Robert Vickrey (1926 – 2011)

Chrissie, c. 1956, tempera on Masonite, signed lower right, 23 x 30 inches, Midtown Galleries label verso, including artist’s name and title “Chrissie”; (perhaps) exhibited: Annual Exhibition: Sculpture, Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings, Whitney Museum of American Art, November 14, 1956 – January 6, 1957, #174; literature: Vickrey, Robert and Cochrane, Diane, New Techniques in Egg Tempera, Watson-Guptill Publications, New York, 1973, p. 112 (illustrated); NB: Vickrey created at least two works with the title “Chrissie,” the present work and a second tempera of roughly the same size illustrated in Eliasoph, Philip, Robert Vickrey The Magic of Realism, Hudson Hill Press, Manchester and New York, 2008, p. 98.  provenance includes Midtown Galleries, New York and the Estate of Robert Clary, Beverly Hills, California; presented in its original frame 

SOLD

Chrissie is one of a group of paintings Robert Vickrey painted of his children’s nurse maid. The artist’s son, Scott, recalls that his father was attracted to the look of Chrissie’s face and painted her several times, primarily in the 1950s. One of the Chrissie paintings played a seminal role in Time magazine’s decision to hire Vickrey as a cover illustrator. In Robert Vickrey The Magic of Realism, author Philip Eliasoph explained,

"Invited to participate in the Whitney Museum’s Annual in November 1956, Vickrey was represented with a grimacing portrait of his children’s devoted nursemaid, Chrissie.

Perhaps it was the ‘warts and all’ realism of Vickrey’s unflinching depiction that captured the attention of [Otto] Fuerbringer [assistant managing editor of Time magazine]. Chrissie demonstrated Vickrey’s jaw-dropping command over physiognomic portraiture. Her vacant expression, potato nose, and grandmotherly pinned hair are externalized attributes of a humble individual. Chrissie seemed inspired by the grant manner of Jan van Eyck’s wrinkled brows, glistening corneas, and hair pores of the Netherlandish dukes or saints microscopically intensified and examined. For all his youthfulness, Vickrey began focusing on the vicissitudes of advancing age. He characterized a Rembrandtesque sense of pathos. Fuerbringer must have immediately realized that Vickrey, as was said famously by American painter Benjamin West of Gilbert Stuart, ‘nails a face to the canvas.'

Whatever motivated Fuerbringer to reconnoiter Vickrey’s talent, it was consummated with a phone call inviting Vickrey to join Fuerbringer’s elite circle of nominated cover artists."

The present version of Chrissie is a dramatic case study in Vickrey’s deep commitment to perfection. In New Techniques in Egg Tempera, Vickrey recounted, “After I’d worked a month on this picture, I realized that the only good thing in it was the left eye. So I scraped out the entire painting, except for the eye, and started over.” The resulting painting is a tour de force of 20th century portraiture and the technical capabilities of the egg tempera medium.   

Robert Vickrey was one of the most fascinating and technically accomplished Magic Realist painters of the second half of the 20th century. Born in New York, Vickrey studied at the Art Student’s League with Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller before completing a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Yale University in 1950 where he learned the Renaissance technique of painting in egg tempera which was the basis of his artistic practice. Even before his graduation, the art world took notice of Vickrey’s skills when his work was selected by Lincoln Kirstein for inclusion in the exhibition “Symbolic Realism” in New York and London. In 1953, Vickrey’s painting Labrinth was accepted to the first of nine Whitney Biennials in which he would exhibit. The Whitney purchased the painting for the permanent collection, and it is currently on display at the museum next to works by Man Ray, George Tooker, Paul Cadmus and Jared French, Kate Sage, and the other important Magic Realist painters.

From the early 1950s through the end of his long career, Vickrey was consistently represented by some of America’s premiere galleries, including Midtown Galleries. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Vickrey resisted art world expectations by continuing to reject Abstract Axpressionism and surprisingly, he beat the odds by building a significant following of collectors, curators, and gallerists. Time commissioned Vickrey to complete a series of covers for the magazine including portraits of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Vickrey had over fifty one-person shows and exhibited at the most important group shows in the country, including at the National Academy of Design. His paintings are in the permanent collections of over sixty American institutions. In addition to the Whitney Museum of American Art, these include the Butler Institute of American Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New Britain Museum of American Art. He is listed in Who was Who in American Art and all other standard references.