Peter Dean

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The following biography is from the archives of Wikipedia. 
The following biography is from the archives of askART.

Following is the obituary of the artist, submitted by James E. Martin, whose novel, Clementa, has a painting for cover art of Peter Dean's, and who was a long-time friend of the artist and his family. Martin, working with the widow of the artist, wrote the obituary, which was published in The New York Times.


Peter Dean, Artist, 58

Peter Dean, an artist whose works have been shown throughout the United States and Europe, died Saturday 13 March 1993 at home in New York.  He was 58 years old.  

The cause of his death was Lou Gehrig's disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).  

Works by Mr. Dean, a figurative expressionist painter, are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Ghent Museum of Modern Art in Belgium, as well as museums in New Orleans, Richmond, Madison, Charlotte, and Wichita.  

Mr. Dean was an active participant in the downtown art scene for 30 years.  His paintings were first shown in New York in 1963 at the Aspects Galley on Tenth Street, and a "Salute to Peter Dean by his Friends" was presented last fall at the G. W. Einstein gallery in Soho.  Currently his paintings can be seen at the Gallery Jupiter, Little Silver, N.J., and the Leedy-Voulkos Gallery, Kansas City, Mo.  Also, several of the assemblages that he called fetishes are being shown at the Gallery 1100/Niagara, Buffalo, N.Y.  

Mr. Dean was born in 1934 in Berlin and came to this country with his family in 1938.  He grew up in the Inwood section of Manhattan and attended Cornell University, then transferred to the University of Wisconsin and graduated in 1956 with a bachelor's degree in geology.  He explored for minerals with the Anaconda Copper Company in Brazil, Montana, and Nevada before returning to New York to try his luck at a career in art.  

Soon after, Mr. Dean joined Benny Andrews, Isser Aronovici, Bill Barrell, Ken Bowman, Jay Milder, Peter Passuntino, Nick Sperakis, and other artists in forming Rhino Horn, a movement to break away from the abstractionism dominant at the time. In 1984, Mr. Dean's paintings were shown alongside those of Munch, Soutine, and Ensor at the Galleri Bellman on 57th Street, but his work seemed to have a special appeal to collectors in New Orleans, perhaps because they felt its resonance with Mardi Gras.  

Mr. Dean is survived by his wife Lorraine and his son Gregory, both of New York, and his sister Marion Wollmeringer of Framingham, Mass.