Thinking in several dimensions at once, Vickrey began by creating a compelling mood and design, and then embarked on a narrative subtext to make commentary about art, war, politics, and spirituality. He was also interested in social aspects of life and art, commenting that his imagery takes on different meanings relative to the viewer’s own disposition.
Long fascinated by cinema, Vickrey was also an amateur filmmaker, and one can see this cinematic influence in much of his work. In his satirical commentary and his thematic inclusion of memories, dreams, and desires, the artist paid homage to Fellini. Meanwhile, his habit of placing ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances echoed the suspense of Alfred Hitchcock. While he often produced feelings of disquiet, the foreboding nature of Vickrey’s work is counterbalanced by the serene beauty of its execution.
This sort of duality extends to formal interpretations of Vickrey’s work. His masterful technical ability resulted in crisp, highly realistic depictions of intelligible figures and objects. However, Vickrey transcended mere realism by breaking up and rearranging his objects, placing them in original or imagined combinations. In this way, he incorporated abstract ideas within a highly understandable visual vocabulary. “I’m trying to capture something that doesn’t exist, but perhaps by using realistic terms I will make the viewer believe that these things do exist.” He likens this phenomenon to experiencing a vivid dream, whereby unlikely or impossible events feel entirely possible.
Using external symbols, Vickrey illustrated a many-faceted interior world. He possessed a profound sensitivity to man’s quiet struggles and created vivid and dynamic portraits of some of life’s most perplexing intellectual questions.
Vickrey held more than one hundred solo shows at museums and galleries throughout the U.S. He participated in 142 group exhibitions and 125 of his paintings are represented in the permanent collections of approximately seventy public museums and institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery, and the National Academy of Design.
He has won fifty-four major national prizes, has been elected to full membership in the National Academy of Design and the American Watercolor Society, and has been designated a Dolphin Fellow by the latter group. He created seventy eight cover paintings for Time magazine between the years 1957 and 1968. Forty eight of these covers are part of the permanent collection in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Gallery. Vickrey has been the subject of three books, including Creatures of the Spirit, by Donald Miller, and Robert Vickrey: The Magic of Realism, by Dr. Philip Eliasoph. He had been featured in numerous major publications including American Artist and American Art Collector magazines, and was the subject of a PBS television program. Vickrey had also authored four books, The Artist at Work, New Techniques in Egg Tempera, The Affable Curmudgeon and A Con Man’s Carnival.
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