Robert Vickrey

(from http://www.harmonmeekgallery.com/artists/vickrey.html 6-26-07)

Born in New York in 1926, Vickrey spent most of his early career in the city after getting a BFA from the Yale School of Fine Arts. He studied and pursued the ancient technique of egg tempera painting and for many years has been generally accepted as the single artist who has done the most for the medium in an era of abstraction – including writing two books on the subject many years ago.

Vickrey until this year had never been without representation by a major New York gallery – a record setting fifty years. We have shown his work since 1970 and have represented him since 1981, displaying solo shows annually ever since. Nearly 25 museums have borrowed shows from our gallery as well. He has had more than 30 other museum shows and over 40 gallery shows. He is represented in more than 75 museum collections and has over 40 of his portraits (of 80) which were used on the cover of TIME from 1957 to 1968, in the permanent collection of the Nat’l Portrait Gallery.

A book is being published in September, 2002, by Ursuline College in Pepper Pike, OH to coincide with a retrospective at the Wasmer Gallery at the college. The book, written by Donald Miller and Robert Vickrey documents 51 years of his use of the St. Vincent nuns as a subject in his work. The 100 page book will sell for $50. and is available through the college or our gallery

Sources / Press: for information:

Bill Meek, Agent/owner Harmon-Meek Gallery, Naples, Florida – bbmeek@earthlink.net

Philip Eliasoph, Ph.D, Professor of Art History, Fairfield University – pieliasoph@fairfield.edu

Scott Vickrey, artist’s son and family spokesperson, Los Angeles, CA – capelightprod@hotmail.com

ROBERT VICKREY --- POETIC-EXISTENTIALIST MAGIC REALIST MASTER OF RENAISSANCE EGG TEMPERA METHOD -- DEAD AT AGE 84

For immediate release:

Robert Remsen Vickrey, firmly established among an elite cadre of America’s most notable ‘Magic Realist’ artists who rose to prominence at mid-century, died at his home in Naples, Florida on April 17. He was 84. Caught in the shifting fulcrum at mid-century between the receding generation of figurative, Renaissance inspired realists and the emerging vanguard abstractionists, Vickrey remained steadfastly in the traditional ‘pictures with a narrative concept which might even be beautiful’ camp.

“For this legacy of his art - so complicated, precisely rendered, and amazingly innovative – it is for future generations to acknowledge the munificence of these paintings, “wrote Philip Eliasoph, Ph.D., Professor of Art History at Fairfield University, long-time champion of the Magic Realists, and author of “Robert Vickrey: The Magic of Realism,” (2008, Hudson Hills Press, NY). “What else could an artist ever hope to achieve than to establish an iconic, immediately recognized signature style? Entering a gallery or museum, a Vickrey painting can be spotted from twenty yards away.”

The winner of numerous awards for classical painting, he was honored by the American Watercolor Society and appeared in 25 exhibits at the National Academy of Design where he was an elected academician. Between his early discovery in 1952 and 1963 his paintings were exhibited nine times at the Whitney Museum’s annual show – the premiere showcase for important new American art. Over 80 museum collections include his works in their permanent collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Corcoran Gallery.

“Probing (and revealing) a world that is sensed, not seen, Vickrey touches nerves of memory and familiarity,” wrote Dr. Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Senior Curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “Each of Vickrey’s paintings creates a world of experience that invites viewers to examine, remember, sense, and react. His is a humanist art that prompts us to contemplate our internal and external lives.”

Vickrey was born in Manhattan on August 26, 1926, into a prominent Scottish-Irish family. His grandparents, Robert Albert McKim and Caroline Remsen of New York, had their wedding at Grace Church on March 1, 1889. It was a gilded age extravaganza reported in the society pages with 1,800 guests in attendance and wedding gifts purchased in Paris which once belonged to the Emperor Louis Napoleon. Vickrey’s father, Claude was an insurance salesman and active in organizing debutante soirees. His mother, Caroline Remsen died in 1931 when he was only 5 years old and he was sent to the Harvey School in Westchester.

Vickrey’s formal art education began in 1940 at the Pomfret School under Victoria Hutson Huntley. Serving in the U.S. Navy’s V-12 program beginning in 1944, he attended Wesleyan and then Yale, where he became enamored with the old masters at the Yale Art Gallery and dedicated himself as an artist. He earned his Yale B.A. in 1948 and then earned his B.F.A. at the Yale School of Art in 1950. He married Marjorie Elizabeth Alexander, in 1951, and the artist and his wife had four children, Scott Remsen, Elizabeth Nicole (Kiki), Wendy Caroline (Carri), and the late Alexander Sean. After Marjorie’s death in 1997, he married Beverly Bowen Rumage of St. Louis in 1999, who survives him today living in Naples, Florida.

A gifted raconteur, satirical essayist, theatre critic, French styled ‘New Wave’ experimental film maker, and competitive tennis player, he was proud of his career sparked by remarkable early recognition of his Magic Realist art, then its death being eclipsed by avant-gardism, then a realist- revival, and finally re-assessment of his career, “In the end, I think what matters is that I have painted a good picture,” he affirmed without rancor,” although late in life rejection as an obsolete dinosaur from a bygone era of American art left me feeling like “an artistic equivalent of Dostoevsky’s ‘Underground Man.’

His enchanting, poetic and often haunting images are devoted to the complexities of the human form bathed in direct sunlight or bi-sected with film-noir inspired shadows falling across the picture plane. “I’m not bothered by the world around me,” he commented recently, “I paint all of my paintings in my head – most of them are dreamscapes.”

Often placed into a small circle of ‘Contemporary Florentines,’ which included Paul Cadmus, Jared French, Henry Koener, George Tooker, and Andrew Wyeth, he broke quickly into national fame when arts impresario and New York City Ballet founder Lincoln Kirstein spotted the broad-shouldered young U.S. Navy veteran during a visit to the Yale’s art studios.

Only a tiny handful of modern painters had mastered the Renaissance technique of egg tempera painting which had gained a revival at Yale under the direction of Daniel V. Thompson and Lewis E. York at the old ‘eggs and plaster’ studio at Street Hall. Resurrecting Cennino Cennini’s quattrocentro manuscript, ‘The Artist’s Handbook’, a full blown revival of Florentine painting methods had distinguished Yale in the decade before Joseph Albers and Louis Kahn brushed away these old fashioned ideas away with their Bauhaus and International Modern Style minimalism. “I graduated in 1950 when Yale’s art school jumped from worshipping Botticelli to

bowing down to the Box and Cube – I was lucky to escape to New York that year!” Vickrey said.

Praising his technical powers, New York Times chief art critic John Canaday wrote in 1972 that “Vickrey must surely be the world’s most proficient craftsman in egg tempera painting.” With explicit directions and helpful suggestions, his two guidebooks on the method, “New Techniques in Egg Tempera,” (1972) and “Robert Vickrey: Artist at Work” (1979) became instant classics, reprinted several times gaining him a national audience of aspiring painters eagerly awaiting any pearls of wisdom about how to wrestle with egg tempera’s difficulties. “Don’t be afraid of the haunted forest,” he wrote with generous encouragement.

Recognizing the virtuosity of his rendering skills enjoined with existentialist depictions for the ‘Age of Anxiety’, Kirstein included Vickrey in his landmark ‘Symbolic Realism’ exhibit appearing in New York and London in 1950. A repertoire of iconic images executed with an almost anachronistic egg yolk tempera technique propelled Vickrey into early fame. The meticulous hyper-realist figures and settings seemed more appropriate from the studios of Fra Angelico, Masaccio, or Botticelli, than the gritty urban themes of American during the Cold War.

Strongly influenced by his teachers Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hays Miller at the Art Students League, Vickrey depicted the lost innocence of urban youth making chalk graffiti marks on Manhattan sidewalks, eerie street signs, manhole covers, and pavement markings indicating a ‘No Exit’ sense of a Camus or Sartre landscape, nuns in pristine habits lost in post-Hiroshima labyrinths, and a endless stream of adolescents caught in a web of luminous halos and sinister shadows projected from the distorted spokes of bicycle wheels. The Whitney Museum’s Lloyd Goodrich selected “Labyrinth” for the Whitney annual exhibition in 1951 and it was purchased for the permanent collection by curator Julian Force.

He was represented for most of his career at the Midtown Galleries in New York, and for brief periods at Kennedy Galleries, Hirschl & Adler, and ACA Galleries. Since 1980 he has been represented and sold works briskly by the Harmon-Meek Gallery of Naples, Florida which gave him a successful ‘second wind’ for his late-in-life career. William Meek, gallerist, commented “It has been a privilege to represent Bob – and beyond our professional relationship, we enjoyed an enduring friendship, I will miss his humor, wit, and genius immensely.”

At the 1957 Whitney Annual an editor for TIME spotted the exceptionally expressive physiognomic features in a Vickrey painting of the family’s nursemaid and hired him on the spot. This began a stint as one of TIME’s ‘cover artist’ illustrators, sending him on a globe-trotting, hob-nobbing journey. Between 1957-1968 Vickrey had 77 covers published for TIME, including a portrait which he painted in an Atlanta hotel room from life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for the Janaury, 3, 1964 ‘Man of the Year’ cover.

Vickrey told biographer Eliasoph that King whispered to him during that week not to question him about any sensitive subjects, as Vickrey quoted the civil rights leader saying: “I think the FBI has me tapped. I get death threats all the time. But I know my cause is good.” Recently, after the author’s death, his portrait of J.D. Salinger was shown at the National Portrait Gallery, which owns more than 50 of these memorable TIME covers including Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Moshe Dayan, Kim Novak, Walter Cronkite, and Pat Nixon.

From the time he made his sensational debut in the art world through the present, he has maintained that all he wanted to achieve was to create paintings filled with “juxtapositions of youth and age, growth and decay, hope and futility.” The ARTnews recognized his early genius stating in 1951: “Vickrey is an exceptional technician” and the New York Times also noted his arrival on the scene the same year: “Robert Vickrey lets a meticulous technique and a realistic style serve a fantastic imagination. Full of obliquely expressed sympathy for the human situation…in vivid and original ways, they symbolize loneliness or hostility or simply the pains of growing up.” The poignancy and power of his art was recognized when The New Yorker magazine wrote in 1954 that Vickrey demonstrates a “prodigious craftsmanship and the stuff of poetry shows in everything he does.”

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CONTACTS:

Press: for information

Bill Meek, Agent/owner Harmon-Meek Gallery, Naples, Florida – bbmeek@earthlink.net

Philip Eliasoph, Ph.D, Professor of Art History, Fairfield University – pieliasoph@fairfield.edu

Scott Vickrey, artist’s son and family spokesperson, Los Angeles, CA – capelightprod@hotmail.com