Robert Vickrey
1926 - 2011
Birth-PlaceNew York, NY
Death-PlaceNaples, FL
BiographyRobert Vickrey was born in New York City in 1926, but spent much of his childhood near Reno, Nevada. As a teenager and developing artist, he became enthralled with art of the Old Masters, particularly Rembrandt (1606-1669). Studying at Yale and the Art Students League from 1944 to 1950, Vickrey began to establish himself as a realist artist at a time when abstraction was actually more popular. He quickly achieved success however, and went on to be collected by numerous major museums. He has also been regarded as the contemporary authority on the ancient medium of tempera.Vickrey's style of Magical Realism balances technical precision with whimsical subject matter to produce dream-like, meditative scenes. His lifelong interest in film has lent itself to his use of cinematic viewpoints, which gives his paintings a dynamic quality that contrasts with the relative stillness of his subjects.
EXTENDED BIO
Robert Remsen Vickrey (August 26, 1926 – April 17, 2011)[1] was a Massachusetts-based artist and author who specialized in the ancient medium of egg tempera. His paintings are surreal dreamlike visions of sunset shadows of bicycles, nuns in front of mural-painted brick walls, and children playing.
Born in Manhattan in 1926, Robert Vickrey graduated from the Pomfret School, then studied at Wesleyan University, received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University in 1947 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Yale School of Fine Arts in 1950.[2] His works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro.
Vickrey received the Gerard Manley Hopkins Award for Excellence in the Arts from Fairfield University and the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts in March 2009 where a retrospective exhibition of Vickrey's paintings from 1951-2007 was held at the Thomas J. Walsh Art Gallery. The award and exhibition coincided with the publication of "Robert Vickrey: The Magic of Realism," written by Dr. Philip Eliasoph, a Fairfield University professor of art history.[3] Vickrey died in Naples, Florida on April 17, 2011. He was 84.
SOURCES
Robert Vickrey and Diane Cochran, New Techniques in Egg Tempera, Watson Guptill Publications, New York 1973. ISBN 0-8230-3170-5
Philip Eliasoph, Robert Vickrey: The Magic of Realism, Hudson Hills Press (February 2009). ISBN 978-1-55595-292-1
http://robertvickrey.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/20/arts/design/robert-vickrey-painter-of-magic-realism-school-dies-at-84.html
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