Abner Dean

Abner Dean (18 March 1910 – 30 June 1982), born Abner Epstein in New York City, was an American cartoonist. In allegorical or surrealist situations, Dean often depicted extremes of human behavior amid grim, decaying urban settings or barren landscapes. His artwork prompted Clifton Fadiman to comment, "His pictures are trick mirrors in which we catch sight of those absurd fragments of ourselves that we never see in the smooth glass of habit."The nephew of sculptor Jacob Epstein, Dean graduated from Dartmouth College in 1931, and studied at the National Academy of Design. He worked as a commercial illustrator, contributing to The New Yorker, Esquire, and other publications. His work for Life included illustrations of George Orwell's 1984 for a Life article on Orwell. His first book, It's a Long Way to Heaven (Farrar and Rinehart, 1945) had an introduction by Philip Wylie. Chris Lanier, in "Abner Dean Made This: An Appreciation," analyzed the approach Dean took in the book: The characters in these drawings are modestly sexless, but they reveal all sorts of things about themselves through their activities. Their guiding star is folly, and when they act in groups, it’s always under the direction of a collective id... Some of the drawings are under the sway of a symbolism that suggests a simplified modern version of the instructive images Bosch or Bruegel composed — there are men turning into birds, or mushrooms turning into men, and people with portentous objects affixed to their pates — eggs, books, irons. Of course, when the rest of you is naked, even a hat becomes a portentous object: a naked man wearing a policeman’s hat is not simply a man wearing a hat. But even in the most hermetic and perplexing cartoons, you feel there might be some unacknowledged part of yourself acting out its pet obsession in some corner of the diorama. At first these pictures look like gag cartoons (there’s a funny drawing, and then a caption that might provide a laugh) but on closer examina