ILLINOIS HISTORICAL ART PROJECT

One might claim Albright was essentially a still-life painter, treating all things as objects, with infinite surfaces and tangible, yet hidden structures underneath. By equal measure he believed all elements in the world constantly underwent changes and lived their own independent and interconnected lives. Such conceits were explored in the first of a series of finely crafted still-lives, Wherefore Now Ariseth the Illusion of the Third Dimension (1931; Art Institute of Chicago) in which Albright pushed his technique to its furthest extremes yet. One writer later called it “not only Albright’s greatest masterpiece of still-life painting but perhaps the best that has ever been done in this country.”140

Wherefore Now Ariseth… was the first of many paintings in which Albright worked from carefully selected objects, arranged in his studio in redetermined positions under choreographed lighting. His slow working methods permitted the apples and lemons to rot as he worked across their surfaces, transforming them in paint as they themselves were transformed by time. As he attempted to portray the passage of time and a sense of motion, Albright manipulated the viewpoints and lighting of the objects in his still life. His apples appear to jostle one another, the gloves seem animated and the lemons appear to hover or rotate. As he worked on this painting he wrote, “I could draw an object as if I had six eyes located in pairs of two at different distances from [the] object and at different levels. i.e. the vision of three people viewing an object at the same time.”141 Earlier he had posed the idea, “we only have a knowledge of form through movement.”142 This dynamism is what he would continue to express in more profound ways later in his career.

The composition also heralded a move in his work towards all-over compositions; every minute area given equal design weight. It has led some to view Albright’s works as living dual lives as hyper-realistic and abstract, “He is, paradoxically, an abstract artist who deals with reality only to destroy it by bending all images to his unique metaphysical bias,” wrote Katharine Kuh.143 This same quality would later be praised in the work of Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock.144 In subsequent paintings, Albright pushed these qualities even further; the more realistic his work became, the more abstract it appeared.

In late 1931, Albright began two more compositions based on elaborate studio assemblages. While the theme of Wherefore Now Ariseth… related to growth and decay over a period of time, the objects and arrangement did not seem selected specifically for larger issues of content. A virtuoso display of craft, it resounds with meanings for a variety of viewers but has no grand theme. His next projects differed in that he selected props, and arranged them theatrically to support meaning. One presented a Victorian doll, dressed up and lying in a glass case. The other was of a door, setup on top of a threshold, fitted with the key from his studio, a funeral wreath hung upon it. Following what had now become his regular practice, Albright first drew the picture entirely in charcoal on canvas. After this exacting process was completed, he was then ready to paint. Show Case Doll (Art Institute of Chicago) is related thematically to The Door and it is understandable Albright conceived of the projects together. Each approaches mortality in a particular way; the doll as a corpse on display in a glass coffin, the door as a metaphysical, symbolic structure between the physical and spiritual.

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Ambitious as he was, Albright found the simultaneous projects a distracting way to work. He abandoned Show Case Doll in 1932 in order to focus on The Door. He explained:

“I worked on one in the morning and one in the afternoon... I found that I was running back and forth from one to the other. The light would get good over one... and I’d run over and work on it. Then I’d run back to the other one. Finally I said to myself: for gosh sakes, Albright, make up your mind: it’s got to be one or the other…”145

Show Case Doll remains as a charcoal drawing on canvas, with touches of oil here and there. It affords a rare opportunity to examine Albright’s elaborate working methods as separate layers. Despite its unfinished state, Albright remained pleased with the work. He produced a lithographic version in 1954, and found it one of the few works he was still proud of in 1963.146

Albright drew in charcoal for thirteen months as a foundation for the painting of a door, eventually titled, That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do.147 Working slowly and deliberately,148 he averaged a quarter inch a day and didn’t retouch any section once he had finished. Probably the most accurate and finest detail of the color and sensuality of this astonishing painting remains Daniel Catton Rich’s 1943 description:

“Death’s corruption has never been exposed with more unfailing insight. The very pigment seems dead, made up of cobwebs, dried spittle and dust. Color is smoked on rather than painted... twisting moldings... are sharply cut by a metallic, cold light. Vapor drifts from the shadow... form dissolves into an ectoplasmic mist. The canvas dulls or glows with a charnel luminosity.”149

A hallucinogenic painting in both psychological and visual effect, it remains one of Albright’s best known works. Albright collected and arranged an intimate still life of personal and found objects - the door itself came from a Chicago junkyard, the lace handkerchief belonged to his grandmother. The
warped shape of the door, with its elaborately carved molding, resembles a coffin; a hand touches the molding as if to bid farewell; and a wisp of smoke issuing from the keyhole alludes to the expiration of life. The door does not symbolize death or the event of death but is an evocation of what lies beyond the ultimate unknown. It is a threshold we are not allowed to pass over - or to know about. Would we open the door were we allowed? Beyond lies a psychological place, hidden behind a barrier, and evokes the hushed voice in all of us which wonders beneath the everyday, what is behind the door. The painting can be seen as an extension of his figural works of the 1920s. Perhaps his figures stand before a similar door, in quiet contemplation, and here he turned this space around on the viewer. Albright wrote, “To live is one thing – to have died is to have lived longer. Death is the greatest event in the philosopher’s life. Our bodies are our earthen shelters undercover of which we live. To really see ourselves, we have to step out from our shelters, and that time comes with death.”150

In 1938 Albright initiated a practice that would become a sort of ritual for important major projects; he exhibited The Door in its unfinished state at the Pittsburgh Carnegie International where it caused a sensation.151 According to lore, the unfinished canvas was displayed in an elaborately carved frame that apparently caused the entire object to resemble a casket. The powerful effect was noted by many, including Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph critic Dorothy Kantner who wrote, ". . . if [Albright's] canvas doesn't squelch your joie de vivre you are pretty hard-shelled."152 No photograph of this frame – presumed lost – has surfaced. The very act of displaying “that which is undone,” underscores Albright’s interest in the vitality of the life of an artwork to grow in the process it experiences - both at the hand of the artist and in its public life. Albright continued this process later in life. In 1956, Katharine Kuh, the Art Institute’s first curator of Modern art assembled the American pavilion at the Venice Biennial. She and Art Institute director, Daniel Catton Rich asked Albright if he would loan The Window. He obliged and it too appeared there “in process.”153 And The Vermonter (If Life Were Life There Would Be No Death; 1966-77, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College) was exhibited two years prior to its completion.

Albright is traditionally portrayed as an introverted artist with little concern for what happened outside the walls of his studio. Yet the growing menace in Europe undoubtedly affected him in myriad ways. He frequently painted in Maine during the summers but the war had made travel on the East Coast dangerous. A recently revealed series of letters from Albright to a girlfriend demonstrates his feelings about the state of the world but also his perceptual abilities about such affairs.

“I suppose by the time you get this there will be war. Germany will probably march up to Warsaw’s door without declaring war as she speeded through Belgium the last time.”154 “What do you think of the war ‘over there.’ It sort of makes me sick to hear the news coming in. It is the same old story of the last war and the whole thing is a mess that will run half a dozen years without an end and which will see this country in the battle within two years.”155  “I can hear the steel riveters working with C.I.U. hammers laying down steel hulls for boats - to supply targets for torpedoes. They are all up and down the coast those men.”156

Certainly one wonders, given the traumatic decade in which The Door was painted, whether the painting is symbolic of the depression, rising terror in Germany, the start of WWII in September of 1939 or even of the death of Albright’s mother earlier in the same year. While this amazing painting uncannily resounds with the historical context of the ominous 1930s, the painting is an extension of the figural works Albright was creating in the late 1920s and early 1930s and is bound to their meanings.157

The Door’s meaning appears on the surface fairly straightforward; presumably we witness a home transformed through its physical and psychological presence into a vault, a crypt, a Midwestern sepulcher. There has never been any doubt the dissipation of life, eternal regret and anguish of the living
– the survivors of the dead – encircle this central theme. But one certainly must consider the meanings of Albright’s interest in the intangible, already explored in his Wherefore Now Ariseth, and his growing interest in the position of the viewer before such works. The Door, and later The Window, were composed by a painter conscious of psychological effects on the viewer through optical manipulation of compositional elements. Together with the metaphysical connotations of the “haze” rising out of the shadow on the right, manipulation of “space” between picture plane and illusionary scene, Albright’s painting shares meaning and a formal structure which find its closest equivalent in the mature canvases of Mark Rothko (1903-1970).

Like Albright, Rothko sought the full burden of religious meaning in his large-scale works. His paintings of the 1960s evoke connotations of the void; places of transition where revelation of the future is uncertain and unclear. Rothko’s works bleed with loneliness, isolation and the necessity of human
singularity.158 They present voids pregnant with death but also with the potential for life. How does one paint the infinite? How does one paint the intangible? These are questions each painter struggled with. Albright’s response was to conjure a hyper-realistic image triggering sensations and memories in viewers close to death’s touch. Rothko made the experience of being before the canvas immerse the viewer into its seemingly purged content, its silence its contemplative pull in order that meditative states might be achieved. One wonders, given the prominence Albright’s painting had in the 1940s, particularly in New York, how many seemingly unrelated artists found inspiration in this most resonant but ultimately minimalist painting by Ivan Albright of Warrenville.

After The Door was completed, it debuted at The Corcoran Gallery biennial in Washington DC, in March 1941, where it attracted a great deal of comment and attention. Its campaign continued with new found strength as it won the following prizes: Norman Wait Harris Silver Medal, Art Institute of Chicago;159 Temple Gold Medal, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; and First Prize, Artists for Victory, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where he turned down the $3,500 purchase prize as much too little for his painting.160 The prize was awarded to John Steuart Curry (1897-1946) for Wisconsin Landscape (1937-39) by default.161 Later, in 1946 it was featured in an exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London where it "stole the show."162 By the time The Door’s campaign had ended, Ivan Albright was possibly the most famous or certainly one of the best-known artists in America. But this was only the beginning.

Although it remains unclear exactly how Hollywood movie director Albert Lewin became interested in Ivan Albright’s art, he had ample opportunity to see and read about it in the great wave of press the Illinois artist had recently accumulated.163 In addition to the fame procured by The Door, a large body of Albright’s work had been included in major exhibitions in circulation by the Museum of Modern Art.164 Lewin, a former Harvard English literature professor was also an art connoisseur and had seen, Albright’s “‘compulsively horrible’ paintings, and, naturally thought of the Illinois artist.”165 Albright had been featured in Time magazine in November of 1941 and July of the following year.166 It is possible any one of these scenarios inspired Lewin when he began to cast Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

One particular article about Albright surely would have solidified any inclination Lewin might have had towards Albright. In February of 1943, Daniel Catton Rich’s fine essay on Albright was published in the Magazine of Art. Lewin certainly would have been attracted to an artist who said, “I like faults and quirks in people. I believe a man grows to look more and more like the person he really is.”167 It seemed right out of Wilde’s novel. In March Lewin sent a telegram to the Museum of Modern Art asking for Albright’s address.168 Lewin had found his man.

Lewin wrote to Albright about the film and presumably asked him if he would like to contribute to the production as painter of the crucial artistic element. “I thought it was a phony letter,” Albright later said. “[But] it was true. He [Lewin] came all the way out from Hollywood [to see me].”169 Lewin may well have visited Albright in April of that year, and might have seen “And Man Created God in His Own Image (Room 203),” while it was on display at the Arts Club of Chicago. Albright signed a $10,000 (plus expenses) contract that allowed him to retain ownership of whatever paintings he produced for MGM. In a remarkable concession of power, the Hollywood studio would only be renting their commissioned works.170 Malvin accompanied Ivan as “assistant,” but wound up creating the initial prop painting showing Dorian as a young man.

By August, the name of the artist commissioned for the film made the newspapers. In what was purportedly a great coup, Louella Parsons got the scoop and reported that Lewin had chosen Albright.171 That opened the floodgates, and soon there was a media feeding frenzy on the Albrights, whose reputations had preceded them by many years. The publicity generated by their participation in the film kept it in the news constantly for nearly two years prior to the film’s release, and for many months afterward. The twins themselves embarked for Hollywood during the last week of October 1943.172 Once on the set, the media found themselves a worthy match in Ivan and Malvin, who played the press at will and caught many a journalist off-guard. Despite being forty-six years of age when they arrived in Hollywood, the press nonetheless used peculiar language to describe them, exaggerating their artistic personalities. They were called, gnomes, impish, pixie-like, zany, pranksters, quipsters, eccentric, odd boys, gremlins, hell-raisers, wits, jokesmiths and so on. There seemed no end to the opportunities for public interest in the Albrights. Ivan and Malvin’s good humor and ability to fabricate amusing stories arguably made much of the public relations hype more intense.173

The reaction in Chicago to Albright’s fortune and fame was celebratory. Even Albright’s old naysayer, critic C. J. Bulliet came around by 1943. In an article about the Dorian Gray commission and its art historical and literary context, Bulliet wrote:

“Uncannily apt is the choice... For Albright of all American painters, contemporary or dead, is the master of the macabre in human flesh. He has developed a heavy, gnarled nude [in the past]... a creature of the hospital if not the charnel house. To meet her [Bulliet is referring to Ida] match... you must go to Poe or Hoffmann.”174

Since the actor Hurd Hatfield was not available to pose, the Albrights constructed setups and used mannequins from which to work.175 Hatfield’s understudy sometimes modeled for Ivan, and endured posing with congealed chicken blood on his hands. The movie was shot in black and white, except for the moments when the portrait appears and is revealed in vivid Technicolor. Albright even claimed the studio allowed him to film his painting, and that they used his rushes in the final cut.176 The Oscar-nominated film drew the public’s attention even closer to Albright’s horrific vision, and unbelievably, he exceeded his own fame.

Malvin’s portrait of the youthful Dorian Gray, which he completed in four months,177 ultimately was not used in the film. Surely this was a powerful blow to Ivan’s twin brother, as it seemed a defining moment in which Ivan’s career soared while Malvin remained figuratively and literally behind. The best and most reliable explanation for this dramatic replacement was the necessity to establish as great a contrast as possible between the portraits of the young and aged Dorian, and Malvin’s portrayal failed to project the fashionable “beauty” necessary for this contrast. Unconsciously and quite subtly he had foreshadowed changes to come, which would thereby have weakened the suspense of the film.178 Ironically, this painting, which was aimed at providing a dramatic axis in the plot and visual narrative of the motion picture and which in reality bears little resemblance to the more subtle and suggestive paintings of the previous decades, has come to represent Albright’s vision. The painting’s true significance lies outside of Albright’s personal growth; as a painting that began a sort of vogue for artwork to be used in film and as the most sensational moment in the history of any artist to emerge from Illinois.179

Despite the stardom Albright kept a level head about Hollywood experience. He wrote frequently to many friends back home in Illinois and often joked about the publicity he and Malvin were getting. “The movie is apt to be pretty good... [But its been] too much hard work for commercialism,”180 he concluded. Albright claimed that he didn’t like working in Hollywood, and certainly the rigorous time constraints and schedule were alien – if not incompatible – to an artist who had spent a career being able to afford the luxury of a slow, deliberate working method. But ever the professional, he completed a worthy artistic job, an even better one in creating a spectacle. “It was fun for a while... but... you wouldn’t do good work,” he said.181

The silent triumph, which followed Dorian Gray, was Albright’s participation and prize in the 1946 Bel Ami international contest. Albright finished second of eleven internationally known artists; Max Ernst (1891-1976) took first place and Paul Delvaux (1897-1994) third.182 According to Albright, the contest was never supposed to happen. He later explained, “I introduced [art critic and later gallery owner] Sidney Janis... to Albert Lewin. I was getting a little too hot... Al was going to make a movie on The Temptation of Saint Anthony183 and was going to have me paint the picture. Janis said, ‘Oh, let’s have an international competition instead.’”184 The judges, Alfred Barr Jr., Marcel Duchamp, and Sidney Janis were all familiar with Albright’s work and each had supported it in different contexts. Each represented important portions of the contemporary art world: Barr as the director of the Museum of Modern Art, Duchamp as perhaps the most conceptually advanced artist of his day, and Janis as an important dealer and critic. Ironically, Janis kept Albright from placing first, “Al [Lewin] told me that the guy that kept me down was my friend Janis. He gave me third vote. Duchamp and the others [put] me up there. It was Sidney Janis who kept me from getting it.”185 Albright revealed however, he was promised a portion of the movie’s eventual gross by Lewin, “I had part of the world take... I wouldn’t have entered the competition [otherwise].”186 Whether Albright actually had a financial stake in Bel Ami’s success remains unconfirmed, but would reveal yet again the fortuitous position he found himself in during the mid-1940s.

Painted in Warrenville between 1945-46 The Temptation of Saint Anthony (Art Institute of Chicago)187 is at once without parallel anywhere in his career, and seems closest to any vestiges of outside influence. It is possible that this was intentional, knowing his attitude towards the competition and the many surrealists competing with him. Grotesque creatures ooze and grow, spill out of a kaleidoscope of goo. One is hard pressed to understand the meaning of “temptation” here; Albright’s Saint Anthony seems hopelessly tortured. The horrific painting was possibly a challenge or mocking of surrealism an attempt to beat the Europeans at their own game.188 Each of these projects further bolstered his experiments with color theory and afterimages in particular (the colored shapes perceived as a result of staring at a form and then closing one’s eyes to view its color complement) which he expanded upon later in his career.189

 

On August 27, 1946, Ivan Albright and Josephine Medill Patterson Reeve (1913-1996) were married, “in a surprise ceremony at a Wyoming Ranch.”190 They had met a few years previous through mutual friends.191 Younger daughter of New York News founder, editor, and publisher Captain Joseph Medill Patterson (1879-1946),192 Josephine had already lived an amazing, successful life by the time she married Ivan. Among other things, she had been a crime reporter, mail pilot, dairy farmer and found time to raise horses.193 Heiress to a wondrous fortune and popular socialite, Josephine brought Ivan into further contact with Chicago's so-called cultural elite. Albright became a loving father to Josephine’s two children, Joseph and Alice, from a previous marriage. In 1947 a son, Adam Medill was born to Ivan and Josephine and daughter Blandina in 1949. Ivan’s marriage led to a period of estrangement between him and his twin brother. As constant companions, they had shared nearly everything in life, but were now forced to go their separate ways.

Ivan and Josephine’s move to 55 E. Division in Chicago, also marked the first time Albright actually lived in the city though he had been claimed as one of its native artists. It marked the first time Ivan had really lived outside of his family home and apart from Malvin. For the first few years of his marriage, Albright commuted to his suburban studio in Warrenville until he purchased a building in Chicago on Ogden Avenue, which was remodeled by architect Andrew Rebori. The first major project Albright undertook after his marriage was initiated in January 1947 when Albright and six other Chicago artists were commissioned to paint a mural for friend Ric Riccardo’s Rush Street restaurant and gallery.194 Albright’s contribution was Drama (Mephistopheles), for which he used two models, Josephine for the legs and Ric for the rest.195

For all his visibility and independence, as a successful artist who compromised little or nothing for his art, the impact of Albright’s reputation on younger artists in Chicago has been underestimated and strangely downplayed.196 Few artists have come forth to describe his presence. Artist Ellen Lanyon is rare among her peers in giving credit to Albright:

“We all acquired a concern and appreciation of Dada, Duchamp, the primitives and the surrealists up to a point. But, there was a kind of Surrealism that turned us off – that was the later Dali, the overly theatrical. We put Albright into that category because of Dorian Gray and That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do. None of us realized that certain elements of Albright’s work were inherent in our work, especially the narrative element. Albright should be credited as the first strong narrative painter here and narrative art is extremely strong in Chicago.”197

Certainly, although those who created and chronicled the “Chicago scene" have denied it198 Albright’s position as a mentor, as a model or as something to react against cannot be underestimated among the following generations. Cosmo Campoli (b. 1922), Leon Golub (b. 1922), Seymour Rosofsky (1924-81), The Hairy Who (including Jim Nutt [b. 1938], Gladys Nilsson [b. 1940], and Karl Wirsum [b. 1939]) and the later Imagists such as Ed Paschke (b. 1939) – even more contemporary artists such as Susanna Coffey, David Klamen, Jim Lutes, Alejandro Romero, and Ken Warneke – owe something to Albright’s example. Additionally, Albright was well known among Mid-Westerners much beyond Illinois, both of his own generation and those who were younger. John Wilde (b. 1919) recalled: “we all certainly felt his presence on the art scene. I can’t point to anyone who was influenced by Albright, but many of us admired him.”199

Author Susan Weininger has pointed out the startling resounding aspects of Albright’s approach and poetic titles evident in the works of Ohioan, Emerson Burkhardt (1905-1969) and certainly some of his paintings seem under the shadow of Albright.200 As suggested throughout this essay, but denied by many previous scholars, Albright's wide exposure through exhibitions, competitions and film necessarily implicates his work in a more complex dialogue with his contemporaries. His presence in California and later friendship with Nathan Oliveira also suggests that he may have inspired members of the Bay-Area Figurative School.201 The subject of Albright’s impact remains complicated and deserves a thorough, unbiased study, yet unwritten.202

During the 1940s Albright achieved great visibility. He achieved critical and popular acclaim, international and local success, and worked comfortably within a variety of unusual contexts. An obsessive exhibitor, he intensified his participation in national shows and earned awards for oil painting, watercolors and prints. He moved through drastically different social circles with ease and adapted to a shifting lifestyle. Assessing this, Jan Van der Marck commented that “Not since Whistler (and again not until Warhol) [has] an American painter been able to straddle, comfortably and without loss of professional status, the widely different worlds of art, society and entertainment.”203 The 1940s also saw the true separation of Malvin and Ivan’s careers. Their notoriety climaxed with joint “Albright Twins” exhibitions in New York and Chicago at Associated American Artists Galleries in 1945-46. Critical reaction was generally positive but the press noted the intensity of Ivan’s vision versus the serenity of Malvin’s.204 We know little of what Malvin thought about his twin’s fame and soaring career. One can only guess it may have been deeply traumatic, for the twins separated not long after, and Malvin greatly reduced his artistic activities.

But for all of this fame, Albright really wanted to return to a massive project he had begun in 1942,205 a painting he referred to as The Window. It would occupy him for twenty-one years and was the last painting he produced completely in Illinois. So important was this project to the artist that in a 1950 interview he publicly discredited Hollywood commissions, a series of lithographs, and his Chicago restaurant mural by calling The Window his “first honest job” since The Door.206

When Albright began his project in 1942, his notoriety caused great expectation among critics and local artists about the next eccentric painting. As the matter brewed slowly, press reported upon it eagerly, and Albright made the papers with just about any amusing anecdote about The Window or other related topics.207 Notes on the entire project consumed six notebooks and one original diagram.208 More astonishing than the time frame of the project was the setup Albright imagined and then constructed for his model. He eventually built an entire room, a theatrical installation filled with props from earlier aintings and elements specially devised for the new composition. The project reveals a great deal about Albright’s working methods, and a context often denied among contemporaries.

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The Window was originally begun as a self-portrait but the idea was abandoned within the first year of work.209 Albright’s own explanation of the genesis of this painting was given in a typically offhand fashion:

 

“After ten years of painting on a picture of a door, I don’t think I cared to see any more wood for the rest of my life. So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll take a new material. It will be a still life.’ And after thinking it over for a number of weeks I decided on having a brick wall – with a window in it of some type – and looking through into a room.”210

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In the Fall of 1942, Albright began to select bricks and after looking around for a window frame, found none that suited his purpose, so he built one. He also selected a tombstone for the sill211 and went to Aurora, Illinois, where he eventually spent three days picking out an estimated six hundred bricks.212

Initially, he experimented by building the brick wall flat, kept a running number of the order, and rearranged them until he was satisfied with a pattern. Then a temporary wall was arranged, bricks balanced precariously upon one another so it could be taken apart at will and rearranged. Finally, all elements were placed onto a stage, also built by Albright, resting on casters so the construction could be moved around. This alone took three or four months, between fall of 1942 and winter of 1943.213

Albright indicated that one of the major concerns in this project was not simply to produce a detailed and provocative still life, but to:

“Lead the observer all thru [sic] the room and then outside again but so he does not know he is being led. At places have him stop and cry. At places have his emotions torn asunder. At places have him worship God. At places have him have contempt. Make of man a poor thing. A real thing a sorry thing, a thing which he is but knows not. Have him love the bricks and have the bricks hard.”214

As we have seen, Albright believed all objects were in constant motion - that nothing was truly static, and motion translated into or crossed over into the dimension of time: “An object standing still in space is constantly causing a state of ripples in time like a stone thrown in water causes ripples in water.”215 He hoped, and believed that the effect would cause a heightened emotional response in the observer. In 1964 he wrote about his method, referring obliquely to The Window, which he had recently completed:

 

“I walk about and put things in different positions to break up... their eternal death. I like to see dust move and crawl over an object like a film. I like to see the objects scream and work against their positions, against their size.216 These effects I achieve in my canvas by walking around my objects and painting them from numerous angles. Sometimes my canvas is upside down and the object then rendered when the canvas is righted becomes an object of contention with its neighbor.”217

To orchestrate this cacophony of viewpoints, distances, lighting effects, and atmospheric conditions, Albright produced a diagram, which helped to systematically map out compositions and processes. In addition to visual notes, Albright wrote about the meaning of the project. This intimate writing often reveals enthusiasm, passion, disillusionment, and annoyance with the massive project. On June 14, 1945, when everything was set in his composition, he wrote:

 

“Now to think - this window represents me. I am the window no more or less. What I am I give... I wish to obtain movement. I wish to take different positions of the same object and relate them into one organic whole which [sic] will reflect its different positioned aspects in spite of operating as an intrinsic whole... I am not interested in obtaining the reaction of one moment but of a continual passage of time. I desire a sense of emotions of passions and work together in the canvas. I want it to posses a segment of color - space, time, and emotion to have life - not dead but alive.”218

 

Because of the enormity of the preparations involved in arranging his setup, it wasn’t until February 1945, some two and one half years later, Albright began to compose his under-drawing, working directly on the canvas using charcoal he had manufactured with Malvin.219 Albright’s detailed drawing required about eighteen months of work, done intermittently between 1945 and 1948 due to occasional interruptions.220

In the summer of 1950, The Window was featured in an article that was a part of an ongoing series in Art News showcasing the working methods of various artists. Since Albright’s methods were so time consuming, author Marilyn Robb discussed how the project had developed, concentrating on the
individual props, total stage setup, lighting concerns, philosophy and the under-drawing. This charcoal “sketch” on primed canvas especially impressed Robb:

“Although Albright says ‘there is no point in going too far in the drawing,’ he goes further than any other artist since Seurat and one of the most elaborate drawings of the twentieth century is being lost in the painting.”221

This characterization was appropriate. Albright truly felt he was competing with his own past, if not the weight of history. In a February 1952 notebook entry he wrote:

 

“Make the painting more accurate and more accurate until Door looks crude and unfinished. Get feeling in as well as accuracy. Work hard and harder and harder and then harder still. Let the best you can do be but the beginning of accuracy and go on and on beyond what you think you can do or what you think is possible. Have no limit to achievement, no end to goal. No fulfillment in further fulfillment.”222

In the 1950 article Albright referred to his props as “philosophical toys,”223 yet didn’t elaborate on the meaning of anything in the picture. He also didn’t reveal the personal connection he had to many of them. Instead, he told Robb:

“Two compositional considerations guided the... choice of objects – each must contribute to ‘the opening look of reaching back into space’; each must serve as a foil to the texture of the other.”224

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In a later article, which revealed much about Albright’s relationship to his models and the objects in his still life, painting it was reported:

“Each of the old bricks in The Window was carefully selected from a brick pile in Aurora; the baby’s shoe next to the whiskey flask was found on an ash heap in Warrenville, the ‘buckeye with a hole’ [the painting on the back wall] was discovered in Geneva, the mirror came from Maxwell Street, and the costumes and corset belonged to his mother.”225

 

Suggesting the image of Joseph Cornell, rather than a leading “magic realist” painter, the same author wrote, “For The Window he has collected drawers full of pieces of broken glass, moss, wasp’s nests, bird’s eggs – he knows where they will fit in and why he needs them.”226 Indeed, the very act of constructing a stage setup with its own implied narrative, great physical power and provocative meaning connects Albright with a tradition of assemblage. It can be argued Albright anticipated installations that were popularized in the 1960s by nearly twenty years. Especially compelling is the parallel with Edward Kienholz, with whom Albright not only shared building methods but also similar philosophies and content.227 Kienholz declared, “all the little tragedies are evident in junk.”228

Similarly, Albright’s own statements, “things are nothing… it’s what’s happened to them that matters,”229 or “you want to pick something that looks as though its lived its life,”230 surely reveals a focus on the “object” that is every bit as poignant as anything produced by assemblage artists in the 1960s. Even George Segal’s frequent use of the window or a figure before/inside of a window in the early 1960s suggests that he too had more than a passing familiarity with Albright’s work.

Albright’s setups, generally viewed as evidence of his eccentric and meticulous working methods, have not been considered as art. Albright’s attitude toward this was ambiguous, although he considered his setups to be very important and held on to their component parts for decades after they served their apparent purpose. In 1964, as part of his first retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago the artist installed his setups for both The Door and The Window adjacent to the finished paintings. For The Window he worked with an electrician to place a lighting system within the tableau that ran on a timer illuminating specific details of the setup at different intervals.231

A profound contemporary analogy to The Window is Marcel Duchamp’s (1887-1968) Etant Donnes (1946-66, Philadelphia Museum of Art), which would place the least fashionable artist of the twentieth century with the most fashionable. The Window has an uncanny – or perhaps not so innocent – parallel with Duchamp’s work which was supposedly a secret to all but two or three persons people in the world until October of 1968.232 Duchamp concealed the work from the entire world during the period he worked on it between 1946 to 1966. He encouraged the myth he had given up artistic activity to play chess.

Duchamp’s work shares a nearly identical date range to Albright’s The Window. Like The Window, Etant Donnes required the assemblage of a tableau, including a contrived background and interior, the construction of a brick wall, whose bricks Duchamp selected from a demolition site near his Greenwich Village studio. Each work was made with the aim that viewers be intimately involved in optical effects, their act of looking playing a crucial role in the meaning of the exhibited product.233

In 1968, Marcel Duchamp curated an exhibition in 1968 entitled “Doors” at the Cordier and Eckstrom Gallery in New York for which he wanted to borrow Albright’s famous painting of 1931-41.234 The Art Institute of Chicago refused to loan The Door, but as Albright wrote to Earle Ludgin:

 

“I happened to be [in] N.Y. at Sidney Janis [‘s gallery]. Eckstrom was on the phone and said Duchamp wanted my door very much for the Cordier [&] Eckstrom exhibition. They had tried to borrow the painting Door from the Art Institute & had met a refusal - so I suggested the original wooden door - so I became according to Sidney Janis, the grandfather of pop art. That clears that up.”235

Certainly, these are issues that demand a reassessment of Albright’s significance. Furthermore, in December of 1951, when Jean Dubuffet (1901-85) visited Chicago to deliver his famous “Anticultural Positions” lecture at the Arts Club, it wasn’t the city’s young artists he wanted to meet, rather, it was the painter of That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do. Most likely, Katharine Kuh and Daniel Catton Rich arranged a trip to Albright’s studio for Dubuffet. According to Katharine Kuh, Dubuffet considered Albright America’s greatest living artist.236 “He thought his work was like mine... I gave him a whole set of photographs of my work which he wanted,” Albright recalled.237 Dubuffet contributed an oft cited and often reprinted forward to Albright’s 1964 retrospective catalogue. It was a fine and affectionate endorsement by a leading post-war European artist of an ardently independent American.

Meanwhile, Albright was hard at work on his painting that progressed nicely between 1950 and 1963. In January of 1962, Albright exhibited The Window one last time before he ceased work on it. The sixty-fifth annual American exhibition at the Art Institute was an apt locale as the work shared exhibit space with Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, Kenneth Noland, Richard Hunt and Joan Mitchell, (whose painting was reproduced in the catalogue adjacent to The Window). Albright once quipped, “I get into both abstract and realistic shows because I am abstract.”238

The debut of The Window in its present state was made in September 1963 at the Dunn International exhibit in New Brunswick, where it was awarded a $5,000 prize. A selection committee consisting of organizer, John Richardson, Sir Kenneth Clark, Sir Anthony Blunt, Alfred Barr Jr. and Gordon Washburn attempted to show the current condition of the contemporary art world in 1963 by exhibiting the “hundred best living artists.”239 As Richardson explained to Albright’s friend and collector, Earle Ludgin, in an appeal for a loan from his collection:

“Mr. Alfred Barr is particularly anxious that a painting by Ivan Le Lorraine Albright should be included. So am I, as Albright strikes me as being one of the strongest, most personal and most American of American artists, and he is very little known over here. As you well know, Albright’s output is very small, and so there is no question of getting a recent work.”240

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Ludgin passed on the request to Albright, who responded by sending his most recent work, The Window. Ludgin said that Richardson, as Ludgin put it, was so astonished and ecstatic, “The man is dancing in the street.”241 As Richardson told Ludgin:

“You refer to your astonishment: mine is even greater. I would never have dared to ask Albright for what is, unquestionably, his masterpiece. When I was in Chicago three years ago, I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Albright and seeing this ‘work in progress’. It struck me as being one of the most remarkable paintings of the century.”242

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During the 1950s, Albright created several still life paintings with Western themes while on trips to his ranch in Wyoming where he kept a studio. The earliest indication he had been working on such paintings was Roaring Fork, Wyoming (location unknown; 1948). As mentioned previously, several of Albright’s paintings push verisimilitude to such an obsessive or paranoiac extreme they become, paradoxically, abstract. The Window bears such qualities, but Albright pushed beyond all limits in a gouache painted between 1959 and 1965 called The Rustlers. Its subject is a collection of found objects, accumulated at the Wyoming ranch. One can read it as a response or challenge to Jackson Pollock and others who eclipsed Albright at mid-century as representatives of American art. In a review written in 1953, Albright referred to these artists scathingly as the, “hollow,” self-important “drip and dip linoleum boys, popularly known as the New York school.”243 At the same time, one finds it is difficult to look at these works without thinking of the trompe l’oeil paintings of Albright’s friend, Aaron Bohrod (1907-1992), in particular, a work like The Great West (c.1971), which deals with the same iconography on a smaller, less complex scale.244 In many of his own works Bohrod seemed to be competing directly with Albright and even did a portrait of the older artist.

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Although this shift in iconography and Albright’s repeated use of such symbols of American expansionism were explained away as that which he had at hand in Wyoming, one wonders how they reflect his stance during the Cold War, possibly a window into his politics or a defense of his position as a radical yet wholly American painter. Friendships during this period with Senator William Benton and Adlai Stevenson are among those aspects of Albright’s life that will have to wait to be explored in a full length, in-depth biography.245

The fifties were not completely about still-life painting for Albright. He reluctantly accepted his first and only portrait commission late in 1954. Art patron Mary Lasker Block (1904-84) who was the wife of steel millionaire Leigh Block, posed as often as five times a week for over two years.246 Albright posed Mrs. Block with the back of the brick wall and window of his setup for The Window. Although he alluded to the folly of materialism and excess in the portrait - thus undermining the power relationship in a commission, it is significant that Mary Mrs. Block inhabits the interior space of Albright’s window - as if she were captured within his realm. The fiery red edges of the curtains flanking Mrs. Block evoke visions of an earthly purgatory, or allude to a fate held for the vain and greedy. Whether Albright deliberately infused the portrait with such meaning, it works wonderfully and places the work in lineage with traditional vanitas portraits. The painting is a spectacular ensemble of textures, from the velvet-brocade dress, to lace curtains, from leather gloves, to a heavy jeweled pendant and pearl bracelet. Each prop, in its precision, seems magnified and perfectly realized, at once dazzling and mummified, like the richly costumed, coolly regal images of Renaissance nobility by Agnolo Bronzino or Hans Holbein. As hard as her polished nails Block stares with a great chilling intensity as if hypnotized, or casting her own spell. She bravely gave herself up to Albright’s vision, although he admitted to having incorporated some of her reality into his art as well:

“I asked her to bring me her nail polish and I copied that on[to] my palette... Also I asked her for her lipstick. She wore a kind of cerise purple blue… I did the same for that...her face powder; I copied it identically. It was rather ghastly in a way; it looks so close [to how she looked] that it’s kind of scary.”247

Though a commission, Albright considered this one of his most effective paintings, probably due to the combination of finely crafted material detail and moral overtones. On viewing the portrait, a psychiatrist who had known the sitter nearly all his life told Albright, “You know more about Mary Block than I do.”248

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In 1964 the Art Institute of Chicago honored Albright with a retrospective, which then traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art the following year. It was a grand Illinois send off as well because the Albrights were about to leave for Woodstock, Vermont, where they moved permanently in 1965. Despite this move, Albright’s presence in Illinois remained strong, and his connection to Chicago was direct. He exhibited in the sixty-ninth Chicago and Vicinity exhibition in 1966 although his official residence was by now Vermont. Albright received a number of honorary doctorates and other awards from colleges and universities late in life. Among the institutions who honored him were the: National Institute of Arts and Letters (1957), Mundelein College (1969), Lake Forest College (1972), Columbia College, Chicago (1974), School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1977) and Dartmouth College (1977). Albright had long planned to present the core of his work to the Art Institute of Chicago and in 1977 he made the gift official. Later, the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College would receive hundreds of travel sketches and other works.

As mentioned previously, the Albright family traveled a great deal during the first part of the century. Adam, Ivan and Malvin frequently painted on such trips and many of Ivan’s watercolors and experiments with mixed media come from these excursions. Maine in particular excited the Albrights’ pens and brushes. During the 1930s they vacationed in Maine, where seascapes and landscapes, even detailed still life works depicting the produce and trade tools of the region, were immortalized by Ivan.249 Such colorful and spontaneous works, not often associated with his artistic persona, were well received by critics and the public. For instance, in 1940 Albright won the Philadelphia Water Color Prize at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts annual for Ah God, Herrings, Buoys, The Glittering Sea (1940; Art Institute of Chicago). The piece was the first Albright work to be purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago. Director Daniel Catton Rich said at the time of the purchase: “I consider Ivan Albright one of the most original artists in America today. His vision is extraordinary as his technique.”250 After his marriage to Josephine in 1946, Albright had intensified his travel experiences, and they literally traveled all over the globe. including Russia, China, Japan, Iran, Greece, Kenya, Alaska and England; there were few places the Albrights didn’t see between 1946 and 1983. Albright worked in all of these places. It is possible his varied experiences of geography and terrain sparked a greater interest in landscape later in life. Although he had worked on some plein-air paintings in watercolor early in his career, he had stated
to one interviewer:

“You can’t represent [landscape]. Actually one place is just as good as another for me. Traveling around the world wouldn’t move me any more than sitting right here in my studio. It’s the meaning that you bring to your painting that’s important. Nature herself can only go as far as your mind can bring it.”251

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Albright’s necessarily small and spontaneous travel sketches are some of the most fascinating of his career. There are few pure landscape oils in Albright’s oeuvre but he reserved landscape for some of his most daring experiments in expressionism late in life.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Albright also painted on family property in Georgia. There he produced one small figural piece, at least two self-portraits, in 1967-68 and in 1971, but mostly occupied himself with the Georgia landscape, particularly swamps. In these works, Albright was interested in capturing the motion of a body through the landscape, a concern that became an obsession as he literally made maps of the areas he was attempting to paint. A series of metal-point drawings done between 1956 and 1969 explores similar ideas of motion and presence.

The first major work Albright produced in Vermont was, The Vermonter (If Life Were Life There Would Be No Death). His model was a fairly ordinary man, a retired member of the Vermont House of Representatives and maple farmer, Kenneth Atwood.252 Albright began the painting three times. The
image of Atwood was painted on a hardwood panel in 1966 and completed eleven years later. Albright told Katharine Kuh he had selected a model “who has lived and feels as tired as I do.” In light of this, many, including Kuh, supposed the painting was a link to the artist himself.253

Astonishingly, his method for The Vermonter became even more complex than for The Window. He to used three diagrams and filled nine notebooks with writing and smaller diagrams of minute details such as hands or patches of cloth. By painting tiny fragmentary areas of flesh and other materials from multiple angles and viewpoints and using color for psychological effects, he hoped to give the sensation of a growing and trembling figure in a state of transformation, to “give the canvas an opportunity to elieve itself of all of its inhibitions and repressions.”254 Albright’s writing about the work is often quite poetic, and demonstrates the life he tried to evoke in paint:

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“Make eyes literally move, make mouth tremble… left hand act as if it would rise up... make right hand as if it would crawl around stick... Have end of nose literally wiggle... have him as spiritual as I can make him but also all flesh...”255 “Make the painting closer than ever... more real than real so reality seems by comparison as a misty dream, an untruth against a truth...”256 “Make the most human head ever made... eye sockets that tell the years... eyes that bring pity... that have seen better.”257

 

The true and overlooked context of The Vermonter lies with contemporary paintings by Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacommetti (1901-66). Albright admired Giacommetti, but expressed dismay over certain issues of originality he felt lay with the Swiss artist’s well-known tall, gaunt bronze sculptures.258 Nonetheless, Albright and Giacommetti, not to mention Bacon, shared similar views about the role and participation of models in painting, and the transformative experience before them as working through the painter.259 The Vermonter bears close resemblance to images of popes, depicted by artists from Raphael to Velasquez to Francis Bacon, and reinforces Albright’s own claims for the sense of the spiritual in this late work.

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Alongside The Vermonter and into the 1970s, Albright worked again on smaller oils and graphic works, many of which seem to have a relationship to the larger project. Between 1975 and 1977, he produced a series of drawings of young Vermont women, which bear a sensitivity not often seen, perhaps not since his earliest portraits. While in Vermont, he began a relationship with Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, which lasted until his death. From 1969-1974 he was a visiting scholar there and from 1980-1983 visiting artist. Although he didn’t teach during this time, he was accessible to students and had a few exhibitions at the Hood Museum of Art, where The Vermonter was exhibited in progress in 1975.

 

Eye problems had been growing worse for Albright over the years, induced in part by his close scrutiny of colors and their afterimages. In 1977 and 1978 he had successful corneal transplants and felt reborn, returning to his work with joy and verve. Albright seemed ready to explore the outer reaches of his vision, “Everything I have worked [on] or thought about has been almost exclusively been on or about this world. I would now like to think of other worlds and places.”260.

Albright’s late work is marked by an increasing spirituality and, a sense of the mystery he seemed to feel in all things, animate and inanimate. In his notebooks during these years, he wrote a great deal about the interchangeability of matter, the various stages of life, transformation and transcendence, and the definition of life’s boundaries. Among the most explicit manifestations of his interest in spirituality is Albright’s near obsession with the legendary Shroud of Turin, which became the inspiration for several works of art through the 1970s until his death.261

Albright’s notebook entries, relating to a late series of still life works, are concerned with the evocation of motion and spiritual relationships. One must consider the expression of isolation in these writings also represented in his exquisite, small-scale depictions of single apples and potatoes. Albright firmly held a belief that everything, even the most humble, has importance, affecting everything else, near and far.262 The largest of these works, Still Life with Potatoes in Motion (1978-80, private collection) is a most astonishing painting. The work shows strength and invention even as he entered his 80s. He used his earlier work as a median by which to evaluate his latest, which showed a highly fractured and complex vision of whirring onions, potatoes and other objects. In 1979 he wrote:

“I have just looked at the photos of my Door and Window - they are not painted too well and I can beat them both in accuracy and also put in feeling, sympathy, pathos and respect for god. I can beat them mightily and I intend to. They are inferior works and I can make them third class paintings.”263

In exhaustive notes, Albright wrote about other worlds and the possibility that light, time, motion, shadow and form itself are limiting conceptions, and as understood from our present assumptions may not mean anything elsewhere in the universe. The ultimate subjective conclusion from a constantly searching, questioning artist, Albright’s own words from a notebook, perhaps capture the spirit of this work best and emanate the intensity, joy and passion of painting during his final years:

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“October 28, 1979... Saucer, little potatoes all in slow motion... The direction of all objects must include several inches above setup. The haze, the glow of all objects, the dust, the dirt, the potatoes, the porcelain butter saucers, are all moving together as a whirling unit, like a galaxy across my vision – bigger and smaller – the same objects grow dazzling, and subdued grows the light around them. Paint the dancing sun beams – in this case shadow beams – all is a unit – all is one... The bit of universe is repeating itself and moving in a circle... the universe within your studio walls... Study it, penetrate it... painting it as a ball of motion. Everything is included in it. Its motion includes time, also life and death. In its movement it’s on its way to eternity.”264

Throughout his life Albright had painted many important and meaningful self-portraits, the first in 1933. But in his eighties, prompted by an invitation to create one such image for the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy, Albright embarked upon a profound dialogue with his own character, resulting in twenty-five self-portraits (1981–83) that are remarkable for the range of emotion they express and the techniques they employ. The series should rightfully be considered one cohesive work of art. His face appears to progress frame by frame, attempting the impression of “real time,” shifting in expression and slowly unveiling the artist’s presence and personality to the viewer. It is as if his vision was could no longer be contained in a single image, many stream in procession bearing a bit of the whole. As if aware of the little time he had left, he wrote, “The amount of life I can put through my eyes is the amount I can see.”265 Indeed, Albright concentrated on his eyes in many of the portrayals, holding as much as possible onto the visual world of flesh and objects, which for so long he had rendered in transformative spiritual terms.