Frederick “Fritz” Kubitz’s retrospective exhibition of oil paintings, “All About Boston,” will take place at the Guild of Boston Artists in their Newbury Street gallery, concurrent with the Boston Marathon and One Boston Day on April 15.
Kubitz is also a distinguished architect who trained at MIT and worked for the renowned Eero Saarinen, and other firms, and then ultimately for himself. He was involved in the design of many institutional structures such as the avantgarde TWA Flight Center at JFK International Airport (recently repurposed into a hotel), the American Embassy in London, buildings at Harvard and Tufts universities and the remodeling of Fenway Theater/Biltmore Hotel into the Berklee College of Music — as well as the designs of airports such as Dulles and Logan. He talked about the latter as career high points because of the excite- ment of interacting with the president of Pan Am, and of Lufthansa flying him over to see European airports for background on the new designs.
He started drawing as a youngster in Champaign, Illinois, where he grew up. When he won a prize in third grade from the Chicago Tribune for a drawing of a cardinal, and not long after sold a watercolor, he was hooked. He is largely self-taught but also had some formal training at the University of Illinois’s fine art department when he was beginning to learn architecture there, a profession he chose because it would be financially secure as well as productive. He said that he has also learned from notable artists he respects whose methods he has dis- cussed with them over the years, and there’s a dollop of paint- ers of Rockport and Gloucester inspiring him as well.
I see a bit of a little bit of Joseph Turner, Thomas Hart Benton and Andrew Wyeth reflected in his work, and indeed, when he was a student at MIT, where he took his master’s degree in architecture, Kubitz would walk past Newbury Street galleries showing artists such as Wyeth, thinking he would like to have his paintings in windows there — and now, with the Guild show, he will with a first retrospective — but not his first show on Newbury Street.