VICKREY'S HALLOWEEN MASK
by Libby Clay
Robert Vickrey's tempera on panel painting, Halloween Mask (79.60), is a natural to use in the inquiry method of touring. Questions arise as soon as you begin to look at it, for it has real mystery about it. We see a boy wearing a half mask that seems to resemble a bird's beak. Look again. How old is this boy? He has the torso of a ten- or twelve-year-old, yet his hands and feet seem almost man-sized. And the mask...what is that peculiar membrane in the eye section...with the human eye just peeping through it? Is the boy becoming bird or bird becoming boy? What is that eerie hawklike shadow behind the boy?
A gift of longtime Gallery friend Earl Kage, Vickrey's photorealistic painting can be found in the twentieth century gallery. It was painted in 1953, when the artist's career was just beginning. Photorealism was not the "in" thing in the 1950s, for those were the years of Abstract Expressionism and The New York School. The Regionalists were out...the Romantics were out...but Robert Vickrey managed to survive in a hostile environment. He persisted in keeping his eyes open when the majority of the art world was severing contact with reality.
Children are among Vickrey's most frequent subjects, for the practical reason that "I've had a lot of children." (He and his wife, Marjorie, have two sons and two daughters.) He says, "In my work they represent the rebels, the loners, the free spirits who fight against the crass, materialistic things the grown-ups stand for...and which children eventually become." Several of his paintings show young girls blowing soap bubbles, and the evanescence of the bubbles reminds us of how swiftly childhood passes.
Vickrey's favorite medium, tempera on board, is a very old and very demanding one, harking back to Giotto. He uses powdered pigment to which water has been added to form a smooth paste. The paint will not stick on the panel without a binder, and the binder in tempera is egg yolk mixed with water. Now—what to do with all those egg whites? Andrew Wyeth solved the problem by pouring them in his dog's food. Vickrey tried this with his dog, and the result was "the longest and dirtiest look ever exchanged between beast and man."
A story that students on tour might appreciate is that once Vickrey was painting a portrait in a less-than-fastidious New York apartment. For a short while after it is applied, the tempera medium is edible, and when Vickrey returned one morning to finish a partially painted portrait, cockroaches had eaten half the face away.
You may be more familiar with Robert Vickrey than you know. Between 1957 and 1968 he painted some 75 covers for Time magazine. He painted such notables as John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Patricia Nixon. (He turned down an opportunity to paint Vice President Nixon, thinking there was no future there.) His last Time cover was for the wedding of Jacqueline Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis. He used photographs, but since he didn't have a photograph of them together, he had to guess who was taller. He guessed wrong, but explained his error by saying that they were on steps, and Onassis was on a higher one.
In his studio, because he sometimes had to work very quickly, he often felt that the picture he was working on was not his best work, and he avoided signing it. But he found that if he didn't sign it Time would print his name in clear block letters on the white margin of the cover. He took to signing his name in the lower left corner, where it would be hidden by the address label.
Vickrey now summers on Cape Cod, in Orleans. Last July he made the news when three of his paintings were stolen from Munson Gallery in Chatham. The bold thief had talked with the gallery owners about the paintings just before he stole them. He was apprehended after selling one to a gallery in Manlius, New York, and the paintings were returned safely.
Connections with Halloween Mask are nearby. To the left is Reginald Marsh's Ice Cream Cones (45.70). Vickrey studied with Marsh. You can see the Joseph Albers across the way. Albers came to the Yale School of Fine Arts while Vickrey was a student, bringing his color theories and influencing Minimalism and Op Art painting for years to come. Abstract Expressionism in our collection is just around the corner with the Frankenthaler, the Vicente and others.
"I paint all my pictures in my head," Vickrey has said. "Most of them are dreamscapes more than anything else...dreams are sharp and vivid... everything that happens seems plausible at the time." Perhaps this is the secret of Halloween Mask.
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