Friedel Dzubas’s Last Judgment

A masterpiece by the German-born American artist whose works display a mastery of color, light, and scale.

Rediscovered after 25 years, the nearly 60-foot mural painting by the German-American artist Friedel Dzubas (1915-1994) – Crossing/Apocalypsis cum Figuras (1975) – renders the Last Judgment from the Book of Revelation as a vast modernist abstract tableau unmatched in scale and impact. Commissioned as the focal point of the lobby entrance to the Shawmut National Bank of Boston, its placement signaled the will of the building’s design firm (TAC – The Architecture Collaborative) to “bring our pragmatic requests and our spiritual desires into interplay.” In the volume, Dzubas’ process of composition is tracked in never-before-seen documentary photographs, while his magnum opus is re-framed in light of the complex sources of his religious convictions.