Ivan Albright

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Ivan Le Lorraine Albright (February 20, 1897 – November 18, 1983) was an American magic realist painter and painter, best known for his self-portraits, character studies, and even lifes.

His nocturnal subjects, as well as his surgical skills, have earned him the nickname "master of the macabre."

Life

The Albright family (formerly the Albrecht family) was already known for art and craftsmanship long before Ivan Le Lorraine's birth and his identical twin brother Malvin Marr Albright's birth. Andreas Albrecht, Ivan's paternal great-grandfather, was a master gunsmith in Thuringia, Germany, where a family trade passed down to Ivan's grandfather Zachariah. Adam Emory Albright, Ivan's father, was an Impressionist painter and student of Thomas Eakins, who created his reputation for landscapes and idealized children's paintings.

Ivan and Malvin were born in 1897 near Chicago, Illinois, to Adam Emory Albright and Clara Wilson Albright. The boys would be used as models in their artwork through their youth and up to age 11. At age eight, Adam began teaching the two to draw, as well as regular visits to the Art Institute of Chicago. The boys were introduced to a number of influential American Impressionists and Realists, including Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, William Glackens, Maurice Prendergast, Edmund Tarbell, and John Twachtman, through their father. These experiences, according to Michael Croydon, Ivan's biographer, paved the way for Ivan and his brother's later careers as painters.

Ivan's formal education and career aspirations in his youth and early adulthood were rather uneven. Due to his father's work, his family moved frequently, but it wasn't until 1910 that they settled in Hubbard Woods, where Ivan and Malvin could attend New Trier High School. Ivan studied at Northwestern University's College of Liberal Arts, which he dropped out of. Soon after, his brother was admitted to the same academy. He began to study at the University of Illinois in Urbana in 1916, at a time when architecture or chemical engineering were in play. Ivan wasn't aware that Ivan wasn't interested in becoming an artist until 1918, during a family painting trip to Caracas, Venezuela. At the Art Institute of Chicago's Annual Watercolor Exhibition, he first exhibited his first work, a watercolor investigation of the trees, in Hubbard Woods. As both he and his brother were enlisted in the United States Army as part of the American Expeditionary Forces, the entry of the United States into World War I disrupted his early adult life. Albright created at least eight sketchbooks of medical drawings illustrating surgeries and wounds in graphite and watercolor while stationed in Nantes, France, between 1918 and 1919. Albright was not yet an expert draftsman, art historians, and commentators, who often cite these illustrations as the source of his concern about the fragility of the body and humanity for those suffering.

Both he and his brother attended the Art Institute of Chicago after briefly working in architecture and advertising in 1920. Though Malvin was interested in sculpture, Ivan studied painting, and both were given a high academic education in accordance with the Institute's traditional philosophy. He stayed there until 1923, having exhibited The Philosopher (1922) and receiving Faculty Honorable Mention in both Life and Portrait Paintings. He continued his studies at his father's alma mater, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, with the intention of learning from George Bellows. Ivan was on sabbatical in Europe, but Bellows decided to study under Charles Webster Hawthorne. Having completed his formal education, he and his brother Malvin rented a studio in Philadelphia in 1925, and his career as an artist began.

Albright's mature "baroque" formal style emerged between 1925 and 1926, but in several cases the general public was not prepared for his "naked and uncompromising" description of the human body. Albright and his brother spent three months in southern California near San Diego at the end of 1926. Albright produced several works that are representative of his style, such as I Walk and Fro Through Civilization and I Talk As I Walk (Follow Me, The Monk) and I Drew a Paint in the Sand and the Water Washed It Away (The Theosophist). He and Malvin returned to Illinois, where their father Adam had repurposed an old Methodist church for use as the Albright Gallery of Painting and Sculpture by 1927. Malvin used the nym Zsissly name to avoid confusion with Ivan due to the brothers' proximity for the next two years. Ivan's style began to be a source of controversies in May 1928: his painting The Lineman was used as the front cover for the trade magazine Electric Light and Power. The lineman's portrait was inaccurate and depressing, according to the magazine's reviewer; however, the painting was much more effective with art critics. Albright began painting paintings that emphasised surface quality as much as baroque style, beginning with Woman (1928). The painting was on display at the Toledo Museum of Art in 1929, alongside another group protesting the painting's removal.

Albright's career was well-established by 1931, right after the Great Depression started in 1931. He exhibited fourteen paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago in July of this year, along with fellow artists George and Martin Baer. That year, as well as the completion of the monumental Into the World (1929–30), he began his decade-long obsession with his magnum-opus That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (1931). The Depression didn't have a huge influence on his career, according to Albright, "whether good or bad, [so] it didn't make a difference." Albright was able to live comfortably through the 1930s thanks to his father's success in art sales and real estate. Nevertheless, Albright, as with many other artists of the time, was involved in the Public Works of Art Project in Illinois. He was supposed to receive thirty-eight dollars per week as a "class A" artist, but he denied ever receiving compensation for his work. Albright created two paintings: The Farmer's Kitchen (1933–34) and Self-Portrait (1934). The Farmer's Kitchen, which is now housed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, fulfilled PWAP's desire for photos of hard-working Americans and is certainly the closest of Albright's paintings to those of the popular Regionalists. Albright was able to participate in the woman weariness and deterioration of the woman, deteriorating it, and consequently, criticize Grant Wood and Doris Lee's optimistic outlook.

Albright's life in the 1940s marked a string of shifts. Carla Wilson Albright's mother, Carla Albright, died on May 8, 1939, and she and her husband Adam Malvin were devastated, but they, Malvin and Adam spent the next few summers painting in Maine. Albright finished work on The Door in 1941 and started on its de facto companion Poor Room, No Today, No Tomorrow, No Tomorrow, No Today, No Tomorrow, No Tomorrow, No Tomorrow, No Tomorrow, No Today, No Tomorrow, No Tomorrow, No Tomorrow, No Tomorrow, No Tomorrow, No Tomorrow, No Tomorrow, No Tomorrow, No Tomorrow, No Tomorrow, No Tomorrow, No Tomorrow, No Tomorrow, Only the Forever and Forever, And Forever Without End (The Window), which Albright will continue to live on de facto When Ivan and Malvin were asked to paint for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, directed by Albert Lewin, work on The Window was interrupted for the first time. Albright's portrait insisted on working under the same harsh lighting as on film, to help compensate for his nascent obsession with color that would persist in his art into the 1970s. Albright's personal life changed even more in 1946 when he married Josephine Medill Patterson Reeve on August 27. The couple briefly lived in Billings, Montana, then south to Ten Sleep, Wyoming, before returning to Chicago. On the wedding, Albright adopted Josephine's children. Ivan and Josephine's son Adam Medill was born in 1947, and two years later, they had a daughter Blandina Van Etten.

The bulk of Albright's output comes from portraiture and self-portraiture. The final interruption to Albright's work on The Window was the commissioning of the Portrait of Mary Block (1955–57). After completing The Window in 1962, he began work on a posthumous portrait of his father-in-law Captain Joseph Medill Patterson (1962–64), an officer during WWI and the father of the New York Daily News. Also, when he and his family were holidaying in Aspen, Colorado, in 1963, he created the Aspen Self Portrait, objectively capturing the artist at 60-six years old.

Albright's small-scale works in the 1950s and 1960s were not widely distributed, but he did see him expand his horizons with travel. Albright produced a number of oils and gouaches with western themes between 1948 and 1964. This was in part because Josephine and her sister Alicia Patterson Guggenheim obtained partial ownership of a ranch in Dubois, Wyoming, which was in part due to Josephine's and her sister Alicia Patterson Guggenheim's participation. The ranch was a fitting setting for a series of Western-themed works, including Roaring Fork, Wyoming (1948), The Purist (1949), The Wild Bunch (Hole in the Wall Gang) (1951), Tin (1959–64), and The Rustlers (1959, 1963–64). Similarly, Ivan and Josephine inherited her plantation in Georgia, just north of Jacksonville, sparking Albright to pay special attention to the swamp. In part, Ivan's stay in Georgia between 1963 and 1965 was in part out of necessity, as the city of Chicago decided to raze his Ogden Avenue to make way for a shopping mall. In addition, Albright's retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1964–65, he felt excluded by Chicago's cultural community. Pop-Art and Minimalism dominated contemporary art at the time, much like Albright's figurative style. Ivan and Josephine moved to Woodstock, Vermont, in 1963, but they were only able to live there full-time in 1965, when the house was completely renovated. Albright produced What If Life Were Live? (The Vermonter) (1966–77), a retired maple farmer and former Vermont House of Representatives executive, and it was there that he produced what was perhaps his last major work, If Life Were Life (1966–77).

Albright was seventy-five years old, but his eyesight began to deteriorate as a result of cataract formation. With his first corneal transplant in 1977, the cataracts were restored, giving the artist a new sense of life. That year, he donated a substantial portion of his art to the Art Institute of Chicago, and Michael Croydon's first biography was published the following year. However, his health rapidly deteriorated. His last series of paintings was a series of self-portraits created between 1981 and 1983. The series was launched at the request of the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence for a self-portrait to add to their collection of self-portraits by great masters in honor of their 400th anniversary. Although one of the paintings is now in the Uffizi, Albright produced more than twenty-four in total in a variety of styles and media. He completed the last of them after a stroke and just a few days before he died on November 18, 1983.

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