George Deem
George Charles Deem Jr. (August 18, 1932 – August 11, 2008) was an American artist best known for reworking famous images from art history into new paintings. He turned old master scenes into fresh compositions that carry their own meaning.
Deem was born in Vincennes, Indiana, and grew up on a farm with his parents and a twin brother. He left to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1953 and served in Germany before finishing his degree. In 1981 he received an outstanding alumni award from Vincennes University.
In the late 1950s, Deem worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He taught painting at the School of Visual Arts (1965–66), Leicester College of Art and Technology (1966–67), and the University of Pennsylvania (1968). He held residencies at the Evansville Museum of Art and Science (1979), the MacDowell Colony (1979), Illinois State University (1982), and The Branson School (1995). He served on the MacDowell Colony Fellows executive committee from 1982 to 1984.
Deem drew on artists such as Caravaggio, Chardin, Ingres, Winslow Homer, Mantegna, Matisse, Picasso, and especially Johannes Vermeer, about whose work he even wrote a book. He explained that he integrated parts of other paintings into new designs, suggesting that a painting can contain another painting.
Critics found his work clever and playful, though sometimes puzzling to those unfamiliar with the originals. He traveled across the United States to speak and exhibit, but lived most of his life at 10 West 18th Street in New York City's Flatiron District. He died of lung cancer in Manhattan in 2008 at the age of 75.
In 2012, the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut hosted an exhibition titled The Art of Friendship: The Collection of George Deem.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 16:37 (CET).