After J.D. Salinger passed away on January 27 the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. put on display a painting of the author by Robert Vickrey. The work, which Vickrey did for a 1961 Time magazine cover, offers a detailed examination of Salinger’s long, thin face and dark, prominent brow. Salinger is 42 at the time and his finely rendered crest of jet-black hair is graying at the sides above his large, oval-shaped ears. Behind Salinger stretches a golden field of what we must assume is rye. In the distant background, a child, young Holden Caulfield, guards a dangerous cliff edge, protecting the other children from falling into the abyss of adulthood.

The painting was hung in honor of Salinger, to invite viewers to nostalgically study the reclusive author’s face and to remember his books that shaped our adolescence. But for those familiar with the image itself, the National Portrait Gallery’s curatorial decision is a chance to revisit the work of Vickrey, an American realist painter and one of the last living masters of egg tempera, whose relative obscurity in today’s art world is largely incongruous with his contributions to 20th century art. Vickrey’s portrait of Salinger was only one of 78 covers he painted for Time magazine from 1957 until 1968. His other sitters included Martin Luther King, Jr., John Updike, Nikita Khrushchev, Walter Cronkite, and William Faulkner. Forty-eight of these portraits are housed in the National Portrait Gallery. Prior to Time, throughout the 1950s, Vickrey was a central figure in the magical and lyrical realism art movement and he participated in nine Whitney Museum of American Art Annual Exhibitions (now called the Whitney Biennial). As his prominence as a painter rose, his work was grouped in exhibitions alongside artists like Andrew Wyeth, Paul Cadmus and George Tooker, to whom Vickrey is often compared.

This is only a fraction of what Vickrey has accomplished in his long career, yet he is not a household name mainly because of the timing of his ascension. As history has shown, the realists, especially magical realists, faced insurmountable odds in the middle of the century. They fought to keep a toehold in the American artistic zeitgeist, but as they did American abstraction was fast becoming the novel and influential movement of the period and it sidelined other art movements in its path.

Vickrey witnessed this firsthand as a student in Yale’s BFA program in 1948. Though American abstraction was known by 1948, it had not yet penetrated Yale’s academic walls and so the program’s emphasis remained on studying the history of art and producing art from this base of knowledge. Two teachers in particular, Lewis E. York and Daniel V. Thompson, espoused this didactic path and taught Vickrey the Renaissance techniques of egg tempera by introducing him to Cennino Cennini’s Il libro dell’arte (The Craftsman’s Handbook), a 15th-century guide to painting and art. It helped, of course, that in 1933 Thompson had done a landmark translation of the book that was required reading for his students. It was from this book that Vickrey was first attracted to using egg tempera and he sought to learn to use the medium in the vein of Renaissance masters like Giotto.

Then, in 1950, Yale’s art school had a philosophical upheaval. Josef Albers, who had most recently been an instrumental figure at Black Mountain College, was invited to head the program and there began the school’s great shift toward design, modernism, and abstraction. The academic establishment no longer supported Vickrey’s artistic inclinations. Vickrey recalls Albers looking over his shoulder as he worked and suggesting with disapproval, “Why don’t you try something more abstract?” Albers’ suggestions went unheeded. Vickrey pursued realism and egg tempera and endeavored to develop the central themes that have characterized his work for over 60 years. The art world, on the other hand, went the way of Albers at that time.

Sixty years later, however, Vickrey’s steadfast adherence to realism and egg tempera has the potential to come full circle. The contemporary art landscape is now dotted with more than a few realist painters who look to the past to influence their work. Au current artists like Kehinde Wiley and John Currin have made strides in adapting Renaissance and Mannerist style for a modern art palate. Walton Ford, who paints lushly-detailed wildlife scenes that often tell the tale of man’s abusive relationship with nature, is a contemporary realist in the mold of Audubon. One can see slivers of Vickrey in Ford’s artwork. In Vickrey’s supra-real canvases, shoots of grass are individually aware. Each strand of hair is filament-thin and traceable. The quality of every line is anchored in the real, they obey the laws of our world, and when depicted in the thousands on a Vickrey canvas, the effect is of having exceptionally acute vision. These same indulgences with detail can be seen in many of Ford’s works.

Even the Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum has adapted a figurative and surrealist style that is a conscious step away from non-objective painting. Then there is the group of realist painters highlighted in Phoebe Hoban’s April 22 piece in The New York Times. The article traced the artistic lineage of Alice Neel through contemporary painters like Marlene Dumas, Elizabeth Peyton, and Eric Fischl. Both Dumas and Peyton, though not artists that would directly lend new popularity to Vickrey, send a message to the tastemakers that realism and figurative painting are to be considered hip again.

If there is a parallel to be drawn between an artist like Peyton and Vickrey, it is in their focus on subject matter. Peyton has painted cultural and pop icons for over twenty years and Vickrey has had a similarly figuratively fixated career painting nuns and children. For the past fifty years these nuns have been the Daughters of Charity of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, an apostolic order formed in Paris in 1633 who are distinct for their habits and cornettes, the latter of which are the Sister’s dramatic, stark-white headwear that extends horizontally like a bird in mid-flight. The artist claims he first happened upon images of the pious women in a photography annual at Yale. Ever since, they have provided a replenishing source of inspiration that has metaphorical weight while presenting endless possibilities to portray changes in light and angularity. (Vickrey shares this compositional trait with Edward Hopper.) Vickrey’s treatment of children in his paintings—it is his own children in many of the works—operates in a similar fashion. He has a fondness for portraying young children at play outside and, conversely, indoors in states of quiet solitude. In both settings, Vickrey introduces deep shadows and slicing geometries of light that add complexity and psychological profundity to the implied innocence of childhood. In essence, Vickrey is well aware that children are the perfect vessels, bright, exuberant, and uncomplicated, onto which adults can project their psychoses. But Vickrey is careful to include some measure of magic in his paintings, either in the bursting quality of the light or in whimsical patterning, and so rather than feeling bogged down by a cerebral torpor, there is an ethereal pleasantness present.

In Robert Vickrey: The Magic of Realism, Philip Eliasoph’s adoring book about the artist, Vickrey himself extrapolates on the meaning of his work. “I am searching to transform the harsh and unsightly aspects of the everyday into newly realized forms of beauty. It’s a certain emotion I am seeking—how an observer reacts to seeing radiant light hitting a windowpane or the shadows of leaves floating across a surface. I guess it’s just my way of finding the magic in the commonplace.” To this day, Vickrey’s search for transformation, for the commonplace magic, continues. At 84, he is still painting, returning each day to his easel to mix his medium from egg yolk and pigments. The hope now is that with the growing reputation of many of today’s realists and those artists channeling the past, the stage is set for a rediscovery of Vickrey, beyond the image of Salinger that hangs in Washington, D.C.

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Last month, the New York Times ran one of Doyle’s dioramas on the cover of the Book Review, accompanying a review of the latest Stephen King novel, Under the Dome. While the title of King’s book may be a literal correlative to Doyle’s work, the piece featured in the Book Review is another example of the artist’s ability to manufacture novelistic tension and beauty at hummingbird scale. Doyle’s works are pure imagination and inventiveness that defy categorization and feel like a story in mid-plot.

The Rumpus: How did you come to the diorama as an art form to explore? What about it resonates with you?

Thomas Doyle: A lot of artists find inspiration in going back to their childhood, and that’s certainly the case with me. My mother took me to a lot of museums as a child. She’s a public school teacher so we were always going on educational trips. I was really fascinated from a very young age by the dioramas and the models I’d see in these museums. My face would always be up against the glass peering into the cases. I was fascinated by these worlds. I started building shoebox dioramas and things like that at three or four years old. Then I went to school to study painting and printmaking and at a certain point the fire started to go out. I felt limited by those media and I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. So I figured, “why don’t I start making what I really wanted to make as a kid?” About six or seven years ago I started making these pieces under the guise of, “I’m not making art. I’m just doing something I really want to do.” As it became more complex I realized that I am still making art, it’s just now in this medium.

Rumpus: Is the American Museum of Natural History your Mecca?

Doyle: Yeah, actually the first time I came to New York was in the summer of 2002. The day I got here, that’s the first place I went. It’s just an incredible place.

Rumpus: When you started creating dioramas six or seven years ago, did you find that the artistic skills you already had from art school helped you? What new skills did you have to learn to work with the new medium?

Doyle: The biggest shift was teaching myself how to work with three-dimensional material. I had basic sculptural training in school. I had worked with clay, but with the dioramas I was working with materials I had never worked with before. I use a lot of Styrofoam and a lot of plaster. On top of that, I use a lot of things that come from the modeling world and you’d be hard-pressed to find an art program that would teach you those things. A lot of the basic things, like small composition and using paint properly, those come with having an eye for how artworks should come together.

Rumpus: Were there other artists you were inspired by, or artists who provided a path for you?

Doyle: There are artists that I like that do similar things but in a different media. In terms of the path, I felt a little bit like I was stumbling around in the dark in pursuing this form. The people I had gone to school with were doing conceptual work, but in painting and printmaking, and when they asked me what I was doing, I explained it them. They were excited for me, but sort of “Oh, Okay.” There wasn’t a set way for me to describe it. I also read a lot of history. I’m interested in that and human stories.

Rumpus: When I saw your work, the two artists that came to mind were Joseph Cornell and Gregory Crewdson.

Doyle: There is an emotional quality to Crewdson’s work that I am drawn to. I love how fantastic [his photographs] are. The world as it is but just tweaked a bit. I started doing my dioramas and then I came across his work and I realized there were similarities. Basically, what he is doing is a live action version of what I am doing on a smaller scale. There’s an interesting link there.

Rumpus: When you sit down to start working on a diorama, what’s your process? Do you work straight through until it’s finished, or do you work on several at a time?

Doyle: Often I work on several at a time because things take time to dry. So I keep a lot of things going. For the most part the pieces leap into form on the page. I’ll sketch them out and over the course of a couple days I’ll know what I want to do. Then it takes hours upon hours of execution. The easy part is the idea and the difficult part is bringing them into the world.

Rumpus: How long does one work take would you say?

Doyle: The piece I did for the New York Times in June, which was fairly complex, took about 125 hours. But that was also only viewed from two sides, since it was a photograph. That differs from the pieces I do under the dome that you can view from all sides, those take typically 80 to 100 hours.

Rumpus: Your work is based on strongly suggested narrative threads.

Doyle: My work right now is divided right into three parts or three series. One of them is the Bearings series, which includes some of the earliest work I did. It has to do with man versus nature and isolation and absence. That series always has a man in red that is always alone or separated from something. There is another series called the Reclamation series, which focuses on the idea of romantic love. And lastly, the series I have worked on for the last year or two is the Distillation series. The Distillation series is about memory and how we distort memories over time. There are a lot of children in that series, a lot of families. I try to explore how personalities can be distilled down to a few key moments that make us who we are.

Rumpus: There are also a lot of homes in the Distillation series. And very often the home is in danger. It’s either hanging off a cliff or sinking into the earth. What are you trying to say with that juxtaposition?

Doyle: It’s about the relation of the home to the family. In thinking about families and childhood, the home is the stage where everything takes place. It’s the scene of all the terror and all the joy and basically everything that makes you who you are. The home becomes a member of the family in a way also. So, in some of the pieces, the family may not be readily in distress, but the home is in peril, whether it’s encased in a sheet of ice or matte black.

Rumpus: Most of the works I have seen use humans as their subjects. Have you ever experimented with using other animals, or another subject in your work?

Doyle: I haven’t. I think it’s because the work is about being human and the emotions that go with that. I have thought about bringing in other elements but the thing I find interesting about the work is to get people to come along with you. The more the viewer connects with the work the better the chance of its success. The subjects in my work are human beings because we are all human beings.

Rumpus: Does the story evolve as you are working on it?

Doyle: For the most part I know what I want to do when I sit down because I’ll have the sketchbook and I’ll start tackling it from all the sketches and ideas. As I work through the issues I’ll add elements to improve it. There is a section on my web site where I scanned in some pages from my sketchbook and a lot of those works are also on the site, so there is a direct link.

The difference between what I am doing and what I might have done as a painter is that paint is very malleable. With paint you can take the story and move it and evolve it very easily. But now I am working with plaster and plastic and metal and wood, which are things that compositionally can be moved around but can’t be pushed too radically in too many directions. So I try to come at the story or the piece pretty fully formed in my head. I have had pieces that were very close to being done before and I have had to go at them with a saw or a hammer to take something out that should not be there.

Rumpus: Is that hard for you to do, or is it exciting because you get to work on it from a new angle?

Doyle: It’s more like resignation. I am not sad to lose something because I know it will be improved. But sometimes things have to be done in order to make them better.

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