Peter Dean at the UWM Art Museum - Minneapolis, Minnesota

Art in America, Jan, 1993 by Sue Taylor

Twenty years ago, Peter Dean signed a manifesto. Along with Benny Andrews, Ken Bowman, Peter Passuntino and other artists aggressively calling themselves Rhino Horn, Dean proclaimed that "our art is involved with life ... with humanity, with emotion .... We are not concerned with making pure color or pure form the subject of painting; we are concerned with, and express, a harsher reality." In its language, this declaration echoed the one written years earlier by Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, who also rejected formalism and insisted on the primacy of content in a work of art. Yet the paintings, drawings and assemblages in this 35-year retrospective of Dean's work have little in common with anything imagined by the New York School.

Dean's expressive paintings are overwhelmingly narrative, based on unusual real-life incidents that carry the weight of parables or allegories. They are lessons in luck or tales of courage and resourcefulness, often involving narrow escapes. Underlying all of Dean's stories is a worldview that marvels at the precariousness of existence and the wonder that human beings manage to survive at all. Perhaps his own deliverance as a child from Nazi Germany in 1938 set the tone for his future preoccupation with harrowing experiences; his timely departure from Berlin, hugging a stuffed bear and grasping his mother's hand, is memorialized in The Expulsion (1988). Here Dean's parents, dressed for travel and sporting yellow arm bands, prepare to board the Paris-Brussels train with their two tiny children. The family is spied upon by a Nazi agent lurking in the background, and a broken-hearted grandmother mourns their leavetaking. Hovering above the group is an angel of death, wearing a robe adorned with bloodred skulls and swastikas.

Another close call is depicted in Danger in the Cabbage Patch (1988), based on the boyhood experience of Dean's artist-friend Tom Duncan. In 1939, Duncan and his mother survived strafing by German Messerschmidts flying over their garden in rural Scotland; Dean paints them under attack, but protected by a pair of pink and blue cherubs brandishing a palette and brush to signify the child's destiny. (Duncan recently rendered his own version of the scene in a sculptural diorama exhibited at G.W. Einstein [see A.i.A., June '92].) In Emergency Action (1988), art dealer Ed Wiegand, confined to a wheelchair and surrounded by pet birds, dogs and mice, confronts a fire in his New Orleans studio. Dean celebrates his friend's intrepid response, recording him in the act of urinating on the flames to save himself and his loyal menagerie.

Such adventures provide Dean with material for his most engaging works, in which the characteristically thick impasto, rich colors and agitated figuration serve intriguing anecdotal ends. The artist's vibrant landscapes, intensely worked in volcanic hues, register his fervent experiences of nature; sufficient in themselves, these pictures do not require the texts (wall labels and catalogue descriptions) that supplement Dean's narrative paintings. In some instances, one detects an additive impulse: embellishments such as glitter, sequins, fur or dollar bills stuck to the canvas seem gratuitous when Dean's handling of paint itself is so completely successful. His flirtation with collage culminates in a group of little mixed-medium sculptures from 1991, incorporating found objects and kitsch miniatures of Michelangelo's Pieta, a meditating Buddha, or a bust of Dante to produce unnerving tableaux. The most disturbing of these includes a rubber baby doll impaled on medical syringes; it bristles like a porcupine with a hundred needles. Here Dean's awestruck wonder at human survival gives way to the darkest visions of mortality and pain, surrendering to the "harsher reality" referred to in his earlier manifesto.