BOCA RATON, FL.- The Boca Raton Museum of Art opened its spring exhibitions today April 26, Robert Vickrey: The Magic of Realism, running through June 19 and Art for the People: 20th Century Social Realism, running through September 11.

Robert Vickrey: The Magic of Realism
Robert Vickrey is a crucial figure in the mid-twentieth-century renaissance of egg tempera, one of the oldest, most versatile and most durable painting mediums. Using the same labor-intensive techniques practiced by Renaissance artists Giotto and Botticelli, Vickrey has become America’s leading modern master of this centuries-old medium and is unquestionably egg tempera’s most innovative practitioner. Robert Vickrey continues today to mix egg yolks with ground pigments to create realist images that incorporate symbols and subjects from his personal observations. This exhibition presents approximately 40 works from Vickrey’s 60-year career as the living master of tempera painting.

This exhibition is organized with the assistance of Harmon-Meek Gallery, Naples, Florida. Accompanying the exhibition is the publication “Robert Vickrey: The Magic of Realism,” published by Hudson Hills Press, a 224-page, 170-color-plate volume authored by Dr. Philip Eliasoph, professor of art history, Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut.

Art for the People: 20th Century Social Realism
The history of American 20th century painting reveals a changing America through the competing forces of tradition and innovation in painting and printmaking. This exhibition comprises a selection of more than 100 paintings, drawings and prints representative of American art between the 1920s and 1960s.This sampling of American art between the World Wars introduces works by well-known artists such as John Sloan and Raphael Soyer, and works by under-appreciated talents such as Vaclav Vytlacil and Richard Florsheim, as well as a canon of fascinating unknowns.

Tracing the evolution of American art from the 1920s into the 1960s, thisexhibit includes examples of American urban and rural scene painting, and political and social realism. Social realism became an important art movement during the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s. This American artistic movement is also closely related to American scene painting and to Regionalism. American Social Realism includes the works of such artists as those from the Ashcan School, and Reginald Marsh and John Sloan. It also extends to the art of photography as exemplified by the works of Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Lewis Hine, Edward Steichen, Berenice Abbott and Aaron Siskind. Together, these works capture the essence of a dynamic period of artistic vitality in American art.