Ivan Albright
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IVAN ALBRIGHT was the Thomas Browne of American art--a painter who has dwelt consistently on the corruption of the flesh and the transitory nature of even inanimate things. This might seem strange, for his father, Adam Emory Albright, was a portrayer of American country children, and Ivan (born in Chicago, February 20, 1897) posed with his twin brother Marvin for many idyllic scenes--perhaps too many. His original choice of career was architecture, which he studied at the University of Illinois. He was also Painting, and in 1918 he first exhibited publicly in a watercolor show at the Art Institute of Chicago. The same year he joined an American hospital unit in France, where his precise skill as a draughtsman was utilized by the Army to make detailed drawings of wounds and operations, an experience which may have had some bearing on his later work.
In France, Albright decided to become a painter and found time to study briefly at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Nantes. Returning to America after the war, he continued his studies, first at the Art Institute of Chicago ( 1919-23), then at the Pennsylvania Academy ( 1923) finally at the National Academy in New York ( 1924). In 1925 he settled in Warrenville, Illinois, where he, his father and his brother established themselves in a vacant Methodist church. Later he built a new studio nearby and more recently has divided his time between Chicago and a ranch in Wyoming.
Albright developed the essentials of his mature style soon after leaving school. From the beginning it was an art of strong light and dark contrasts and of a fluid, baroque movement. His figures look as if they had been posed under a single photographic flood light which reveals harshly where it strikes and totally obscures where it shadows. The violent pattern created by these lights and darks flows, in his early work, along massive lines created by the folds of garments and the big forms of a figure. In later pictures, like Ida, the design becomes more intricate and the light seems to splinter on the varied textures of wicker, lace and sagging flesh. But virtually all the artist's work, early and late, is conceived in terms of theatrical illumination and restless motion.
As Albright developed, the importance of detail grew and the mood of his pictures darkened. The painterly realism of his first work was gradually transformed into a microscopic realism. Now pores, wrinkles, warts, the individual bristles of an unshaven chin stand out with a clarity that seems grotesque, partly because our vision does not normally probe so closely, partly because the very wealth of detail creates a bewildering maze that shocks the eye with cumulative and intimate revelations. Perspective is wrenched in conflicting directions and over these suffering images lie his strange colors--off-blacks and purples that suggest the iridescence of decay.
Albright's penchant for the macabre has twice been utilized by Hollywood--once in 1943-44 when he painted, with his brother, "portraits" of moral dissolution for The Picture of Dorian Gray, again in 1945 when he did The Temptation of Saint Anthony for Bel Ami. The artist's true accomplishment was more profound than the rather theatrical effects of these canvases. The raddled bodies which he created with such infinite care (one picture took ten years to finish) cage an invincibly human spirit that speaks from their eyes and even from their weary figures. His theme was the tragedy of mortality; his mood acceptance, but not defeat.
Albright: A picture is like a house wherein all things are to be found, both material and immaterial; it is a place wherein, side by side, rest decay and the sublime; and children's laughter brushes the inner prayer.
A painting is life and a painting is death, both making and lying in the coffin built for tomorrow's use.
A picture is life, and its life will be no stronger than the days, than the minutes which contain man's desires, frustrations, passions and contemplations; this existence that throws at will, in its mind, chairs or trees, rugs and books, death and meat; a porridge-pot of nights, nightmares and stars. All these and more must go into the picture one does make. This picture will possess no more love than you possess; show no more bewilderment than you betray; be no more sincere than you are; create no more awe than is felt by you.
In essence a painting is an astigmatized portrayal of you; it is your Rorschach with id and plaster cast. It can be no better than you are.
It is essential that we give of the whole and not of the part, for the picture is our legacy left by tomorrow's dead for tomorrow's living.
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