Rare and Limited-Edition Titles

   

 

US $ 75
UK £ 35

November 2008
HARDCOVER
Artist Monograph


ISBN 13: 978-1-55595-292-1
ISBN: 1-55595-292-5
240 pages
11 x 12 in.
29 x 26 cm.
80 color plates

Robert Vickrey
The Magic of Realism

By Philip Eliasoph
Foreword by Virginia M. Mecklenburg

♦ 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.

Philip Eliasoph is a professor of art history at Fairfield University in Connecticut.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg is senior curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.



Robert Vickrey from Hudson Hills Press on Vimeo.

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