| George Deem | |
| Birth Name: | George Charles Deem Jr |
| Birth Date: | 18 August 1932 |
| Birth Place: | Vicennes, Indiana USA |
| Occupation: | Artist |
| Website: | https://georgedeem.org |
| Nationality: | American |
| Alma Mater: | School of the Art Institute of Chicago |
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.
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-Siméon 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.
"The artist George Deem (1932-2008) 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 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."
Deem died of lung cancer in Manhattan in 2008.