Robert Vickrey: The magic of Realism

A comprehensive survey of the 60-year career of a master of tempera painting, an artist who was included in nine Whitney Museum of American Art Annual Exhibitions. 80 color plates show off the brilliant, light-infused compositions of Vickrey's paintings. Monograph places Vickrey in the context of twentieth-century American art.

Robert Vickrey's unique vision and meticulous, painstaking technique sustained him throughout a sixty-year career. Widely considered to be a master of egg tempera, he used the same labor-intensive medium as Renaissance painters, including Giotto and Cennini. But Vickrey's concerns were distinctly twentieth-century in the subjects and themes he chose, from childhood innocence to the dichotomy of urban versus country living.

"A quintessential Realist, Vickrey endeavoured to explore the human condition within a distinctively American environment," writes author Philip Eliasoph, who argues that Vickrey's work built a bridge from Surrealism and New Objectivity to Magic Realism. Described by the New York Times as the "world's most proficient craftsman in tempera painting, [and] an immaculate technician," Vickrey's oeuvre is the "fiercely independent work of one of its most unorthodox and even most daring inventors," according to Eliasoph.