Aaron Abraham Shikler, 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.... For 3 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, Senate majority leader. ....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. © The New York Times Company (http://www.tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica.com/2015/12/Aaron-Shikler) undefined

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