November 18, 1983

Ivan Albright (February 20, 1897 to November 18, 1983) was a painter with a unique, cartoonish, style. Others have described him differently, rather as "A Master of the Flesh and Painter of the Soul."

This feline portrait is an example of the work of Ivan Albright.




We quote another source, which also treats Albright as a serious artist:

'Ivan Albright represents a deeply transcendent, even Platonic, idea of the soul, although one could be forgiven for missing it among the mercilessly unglamorous bodies of his figures....

'Albright arrived at his obsession with ugliness through a series of rejections. The first of these was a turning-away from the aesthetic of his father, the minor, late impressionist Adam Emory Albright, whose favorite subjects were children, and whose palette tended toward pastels. An unkind critic would describe the elder Albright’s work as Eakins made pretty — too pretty to hold much interest, other than as décor for the front parlor of a prosperous Chicago merchant who’d once been to Paris to see the Renoirs. As a boy, Ivan Albright modeled for some of his father’s paintings featuring young lads in straw hats gazing into the shimmering water or clutching sheaves of wheat....

'Yet rejecting his father’s aesthetic did not lead him to embrace the alternative artistic paradigms in the 1920s and 1930s: when he paints workers, for example, there is nothing of the burly nobility of Socialist Realism. His 1927 painting “The Lineman” depicts a worker more slouched and tired than grotesque, but when it was printed on the cover of the trade magazine Electric Light & Power, it provoked an angry backlash from readers who, regardless of their politics, would clearly have preferred the healthy, clear-eyed proletarians painted under the direction of the Soviet cultural commissars.
....
'[A]t this point it’s still hard to see what makes ...[Albright's] a spiritual aesthetic....

'[But all...] this changes with “I Walk To and Fro through Civilization and I Talk as I Walk (Follow Me, the Monk)” (1926-27). In this image of a cowled monk, lit from behind with an auratic glow and seeming to hover ever-so-slightly above the ground, I can feel the influence of El Greco and Zurbarán. A small plant on a windowsill looks none too healthy, and the monk’s face, gaze downcast, shows the inevitable corruption of the flesh by time, but the implication is clear: there is another, better world to which our souls yearn to return. Far in the background and obscured by shadows, a staircase spirals upward, pointing the direction from which we have fallen and to which we should aspire.
....
'Albright’s obsessiveness contributed to his relative obscurity as a painter: he was reluctant to let any painting go, and priced them far above the market in order to deter buyers (he married into the Medill Paterson newspaper fortune, which rested on the ownership of such papers as The Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News)..... Albright’s neo-Platonic — or even gnostic — message [is] that our true home is a distant spiritual otherworld....'

Whatever.