Painter Peter Paone might have never experienced his seven-decade-long illustrious art career if he hadn\u2019t tried breaking into the Barnes Foundation in the spring of 1952. <\/p>\n
At 15, he traveled three hours from his home at Seventh and Dickinson Streets in South Philly out to Merion, taking several buses and getting lost along the way. The venerable institution was not yet a public museum, and in the wake of founder Albert Barnes\u2019 death a year earlier, access remained severely restricted by invitation only. <\/p>\n
When Paone, unaware of those rules, arrived at the gate, he found it locked. <\/p>\n
\u201cI was angry, so I did what 15-year-old kids from South Philadelphia do. I climbed over the gate \u2014 which was about 12 feet high,\u201d said Paone, 89, who lives in West Mount Airy. <\/p>\n
He landed on the other side, walked up to the stately building, and knocked. Arts educator Violette de Mazia, Barnes\u2019 longtime assistant, opened the door, stunned and alarmed to see the teen in front of her.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe said, \u2018Go away. You can\u2019t do that. Who are you? How did you get here?\u2019\u201d Paone recalled. \u201cShe was very taken aback and she wasn\u2019t gonna let me in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Undeterred, Paone asked for a glass of water and de Mazia, somewhat begrudgingly, let him in while she fetched it. She returned to see the budding art student entranced by the impressionist works on the walls, so she relented and gave him a tour. <\/p>\n
It was an unforgettable day that paved the way for Paone to take classes with de Mazia, setting him on a path that catapulted him into the art world. <\/p>\n
For decades, Paone has served as an educator and mentor, becoming a father figure to Philadelphia artists while creating his own distinct body of work. <\/p>\n
Now on the cusp of 90, he is in the midst of a career renaissance with two museum shows this season \u2014 and no signs of slowing down. <\/p>\n
\u2018Promising talent\u2019<\/p>\n
Paone has been making art for as long as he can remember. The middle son of Italian immigrants who moved to South Philadelphia, he spent long hours playing in the streets and listening to the stories of hardworking families like his. They lived in a two-story rowhouse not far from a community center called Reed House, where he found his first art teacher around age 8. <\/p>\n
\u201cMy parents were supportive in the sense that they didn\u2019t object, and I think mainly because they didn\u2019t know what an artist\u2019s life was like. There was no financial support and there was no discussion about it,\u201d Paone said. \u201cMy father did what he could to help me build an easel and build storage racks because I had a little room in the basement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fleisher Art Memorial was another haven for the curious kid in the neighborhood where he regularly attended art classes each week. Years later as a teen, his name appeared in The Inquirer for the first time, in a short blurb about the school\u2019s 1954 exhibit of young Philadelphia artists: \u201cExplorative in their subject-matter, full of linear vitality and bold color this exhibition is refreshingly alive, though these are young students still groping for technical enrichment\u2026 In [these works] we feel the contagion of promising talent in search of itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
He earned special permission to attend John Bartram High School, renowned for its creative arts program, and went on to study arts education at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art (later called University of the Arts) with a scholarship from the board of education that covered four years of tuition.<\/p>\n
Like many artists, Paone spent some years in New York, but he never left Philly for too long. He taught at the Pratt Institute and worked with two galleries for about 12 years, with a brief stint in Europe funded by a Guggenheim Foundation grant that opened opportunities for him to exhibit in London, Vienna, and Hamburg.<\/p>\n
He was always thinking about Philadelphia. <\/p>\n
\u201cIn New York, you know, you\u2019re good for a season, then you\u2019re done, just like vegetables \u2014 you start to smell and you get out,\u201d Paone said.<\/p>\n
He returned home in the late \u201870s, taking a teaching position at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1978, where he soon established the academy\u2019s first printmaking department. While he built a stellar reputation as an educator and mentor for generations of emerging artists, Paone did not have a major solo museum show in his hometown until some 35 years later, in 2013, at Woodmere Art Museum in Chestnut Hill, where he shared never-before-seen drawings and paintings in \u201cWild Flowers<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think I could have had the career that I had outside of Philadelphia, I think, because of the art schools, because of the life I had in Philadelphia, and the collectors, and the Philadelphia Art Museum,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n A studio of wonder <\/p>\n For the last 50 years, Paone has lived in a quiet, wooded area on the edge of Wissahickon Valley Park with his wife, Alma Alabilikian. Surrounded by nature, the former carriage house home is both inviting and mysterious, like something out of a fairy tale. <\/p>\n Inside, it\u2019s a delightfully busy studio on the first floor (the couple lives right above). There are wonders in every corner, from a windowsill covered with tchotchkes to towering shelves laden with tomes on art history. His collection of some 6,000 books, amassed over his lifetime, has been willed to the Philadelphia Art Museum. <\/p>\n Then there are the canvases, packed in by the hundreds: All different sizes, all distinct frames, with clowns, dolls, and creatures amid scenes that puzzle and enchant. <\/p>\n Lately, Paone has been fixated on still life paintings \u2014 grumpy cats alongside decadent multitiered cakes, for instance \u2014 and portraits of what he calls snowpeople, with mouse ears and bird faces. <\/p>\n His subjects change, but a phantasmagoric splendor prevails throughout, evoking an uncanny, occasionally morbid vision. <\/p>\n It\u2019s no surprise that Halloween has provided ample inspiration for years of his creative output. One of his buzziest shows in recent years was \u201cReality Reassembled: The Halloween Paintings of Peter Paone,\u201d which was at the Brandywine Museum<\/a> of Art in 2019, about a decade after he retired from teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.<\/p>\n Paone likes to say his main subject is \u201cthe human condition.\u201d There are no models here \u2014 his surrealist-inspired paintings come from his whimsical imagination.<\/p>\n He spends about seven hours a day in the sunny, crowded space surrounded by dozens of brushes, cans, and paints he makes himself. <\/p>\n \u201cEverything comes from memory. Everything comes from my own skills. I don\u2019t go out painting. I don\u2019t set up still lifes. I don\u2019t hire models,\u201d said the artist, who wears round, thick-framed glasses and has a penchant for bow ties. \u201cIt all comes from my lifestyle and what I did and what I remember from childhood to now.\u201d<\/p>\n A spotlight long overdue <\/p>\n Today, Paone\u2019s work is on view in two concurrent shows at the Woodmere (\u201cSnowpeople<\/a>,\u201d through Feb. 15, 2026) and Doylestown\u2019s Michener Art Museum (\u201cNot So Still Life<\/a>,\u201d through March 15, 2026). For Michener chief curator Laura Igoe, it\u2019s thrilling to present new works from a Philadelphia icon. <\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s thinking a lot about division in society today, which it\u2019s hard not to think about in our current political moment,\u201d said Igoe. \u201cDolls and clowns will be arranged within the still life, but they won\u2019t be engaged with each other \u2014 they\u2019ll kind of be looking away from each other. He sees that as reflective of how we can\u2019t always talk to each other in America today.\u201d<\/p>\n