Robert Vickrey The Magic of Realism

Robert Vickrey's art has sustained throughout a 60-year career. He is widely considered to be a master of the labour-intensive meticulous technique using egg tempura, the medium used by the Renaissance painters, including Giotto and Cennini. But Vickrey's paintings are distinctly twentieth-century in the subjects and themes he has chosen, 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, and with his dedication his artwork has built a bridge from Surrealism and New Objectivity to Magic Realism. Together with Philip Eliasoph's comprehensive essay that describes Vickrey's career and staunch devotion to the egg tempura medium, the fiercely independent work of one of its most unorthodox and even most daring inventors conveys the career and approach of an artist who the New York Times called the world's most proficient craftsman in tempura painting, [and] an immaculate technician.

Philip Eliasoph is a professor of art history at Fairfield University. Virginia M.Mecklenburg is Senior Curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.