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James Dean, a landscape painter who directed a NASA program that invited artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Norman Rockwell and Jamie Wyeth to document aspects of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects, died on March 22 in Washington. He was 92 years old.
His son Steven confirmed the death at an assisted living facility.
From the last Mercury mission in 1963 to 1974, Dean gave dozens of artists access to the astronauts, to areas near the launch pads at Cape Canaveral (and the Kennedy Space Center), and to the ships that recovered the astronauts after their splashdowns in the ocean.
Dean believed that artists offered a perspective that could not be found in photographs.
“Their imagination allows them to venture beyond a scientific explanation of the stars, the moon, and the outer planets,” Dean and Bert Ulrich wrote in their book “NASA/ART: 50 Years of Exploration” (2008).
one night before L.Gordon Cooper taken off on the last Mercury mission in May 1963, Mr. Dean allowed the painters Peter Hurd and Lamar Dodd He worked from a field near the rocket launch pad and provided them with huge lamps for illumination.
A security guard who spotted the two artists in the bushes with their paints and brushes quickly determined that they posed no threat and escorted them to the top of the launch pad, where they looked inside the Mercury capsule. which gave Mr. Dodd the inspiration for his abstract gouache painting, “Max Q.”
In 1965, Jamie Wyeth, then 19 years old, painted “Support”, a watercolor of the Gemini 4 launch from a nearby gantry, the enormous structure that encloses and services the rockets before they take off.
“Jamie went over the edge and let his legs dangle, and he’s painting like he’s sitting on a dock somewhere in Maine,” Dean said in a 2019 interview with Carolina Russoart curator National Air and Space Museum.
Mr. Rauschenberg wandered the grounds of the space center in the weeks before the Apollo 11 mission that took the first men to the moon.
“He didn’t bring a sketch pad or anything, but what he wanted to do was look at our photo archives to experience the action in real time,” Dean told Ms. Russo.
The experience led Mr. Rauschenberg to create “Stone Moon” a series of 34 lithographs, including “Garden of Heaven,” in which he superimposed a negative image of the Saturn 5 rocket, with many of its parts labeled, over images of the liftoff.
In the hours before the launch of Apollo 11 on July 16, 1969, Dean obtained permission for the illustrator Pablo Calle sketch out Neil ArmstrongColonel Buzz Aldrin and Lieutenant Colonel Michael Collins eat breakfast and then get dressed, the only artist allowed in those spaces.
James Daniel Dean was born on October 14, 1931 in Fall River, Massachusetts. His father, John, was a pastry chef. His mother, Sadie (Griffin) Dean, managed the home.
James recognized his artistic talent in high school when a history teacher told students to draw their homework and he began drawing airplanes and ships. In 1950, he entered the Swain School of Design in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1956, with time in between for his military service in Panama.
He was hired as a graphic designer in the office of the Secretary of Defense; Five years later, he joined NASA’s Educational Programs and Services office. In 1963, a year after NASA Administrator James Webb created the fine arts program, Dean was named founding director, one of his many responsibilities in the office.
While Dean handled the logistics of the art program, Hereward Lester Cooke, curator of painting at the National Gallery of Art, approached the artists, who were paid $800 each. They collaborated on the 1971 book, “Eyewitness to Space,” a collection of paintings and drawings related to Apollo.
“Jim had the foresight to know that artists would make an important contribution to the space age,” Ulrich said by phone. “The story of the agency develops through art and the eyes of the artists.”
The concept of commissioning artwork from an agency dedicated to science was not universally accepted from the beginning, Dean recalled. He told the Orlando Sentinel in 1983 that some space technicians “viewed the artists with amused tolerance.”
He added: “Later, when they saw the imagination and skill of artists turning their space hardware into images of fantasy and beauty, they became more and more respectful.”
The artwork led to exhibitions in 1965 and 1969 and several traveling tours.
Dean, who referred to himself as the “other” James Dean to differentiate himself from the actor, left NASA in 1974 to join the Air and Space Museum (which opened two years later), as art curator under the command of the Colonel Collins. the Apollo 11 astronaut who was its director.
Dean was in charge of transferring some 2,000 paintings and drawings from NASA to the museum, as well as preparing the exhibits and acquiring other works of art. He also contributed paintings of the space shuttle program to NASA.
He retired in 1980 to focus on his own painting in a studio in Alexandria, Virginia. He also designed stamps for the US Postal Service, including one in 1985. which Frederic Bartholdi celebrated, who sculpted the Statue of Liberty.
His friendship with Colonel Collins resulted in Dean creating sketches depicting the history of NASA in “Liftoff: The Story of America’s Adventure in Space” (1988).
In addition to his son Steve, Mr. Dean is survived by another son, Richard; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. His wife, Rita (Williams) Dean, whom he married in 1952, He died in 2019. His son James died in 2018.
Dean arranged for Rockwell, whose paintings were famous for their nostalgic evocations of small-town America, to meet astronauts John Young and Virgil (Gus) Grissom during a countdown demonstration test before their Gemini 3 flight in 1965. .
Rockwell, who at the time worked for Look magazine, left with photographs of the two astronauts. But after returning to his studio in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, he realized that he needed more details about his spacesuits. He asked Mr. Dean for one.
Mr. Dean’s request was initially denied because the material within the lawsuit was classified and could not be mailed. He then contacted Joseph W. Schmitt, a suit technician, who brought one to Stockbridge. Mr. Schmitt stayed for a week as Mr. Rockwell painted Mr. Young and Mr. Grissom wearing suits..
When the painting was hanging in the National Gallery for an exhibition in 1965, Dean asked John Walker, the museum’s director, what he thought of it.
“And he looked at me seriously and said, ‘I never thought Norman Rockwell had such a quality,’” Dean told Mrs. Russo. The next morning, Mr. Dean called Mr. Rockwell to tell him what Mr. Walker had said.
“He said, ‘Oh, now I can die happy.’”
