Robert Vickrey is a crucial figure in the mid-twentieth-century renaissance of egg tempera, a demanding technique he has been exploring over six decades. After studying with Kenneth Hayes Miller and Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League, Vickrey went on to Yale, where he learned egg tempera from Lewis E. York. The rediscovery of Cennino d’Andrea Cennini’s Il Libro dell’Arte (c. 1390–1410) was highly influential. The Brandywine River Museum’s 2002 exhibition “Milk and Eggs: The American Revival of Tempera Painting, 1930–1950” chronicled the experiments of the era. Vickrey wrote his own manuals on the subject: New Techniques in Egg Tempera (1973), which author Eliasoph calls “an instant classic in the field of technical art books,” and Robert Vickrey: Artist at Work (1979). Eliasoph quotes Vickrey on reinvigorating the old medium: “There are many ways to use egg tempera, not just one. And with a lot of practice and some imagination, you should be able to come up with techniques I’ve never thought of.”

Magnificent private collections of European old master drawings were recently exhibited at two great venues for such rare and delicate works, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Pierpont Morgan Library & Museum, both in New York City. “Raphael to Renoir,” at the Met, is the first comprehensive exhibition of drawings from the private Collection of Jean Bonna of Geneva, Switzerland. Ranging through 500 years of art history from the Renaissance to 1900, the Bonna collection represents a rich diversity of art from Italy, Northern Europe and France, with rare masterpieces by Raphael, Parmigianino, Goya and Ingres. There is also a choice smattering of early modernist sketches by Degas, Gauguin and van Gogh.
 

In an age when traditionally bound books are apparently being replaced by implements of the digital age, when textuality is supplanted by disposable “info,” this exhibition, at George Billis in New York City, evoked our ambiguous relationship to the book as artifact, as still life. These recent paintings of book piles are not trompe l’oeil, nor are they photorealism. If they evoke nostalgia, the paintings also recall stacks of books kept of necessity for future reference, for casual browsing, for doorstops. We of a certain generation are haunted by old books, lumbered with them, dependent upon them, fed up with them, in love with them. They furnish a room. Decorators buy them by the yard to fill a wall of shelves, libraries de-accession them, hardly anybody can destroy them. (Once in a while they have been burnt, but only because of what the words inside said.) That old problem remains of what to do with the old books? Pass them on, sell, donate, but don’t destroy. Ephraim Rubenstein paints them; in fact, he buys them in order to paint them. His long-thought-out arrangements of the books to one another, like Cézanne’s apples and pears, achieve a dialogue—formally, rhythmically. These books are not in fine bindings but bound in buckram or paper, some water-damaged, with broken spines or flapping labels, or are disbound completely, their contents most likely obsolete.
 

The recent catastrophic bubbles in the electricity, oil, housing and financial markets bring home to us that the relationship between physical reality and the signs, values and meanings we give to it can be wildly unstable. In many countries past and future (Germany between the wars, Zimbabwe today), galloping inflation taught the population that their currency was just paper and that a loaf of bread could be twice as expensive in the evening as it was in the morning. The dollar, euro, yuan and pound have been relatively stable, and this fact perhaps lulled us into a false sense of security in the belief that generally things were worth what they claimed to be worth, that the label matched the product, that the word matched the action, that the idea corresponded to the thing.

In his recent exhibition, “Everything Imagined Is Real,” at Winston Wachter Fine Art in New York City, Robert Taplin presented a series of nine sculpted contemporary scenes (all 2008) based on Dante’s Inferno. In the first, I. Thus My Soul Which Was Still in Flight (The Dark Wood), a groggy, naked man climbs out of a bed in which a woman is still asleep. The bed—a large doll’s size—stands on a small sisal rug, set on a Pottery Barn diagonal to its massive pedestal, as if on a rotating stage. The man’s thick-necked, middle-aged body, the woman and the bedclothes are all cast in resin and sketchily painted. The polychrome on the man’s torso and limbs is in harmony with the rendering of his form, but on his face it’s more detailed, emphasizing his indeterminate expression, with half-open mouth and one eye more bruised and wearier than the other. This tableau is taken from Dante’s first canto, “as he, who with laboring breath has escaped from the deep to the shore, turns to gaze at the churning waters, thus my soul, which was still in flight, turned back to look again at the pass which had never yet let any go alive.” Taplin, who studied medieval literature and theater design and learned Italian so that he could read Dante in the original, has posted his direct prose translations of fragments of the Inferno next to his sculptures, so we can see that he has sculpturally translated and adapted rather than illustrated them. By setting Dante’s encounters with unrepentant sinners in our ordinary present, among common American architecture and furnishings and sometimes bathed in the blue glow of television screens, among the hellish circumstances we watch as news, he has created vivid narrative sculptures that twist and teach our perceptions.