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Albright, Ivan Le Lorraine

Albright, Ivan Le Lorraine (1897–1983). American painter (and occasional sculptor), born in Chicago, the son of Adam Emory Albright (1862–1957), a painter, mainly of portraits, who had studied under Eakins. From 1915 to 1917 he studied architecture at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois, whilst painting in his spare time. After the USA entered the First World War in 1917, he served in France as a medical illustrator in an army hospital, making drawings and watercolours of wounds. The meticulous detail and clinical precision of this work anticipated his later paintings, which show a morbid obsession with death and corruption: sagging, almost putrescent flesh (which he described as ‘corrugated mush’), decrepit, decaying objects, and lurid lighting are typical of his work. Often it evokes a feeling of melancholy for a beauty that is past. Albright came from a wealthy family and his financial independence allowed him to work slowly, producing a fairly small number of elaborate, highly-finished pictures. He was an individual figure who stood apart from mainstream movements (although he has sometimes been called a Magic Realist). For most of his life he lived in or near Chicago, and the city's Art Institute has the best collection of his works. It includes the painting Albright did for the Hollywood film (1943) of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, showing the loathsomely corrupted title figure; Albright's identical twin brother, Malvin Marr Albright (1897–1983), did the portrait of the young and beautiful Dorian for this film. Ivan also wrote poetry, which the art historian Richard Calvocoressi says ‘makes excruciating reading’.