In memoriam: James Dean, founding director of NASA Art programme

RICHARD SANDOMIR

James Dean, a landscape painter who ran a NASA program that invited artists like 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. His son Steven confirmed the death, at an assisted living facility. From the final Mercury mission in 1963 until 1974, Dean gave dozens of artists access to astronauts, to areas near the launchpads at Cape Canaveral (and the Kennedy Space Center) and to ships that recovered astronauts after their ocean splashdowns.

Dean believed that artists offered a perspective that could not be found in photographs. “Their imaginations enable 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 blasted off on the last Mercury mission in May 1963, Dean allowed the painters Peter Hurd and Lamar Dodd to work from a field near the rocket’s launchpad, and provided them with huge lamps for illumination.

A security guard who saw the two artists amid the bushes with their paints and brushes quickly determined that they did not pose a threat — and escorted them to the top of the launchpad, where they looked inside the Mercury capsule, which gave Dodd the inspiration for his abstract gouache painting, “Max Q.” In 1965 Jamie Wyeth, then 19, painted “Support,” a watercolour of the launch of Gemini 4 from a nearby gantry, the massive structure that encloses and services rockets before they lift off. “Jamie went off to the edge and let his legs hang over, and he’s painting like he’s sitting on a dock up in Maine someplace,” Dean said in an interview in 2019 with Carolyn Russo, the art curator at the National Air and Space Museum.

Rauschenberg roamed the space center’s grounds in the weeks before the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first men on the moon.

“He didn’t bring a sketch pad or anything like that with him but what he wanted to do was look at our photo files to experience the action real-time,” Dean told Ms. Russo.

The experience led Rauschenberg to create “Stoned Moon,” a series of 34 lithographs, including “Sky Garden,” in which he superimposed a negative image of the Saturn 5 rocket, with many of its parts labelled, over images of it blasting off.

In the hours before Apollo 11 launched on July 16, 1969, Dean got permission for the illustrator Paul Calle to sketch Neil Armstrong, Col. Buzz Aldrin and Lt. Col. Michael Collins having breakfast and then suiting up — the only artist allowed in those spaces.

James Daniel Dean was born on Oct. 14, 1931, in Fall River, Mass. His father, John, was a pastry chef. His mother, Sadie (Griffin) Dean, managed the home. James recognised that he had artistic talent in high school when a history teacher told students to draw their homework, and he began sketching airplanes and ships. In 1950, he entered the Swain School of Design in New Bedford, Mass., and graduated in 1956, with time in between for his Army service in Panama. “Jim had the foresight to know that artists would make an important contribution to the space age,” Ulrich said by phone. “The history of the agency unfolds through art and through the eyes of the artists.”