From a ‘cheese wizard’ to pumpkin creatures, artist strips back context in posthumous Dover exhibition

The Biggs Museum of American Art in Dover has been inundated with curious characters painted by the late Philadelphia artist Peter Paone.

Pumpkin-headed creatures bare their teeth. A giant snail perches on the shoulder of a man in a blue balaclava. A couple of human-hare hybrids cradles their baby — a bunny rabbit — in a painting titled “Incest.” 

Among Paone’s characters, curator Laura Fravel’s favorite is a bulldog of a man with sad eyes. She calls him “the cheese wizard” because he wears a yellow overcoat and blue wizard hat filled with holes.

“Hearing little kids, but also a surprising number of grown-ups, make up their own stories about the cheese man has been delightful. (Stories) of, ‘He lives on the moon and doesn’t have any friends because he is smelly, but is very sweet and calls his mother every Thursday,’” Fravel said. “There’s no background (in the painting). It’s very minimal. But those little inconsistencies in the design of the character open up so many possibilities.”

Paone flat-out refused to ever explain what his work meant, even to his closest collaborators and family members. Instead, he held up a mirror to the viewer and asked them to find their own meaning. 

“Everybody always asks Peter, ‘What does that mean? What does that mean?’” said Alma Alabilikian, Paone’s wife of 50 years. “He said, ‘What does it mean to you? It’s not important what it means to me. I’m done. I did my job.’”

As if intentionally hammering home his point about the death of the author, Paone died in May.

At that time, Fravel was planning to interview him about The Biggs Museum’s exhibition “Peter Paone: Before Words.” The opening reception in early October came mere days after what would have been Paone’s 90th birthday.

“It is unfortunate timing, but also, I think he actually would, in an odd way, enjoy that it is left open-ended, that we are kind of forced to piece this together and to talk to each other and make up those stories,” Fravel said. 

Break-in and breakthrough

Paone was raised in South Philadelphia by Italian immigrant parents and began drawing and painting when he was 8, according to The Biggs Museum’s exhibition catalogue. 

Paone’s interest in the arts was immediate and all-consuming. At 15, he climbed the locked iron gate of the Barnes Foundation, a Philadelphia art collection. 

“I knocked on the door, and (Barnes Foundation Director of Education) Violette de Maiza answered the door. She was shocked. And (I said), ‘I hear you have pictures here. I want to see them,’” Paone recalled in a 2019 documentary.

Though de Maiza initially insisted that Paone leave, she ended up giving him a tour and later invited him to study at the Barnes Foundation.

At 29, Paone received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a monetary award recognizing his artistic talent. 

“If he were speaking to you, he could paint every stripe on your shirt, every hole in your buttons, every single detail, from memory, two weeks later. He had an incredible memory, as well as imagination,” said Paone’s archivist, Lori Bilodeau. “He never set up a still life and painted it, and he didn’t use models.”

With the funds from his Guggenheim Fellowship, Paone traveled to London, where he rubbed shoulders with (and painted) Ringo Starr and George Harrison. 

After Paone returned to Philadelphia, he bumped into Alabilikian in Rittenhouse Square. The pair, who had first met when they were students at John Bartram High School, married six months later.

“(He) hollered, ‘Hi, Alma!’ I didn’t know who he was. He had changed dramatically. In high school, he was thin. Brown, curly hair. Very, very good looking. And then…” Alabilikian began, bursting out laughing.

Paone had transformed completely. There wasn’t a hair on his head other than his beard and handlebar mustache, and he’d already begun refining his fashion sense: tweed jackets, ascots and red-rimmed glasses.

“He had a kind of dapper quality that emphasized his sense of art being a serious business,” said Andrea Packard, Paone’s former drawing student at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. 

At the university, Paone helped shape the printmaking program and taught from 1978 to 2009. 

But in his later years, he was constantly in his home studio, where he would work 9 a.m.-5 p.m. every day, sometimes blasting Carl Orff’s calamitous “O Fortuna” for inspiration.

“He never believed in these artists who said, ‘The muse hasn’t hit me today.’ He was a firm believer that if you were given a gift, then it was your responsibility to make sure you used it,” Alabilikian said. 

‘Nobody understood him’

Fravel wrote a “fan letter” to Paone in 2024 when she saw one of his exhibitions in Pennsylvania. That led to a studio visit.

“You walk in, and it’s just this fantastical cabinet of curiosities,” she described. “The first thing you see is this library of, floor to ceiling, books. … As you walk in further, you start to notice his collection of early 20th century Halloween decorations and vintage tin toys.”

Paone also had hundreds of acrylic gouache paintings that had been “overlooked,” caught in the shadow of the artist’s other work, Fravel said. So, she pitched the idea of exhibiting some of these paintings.

“We had never been to (The Biggs Museum). We didn’t know anything about it. We took a chance. But Peter liked Laura (Fravel) so much, from the very beginning,” Alabilikian said. 

Fravel whittled down hundreds of works Paone had painted since the 1970s. She landed on about 100 works, all painted within the last six years. 

“I think the oldest one that is dated in the show is from the (COVID) pandemic,” she said.

During that time, Paone painted a series of masked figures, including our aforementioned friend in the balaclava. It’s a rare example of an identifiable, real-world inspiration in Paone’s work, though many have tried to attach meaning to his paintings.

For example, Bilodeau thought “The Dolls We Lost in 2021,” a painting of a figure hugging a large collection of dolls, may have been inspired by the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack — but there’s no way of verifying that theory.

“He said nobody understood him. You get an idea of why,” joked Paone’s friend, Ron Callaghan, as he gestured to a landscape of a house on fire, a giant fish and a tree resembling a naked woman.

While there are some common themes in Paone’s work, like Halloween and the circus, his intentions will forever remain a mystery. 

That’s why the exhibition is called “Before Words.” It extends an invitation to look at Paone’s characters and come up with your own story. In fact, Fravel is currently planning an event in which local writers will read short stories and poems inspired by Paone’s work. 

“The bottom line is the human experience. Other curators have often spoke of loneliness and melancholy, joy. All of the things that are part of the human experience, you will find somewhere in this work,” Alabilikian said. That includes “Confusion,” she added with a laugh.

Fravel decided to place a painting called “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil” at the end of the exhibition. Three figures sit near each other but refuse to look at or interact with each other.

“I think that was something that concerned Peter Paone in recent years. He saw this division in society, of people who were next door neighbors but weren’t really engaging with each other, were very set in their ways,” Fravel said. “He saw his art as a way to start to combat that, to encourage people to come together, to have discussions, to talk about new and exciting possibilities.”