Fear Not!

Joan of Art can answer your question about American art and artists! This query about Robert Vickrey raises our painting, Fear.

Dear Joan of Art,
I am a frequent museum-goer and have seen several works by an artist named Robert Vickrey. All the works struck me as unusual. Can you tell me something about the artist and whether your museum has any paintings by him?

Dear Visitor,
You've come to the right place! The following entry comes from the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), a standard art reference:

"Vickrey, Robert. American painter (born 1926). Born in New York City, he studied at Yale and at the Art Students League with Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller. Vickrey does detailed and eerie tempera paintings of figures, sometimes nuns."

The following quotation by Vickrey is excerpted from a small exhibition catalogue, Recent Paintings by Robert Vickrey, November 5–26, 1988 (New York: Kennedy Galleries, 1988):

"I paint all my pictures in my head. Most of them are dreamscapes more than anything else. In movies, dreams are always portrayed as being very fuzzy and blurred, overblown in a Dali-esque way. A real dream, however, is very sharp and vivid, departing from reality only slightly. Everything that happens seems plausible at the time. Even if you're flying, you say, 'Hey, I'm flying. This isn't supposed to happen,' but you don't question it. You go ahead and fly.

"Once I was called a cinemaconologist by a hostile critic. I guess that means I paint pictures that look like scenes from movies. I kind of like that. I try to transcend the objects I portray, telling you more about them than you might otherwise see.…

"The Saint Vincent nuns in my paintings have represented many things to me. I started painting them forty years ago because I was interested in the abstract shapes of the comettes. As time went by, I realized that these figures were becoming a symbol of something that was too beautiful and fragile to exist in our modern world."

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has a work by Vickrey, a painting of a nun called Fear. This work is traveling around the country in our exhibition, Scenes of American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum on view at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Washington, through September 9, 2001.

I hope this information is helpful.
Joan of Art

Pictured: Robert Vickrey, born 1926, Fear, 1954, egg tempera on paperboard, 34 1/4 x 58 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation.