Arts and Letters

There were four generations of Prussian gunsmiths in the Albright family, when firearms were often elaborate objects of art in themselves. Around 1750 some of them migrated to America and settled in the "Pennsylvania Dutch country" around Philadelphia, where they went on with their special skills. They may have been the ones who developed the Long Rifle, used by sharp shooters of the Colonial army during the American Revolution, to "pick-off" the British officers. The regular army rifles were no match for them. With the westward population drift after the Revolution the family moved on and settled in the Middle West, near Chicago, where they tended to become merchants or professionals, rather than gunsmiths.

In course of time, Adam Emory Albright chose to become a painter and went to Philadelphia, where he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, under Thomas Eakins. It was during that stormy period when Eakins horrified the Academy not only by dissecting pickled cadavers during his anatomy lessons, but in mixing the "life class" with male and female students, before totally naked models. Such improprieties were unacceptable at the Academy at that time, so Thomas Eakins, the outstanding painter of his period, was forced to resign. Adam Albright, subsequently, completed his studies in Paris and Munich.

When Albright returned to the United States he married and set up a studio as a professional artist in Chicago, where, apparently, he did very well. (I have tried through the Archives of American Art to get some information about his paintings, without success.)

Ivan Le Lorraine Albright (named after Claude Lorrain) had a twin brother, Malvin Marr. When they were nine years old their training as artists began in their father's studio, and under his strict discipline, after the manner of Eakins. They worked from the models their father was using. This education lasted for ten years by which time Ivan decided that he would rather be an architect, and started courses in that direction. Malvin chose to be a sculptor.

When we entered World War I in 1917, Ivan became attached to the Army Medical Corps as a surgical draughtsman. His early anatomy lessons served him well.

After the war he went back to his architectural studies, but soon became disenchanted with that, and started painting again. In the meantime his brother Malvin went on with his sculpture, until, as he said, there was no longer room in his studio to hold another plaster cast. So he decided that he too would return to painting, which he said was so much easier than sculpture, anyway.

Since Ivan was making a name for himself, Malvin decided to establish his own identity under another name. Skipping from A to Z he called himself Zsissly, not an easy name to pronounce but which he said, would put him at the bottom of any list of artists. Alas, another painter by the name of Zucker displaced him, to his chagrin.

As the brothers developed, their paintings were plainly similar. Zsissly had a somewhat broader and looser brushwork and a brighter range of colors.

The first time I saw any of Ivan Albright's painting was in the Whitney Museum in the 1930s, when the museum was still on Eighth Street. The Whitney Annual was a gathering of paintings from all over the country. Albright's was the outstanding picture of the show, done in his mature style. It showed a heavy, elderly man naked to the waist, shedding his clothes before going to bed. His derby hat was still on his head. It didn't say more than that, yet the effect was penetrating and unforgettable and it made a great impression among painters and critics alike. Never having seen his work before we called him "that Chicago painter."

Some years later when M.G.M. commissioned Ivan Albright to paint a portrait of Dorian Grey for the movie production, where according to Oscar Wilde's story, Dorian Grey retains his youthful beauty while the picture ages with decrepitude, who else but Ivan Albright, the master of folds and wrinkles, could have done it?

The main body of his work tells us of an artist who seems unaffected by the styles and mannerisms which have prevailed in European Art since the Renaissance, or, more recently by the School of Paris. There is a kinship with Bosch and Grunewald and, oddly, with the Mayan reliefs, in juxtapositions such as his.

In the tradition of realist painting, Albright was unique, in the sense that he composed his pictures of particulars, each particular whether it was an eyelash or the graining of wood was delineated precisely. No detail was more important than another. As if, in his world, all things were really created equal.

The conception of a picture composed of certain significant forms, within a division of space to enhance depth or distance, indeed all the devices of picture construction, as we have known it for centuries, Albright hardly bothered with at all. Yet he has left us with the thought that his paintings are intimately related to each other. Each forming an element in an extended canvas. A picture of the world he knew intimately.

Ivan Albright was not a prolific painter, pictures such as his are not dashed off, nor are the museum walls of the land teeming with them. Yet, with good fortune, we have seen enough to insure a unique place for him within the art of our time.