| Robert Vickrey | ||
| Birth Date: August 26, 1926 |
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| Death Date: April 17, 2011 Artist Gallery |
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| Robert Vickrey was born in New York City in 1926 and later studied at Wesleyan University and at the Yale School of Fine Arts in the 1940s. A small inheritance allowed him to rent an apartment in Greenwich Village and paint full time. Within a year he had found a gallery to show his work. His first one-man show was almost completely sold out, and the first painting he submitted to the Whitney Museum’s annual show was accepted. An editor at Time saw his work at the museum and asked him to do a cover for the magazine. This cover led to some 90 others, including portraits of John Kennedy.
Classified as an American Surrealist or a Magic Realist, Vickrey said it best: “More than a thousand of my works are in public and private collections, but like Rodney Dangerfield, ‘I don’t get no respect.’ It all started when I went to the Yale Art School of Fine Arts. I always like to work at night and was frustrated by Yale’s policy of locking the students out at five p.m. (for fear of orgies, we were told). I noticed, however, a small window with a broken lock in the men’s room. So, every afternoon at five pm., I would march conspicuously out the front door, wait ten minutes, then break into the school and continue my work for several more hours. Come to think of it, such a method of entrance into the contemporary art world seems to be the only one open to a realist”.
He was one of the unsurpassed egg tempera painters in the world. |
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