George Deem American Artist George Deem Signed Color Lithograph Titled Hands Off Mayakovsky

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George Charles Deem Jr. (August 18, 1932 – August 11, 2008) was an American artist best known for reproducing vivid … Read more George Charles Deem Jr. (August 18, 1932 – August 11, 2008) was an American artist best known for reproducing vivid re-workings of classic images from art history. All artists rework the art of the past, at times imitating, at times extending, and at times rejecting the work of artists they admire. Deem moved the process of homage and change into uncharted territory. Art historian Robert Rosenblum has called Deem's unconventional thematic choices "free-flowing [fantasy] about the facts and fictions of art history."

Deem was born in Vincennes, Indiana where he grew up and often worked alongside his cantaloupe-farmer father. He left his parents' farm to attend School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A year later, in 1953, the United States Army drafted him. After serving in Germany, he returned and completed his degree. During his two years of service in Germany, he visited museums in Florence, Venice, Paris and London and saw their remarkable art collections. In 1955, Deem returned to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied with Paul Wieghardt, who also taught Leon Golub Robert Indiana and Claes Oldenburg. In 1958, Deem moved to New York City where he subsequently exhibited with artists like Larry Rivers.
He spent some years in Italy researching the painting styles of Renaissance painters. Deem traveled the United States speaking and exhibiting his art, but lived most of his life at 10 West 18th Street in New York's Flatiron District. Among the artists whose work he reproduced were Caravaggio, Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Winslow Homer, Andrea Mantegna, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and, especially, Johannes Vermeer, about whose style he wrote a book. During a 1993 visit to New York, Deem noted to his great-nephew, Kenneth J. Knight, Ph.D., that his favorite artist was Johannes Vermeer.
As an early postmodern artist, George Deem examined art as a construct and challenged art historical authority. Best known for reinterpreting iconic paintings by artists such as Courbet, Goya, Corot and Vermeer, Deem also produced a large body of paintings and works on paper that present text as subject matter. These calligraphic blocks of writing are tightly composed and purposefully painted. Although the style of script suggests a copy of a historical document or an important letter, the writing is in fact indecipherable. The illegible texts are scribbled, blocked or blurred, concealing their meaning as a way to draw attention to the immeasurable meaning of art.
Other works in the exhibition feature Deem's playful quotations of famous art historical paintings. Using visual devices such as repetition, erasure and obfuscation, Deem highlights the formal qualities of his own interpretation in relation to the original. He rejects the assumption that icons must remain fixed and immutable. By embracing their manipulation, Deem asserts his fascination with what constitutes the meaning of images. Deem's work has proved difficult to pin down. He has been classified as a Pop art artist, a Figurative Realist, a Deconstructionist, a Proto Post Modernist, a Post-Modernist, and even as a Post-Post-Modernist. His fragmentation and re-blending of art history has been called quotation, paraphrase, collage, montage, and appropriation. Although he began his New York career during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, his paintings seem to have affinities with work by "appropriation" artists a generation or so younger, including Sherrie Levine, Yasumasa Morimura, and Cindy Sherman.His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Philadelphia, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Menil Collection, Houston, the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain in Strasbourg, France, the Denver Art Museum, Colorado and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, among others. His work is in public collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, and others. Deem wrote three books, ArtSchool(1993), How to Paint A Vermeer: A Painter's History of Art (2004), and Let George Do It (2009). "The artist George Deem had a unique relationship to and vision of the masterpieces of the past, especially the landmarks of Western painting that date from the Renaissance to the modern era. As Deem himself acknowledged, his abiding interest was in the two quintessential characteristics of Western art: first, the use of oil paint as a medium; and second, the development of a convincing system of perspective. From Raphael to Ed Ruscha, from Watteau to Whistler, from Bingham to the Bauhaus, Deem meticulously reconstructed and reinterpreted the art of the past with insight, originality, and wit … In his analysis and interpretation of works such as these, Deem made his own, important contribution to the history of art." David Dearinger, George Deem: The Art of Art History, Boston: The Boston Athenaeum, 2012. Deem died of lung cancer in Manhattan in 2008.

He was included in the show: A Life of Discovery: Works from the Allan Stone Collection: Alfred Leslie, Arshile Gorky, Barton Lidice Benes, Bernard Langlais, Don Nice, Gaston Lachaise, George Deem, John Chamberlain, John Vickery, Joseph Cornell, Peter Dean, Peter Gee, Richard Estes, Wayne Thiebaud, Willem de Kooning See less