Ivan Albright

b. Feb. 20, 1897, North Harvey, Illinoisd. Nov. 18, 1983, Woodstock, VermontAmerican painter noted for his meticulously detailed, exaggeratedly realistic depictions of decay and corruption. Albright was educated at Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., and the University of Illinois, Urbana, before World War I. After the war he trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and, briefly, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design, New York City.In 1927 Albright settled in Warrenville, Ill., near Chicago. Independently wealthy, he devoted himself to painting. In 1930 he completed "Into the World Came a Soul Called Ida," a portrait of an aging, flabby prostitute looking into a mirror. Ultrarealistic, it conveyed the ravages of time with startling surface detail. His first one-man show was held in Chicago the same year.In 1931 Albright began "That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do" (Art Institute of Chicago), showing a scarred, decrepit door on which is hung a funeral wreath. It was completed in 1941 and is considered to be one of his masterpieces. His portrait (1943-44) of the final stage in the dissolute life of the title character in the film The Picture of Dorian Gray brought him fame. Among his other works are "God Created Man In His Own Image" (1929-30) and "Portrait of Mary Block" (1955-56; Art Institute of Chicago). The pale, unearthly light and hallucinatory proliferation of detail in Albright's paintings convey an atmosphere of age and decay with morbid emotional intensity.Excerpt from 20th Century American Drawings Catalogue:Ivan's father was a painter, and so was Ivan's identical twin brother. Ivan Albright attended Northwestern Universiy, near his hometown of North Harvey, outside of Chicago. Following his brief period in college, he served as a medical draftsman in World War I, documenting war wounds and operations for an army hospital in France. Albright acknowledged that studying X-rays was excellent training. In 1920, he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and graduated in 1923. By 1933, he had exhibited in major museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dayton Art Institute, the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art, NY, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He may have achieved his greatest celebrity when he was commissioned to paint a portrait of the protagonist for the 1945 MGM film, "the Picture of Dorian Gray," in which the dramatic presentation of Albright's painting of the corrupted anti-hero is a climactic high point. Albright never had a primary dealer and placed high prices on his work, partly to discourage purchases. He was accorded solo-exhibitions in major museums including the Tate Gallery, London (1963), a retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago (1964), and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (1965). In the 1970s, two schools gave him an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts, while another gave him an Honorary Doctor of Arts.Since the beginning of his career in the late 1920s, Ivan Albright's has painted figures that fill almost the entire canvas and presents the features of the sitter meticulously rendered and greatly magnified. Every wrinkle, birthmark, stray hair and blemish of exposed, discolored skin was documented in his exploration of the human condition. He accepted death as an essential part of living, a condition that gives life meaning. His technique was painstaking; often he used a brush with only three hairs and covered only a tiny patch of canvas in a day. His canvases observe decay and degeneration and experiment with multiple perspective and the expression of movement.