Biography:
Aaron Abraham Shikler was born on March 18, 1922, in Brooklyn, where he grew up near Eastern Parkway. After graduating in 1940 from the High School of Music and Art, he enrolled in the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia. But in 1943 he was drafted into the Army Air Corps and sent to the European theater as a mapmaker.
He returned to Tyler after the war, earning bachelor’s degrees in art and education in 1947 and a master’s degree in fine art the next year. In 1947 he married Barbara Lurie, a fellow art student, who died in 1998. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by a son, Clifford, and five grandchildren.
For three years after leaving Tyler, Mr. Shikler studied in New York with the abstract painter Hans Hofmann, but he remained a committed realist throughout his life, under the sway of artists like Degas, Vuillard, Sickert and Sargent. Describing his paintings of the Kennedys, he told The Post in 1971, "Both portraits are straight American representational, tempered by a vast study of European tradition".
To make a living, he painted clowns and ballerinas for a wholesale company, signing the work "Phil I. Steen" to register his disgust. When Leroy Davis, an Army friend, opened the Davis Gallery in Manhattan in 1953, he began showing Mr. Shikler’s work, which included figure studies, still lifes and landscapes. He remained with the gallery, now Davis and Langdale, for the rest of his life, often showing with his Tyler friend David Levine, the caricaturist.
A turning point came in 1959 when Jane Engelhard, the wife of the industrialist Charles W. Engelhard Jr., asked Mr. Shikler to paint her portrait. She became one of his most important patrons, commissioning portraits of Lady Bird Johnson, the Duchess of Windsor and Mike Mansfield, the Senate majority leader. He would later paint portraits of Brooke Astor, Joanne Woodward, Queen Noor of Jordan and Diana Ross with her three children...//
...//He also painted a posthumous portrait of Robert F. Kennedy, dressed casually in khaki pants and a leather jacket, which hangs in the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building.
If many critics found Mr. Shikler old-fashioned, his style and approach made him enormously successful. "He does not seek out the avant-garde, and he is not a guest at SoHo painters’ parties", his dealer, Mr. Davis, told People. "But he will do 90 percent of the important portraits to be done in America". He had a sure if genteel touch, and a keen sense of the play of light on surfaces, that infused his paintings with mood and a sense of presence that flattered his subjects. In a 1979 review for The New York Times, John Russell characterized Mr. Shikler’s portrait work as "easygoing, tenderhearted and the reverse of unsettling".
That was not quite the case with his portrait of Mrs. Kennedy, which depicted her in front of a fireplace in her Fifth Avenue apartment, her elongated figure and grave expression reflecting the artist’s first impression of her, described in his McCall’s article, as "a woman of almost spooky beauty and extraordinary inner tension".
It was a little too spooky for Richard M. Nixon. "He felt that Jacqueline had been depicted as a mournful, wraithlike figure", the Nixon aide John D. Ehrlichman told Art News in 1982. He added, "The portrait was depressing and reminiscent of J.F.K.’s assassination, and for a time Nixon wondered if it could be put away out of sight". Fear of bad publicity kept the painting where it was. In 1980, Time magazine commissioned Mr. Shikler to paint Reagan for the cover of its Man of the Year issue. He was given just 90 minutes in which to do preliminary studies, during which the president-elect fell asleep. The portrait showed Reagan, hands tucked into the back pockets of his jeans, wearing a Western belt and a blue work shirt.
In 1988 the White House Historical Association commissioned Mr. Shikler to paint official portraits of Reagan and his wife. The portrait of Nancy Reagan, in a striking red dress, went smoothly, but Mr. Shikler and the Reagans went back and forth over his portrait of her husband. A first version had to be scrapped. The final version, showing the president standing in front of his desk in the Oval Office, hung briefly in the White House but went into storage in 1991, quietly replaced by another official portrait, by Everett Raymond Kinstler. Famous or not, Mr. Shikler was still an artist trying to please a patron. "The portrait painter, you know, is stuck somewhere in there among the couturier, the hairdresser and the masseuse", he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1989.
