Oil on canvasexpand_more
Gift of Robert E. Kohlerexpand_more 2019.96.3
Peter Dean was born in 1934 in Berlin, Germany. When he was four, his family fled the Nazis to the United States. The couple in this painting could be his parents, and the boy a younger version of the painter himself. As they stand on a platform, preparing to board an incoming train, death lurks over the boy in the form of a skeleton wearing a trench coat. The apocalyptic scene may seem surreal, but Dean believed that his work was “a product of our awareness of the state of the world we do live in.” What seems at first a fanciful nightmare is, in truth, a harsh message about the reality of the world as Dean saw it.
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