Imaginarium Online, Features

A Picture of Ivan Albright
Piercing Beneath the Surface

By Mike Hertenstein

Hurd Hatfield (note autograph) as Dorian Gray, checks in on his corrupt portrait -- in reality, an Ivan Albright original. From The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945, MGM).

To celebrate the 1997 centenary of painter Ivan Albright, the Art Institute of Chicago put together an exhibition of his work, and hosted a screening of a film in which he painted the title prop. The exhibition brought together a huge number of Albright's paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures, along with assemblages of the elaborate set-ups and props the artist used for several of his works, and a display of his sketchbooks and journals. The screening of the film, the 1945 The Picture of Dorian Gray (directed by Albert Lewin), was a gala event held in the Art Institute's Film Center. The author of the story from which the film was made, Oscar Wilde, who loved gala events -- as long as he could make himself the center of attention -- would have been scandalized if he could known how little his own name was mentioned at this one. Instead, the limelight was understandably focussed on Albright -- a School of the Art Institute alumnus (he died in 1983). That is to say, the limelight was focussed on Ivan Albright until a special guest -- one, like Wilde, quite comfortable in the spotlight -- managed to steal it from the unassuming painter.

The Film Center is on the school side, as opposed to the gallery side, of the Art Institute complex. It was in this medium-sized theater that, as a part of the Albright retrospective, a movie some might recall as just another "Creature Feature" (though it is much better than that) came to be screened for a preposterously well-dressed audience. With that ironic contrast hovering in the background like an uninvited guest, the crowd (which included myself, though not so preposterously well- dressed) was soon treated to another, this time on the screen. Pretty, young Angela Landsbury appeared early in the story, in only her third film role, one for which she was to receive an Academy Award nomination. The contrast -- in not just my mind, I'm sure -- of this surprising screen image of Ms. Lansbury with the more recent mental image of her as the pudgy widowed sleuth on television's Murder She Wrote served to powerfully underscore a central theme of story we were being told: the transience of human beauty, and the magical capacity for preserving those fleeting moments of art.

In this particular case, innocence and youth are even more fleeting than usual as the Lansbury character is quickly despoiled and driven to an early grave by that evil seducer, Dorian Gray. Of course, this notorious despoiler in due time meets his own tragic fate. For those who don't know the story, Oscar Wilde's 1891 novel, The Picture Dorian Gray, tells the tale of a handsome youth who wishes his painted likeness would grow old while he remains eternally young; the wish is granted, and the painting bears the marks not just of Dorian's age, but also of his sins. Hounded by those sins to his end, Dorian Gray finally lashes out against what has become a hideous reflection -- and the portrait, stabbed by Dorian's knife, suddenly reverts to the original pristine visage of his own youth and innocence. Simultaneously, the flesh-and-blood Dorian takes on all the scars and stains of his wicked life in a single moment: Dorian falls dead on the floor, his face now an image of corruption which has long been the state of his soul.

The painting in the film which represented Dorian's soul at its most corrupt was, of course, the one Ivan Albright was hired to paint -- for reasons we'll get into in a moment. For now, imagine the terrible moment in the film when the corrupt and aged visage of the painted Dorian is suddenly transferred from the enchanted picture to the living Dorian, thereby causing him instantly to stop living. Shockingly decayed and lifeless, Dorian flops to the floor. There is weeping. Solomn words are spoken over the scene as a moral to the story. Finally, the closing credits roll.

And while the credits rolled, the well-dressed audience in the Film Center applauded furiously -- as if they'd just finished a stunning new "director's cut" by Kurasawa or Bertolucci. The lights came up, and while our squinting eyes were just focussing on the stage, who should walk onto that stage, but the gala evening's Special Guest: Hurd Hatfield, the actor who had played Dorian Gray in this very film.

Mr. Hatfield's sudden appearance in this way was utterly breathtaking -- though mostly, I'm sure, in an unintended way. For he was not the young, handsome Hurd Hatfield who had played young, handsome Dorian Gray in 1945. He was a seventy-something year old man who -- to be brutally frank -- looked more like the aged and decayed Dorian Gray who'd just dropped dramatically dead. True, Mr. Hatfield's face was not nearly so degenerated-looking as he'd been made-up to look a half-century earlier. Nevertheless, the effect of his sudden appearance as an old man so soon after watching his onscreen transformation was astonishing: life had imitated art in a cruelly unexpected way. It would have been less of a shock if Hurd Hatfield had come out from behind that curtain looking just as he did in 1945.

Fortunately, the extremely well-dressed Film Center audience was also, apparently, extremely well-brought-up, for nobody I could see -- and while I may be wrong I'm fairly certain I was not the only one who was apalled at the gross visual pun being committed onstage before us -- let anything appear on their faces but adulation and good will. ("In matters of grave importance," we are reminded by Oscar Wilde, "style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.")

Whether or not he would have committed the faux paus of showing his feelings on his face, Ivan Albright would -- I have no doubt -- have been delighted in this unexpected confirmation of the essential clarity of his vision: for the face of the once-handsome actor showed what had always been there, even fifty years ago -- when only Ivan Albright had had the rare courage to pierce beneath the surface.

"It matters little whether I paint a squash, a striped herring, or a man. The space, the light, the motion, the position have one thing in common -- decay."
-- Ivan Albright

The reason Ivan Albright was the exact right artist to paint the picture of Dorian Gray in 1945 is because, of all things, Albright specialized in corruption. His world is a "crumbling, rotting, grinding world of excrescences" says one observer. His paintings draw "oohs and ahhs" and horrified expressions from gallery visitors, a mix of repulsion of fascination like gapers at an auto wreck. He has been described as "the Poe of painting," though in many ways he is more like that disciple and translator of Edgar Allen Poe, the French Decadent poet Baudelaire, who, too, was drawn inexorably to the subject of inexorable decay:

Packed tight, like hives of maggots, thickly seething,
Within our brains a host of demons surges.
Deep down into our lungs at every breathing,
Death flows, an unseen river, moaning dirges. . .

But while the gapers stop up the traffic in the galleries around Albright's paintings, critics and art historians often pass by quickly without even a glance. But they're only returning the favor to Albright, who ignored contemporary art "isms" and turned aside from the mainstream of art history. He looked back to the Old Masters for his inspiration, though he also considered himself a disciple of Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt. Like Hunt -- like Baudelaire, for that matter -- Albright's work, though concerned -- obsessed? -- with death and mutability, was not the product of a nihilistic materialism, but of an intense spiritual concern; only too aware of the ephemeral nature of human dreams, Albright was oblivious to changing fashions in art, for his vision pierced even the decay to the Eternal.

Ivan Albright and his identical twin brother, Malvin, were born February 20, 1897, in North Harvey, Illinois, just south of Chicago. Their father was Adam Emory Albright, a popular landscape artist, their mother a physician's daughter. In the years following the First World War, the brothers Albright attended the Art Institute of Chicago, and launched twin painting careers -- they continued their education together and shared studios in Philadelphia and New York before returning to their father's studio in 1926. The distinctiveness of Ivan's style emerged immediately.

During World War I, young Ivan had been a medical draftsman at an army hospital, sketching war wounds and getting to know intimately the human underworld beneath what he came to realize was a relatively thin layer of flesh. He always denied that this experience had anything to do with the artist he became, though it's difficult not to make the connection. For Albright's peculiar vision is one which pierces surface illusion to the reality beneath, where -- as he said -- only God, or the artist, can see. What this artist saw was this: the brevity of life, the falseness of our grandiose dreams, and the fleetingness of beauty and youth.

The figures in Albright's paintings could be described as "grotesques" -- bloated creatures hung with wrinkled, mottled flesh, scarred with bumps and bruises and bulbous noses: as if the physician's grandson makes of humanity itself a disease. Those who find it difficult to look even briefly at Albright's work will be even more disturbed to learn that the artist paid meticulous attention to detail, building elaborate props and often taking years to complete a painting.

Something of a writer and poet, Albright gave his paintings long, evocative names: in 1928, he dubbed a painting "Flesh", but continued the title in parenthesis, "Smaller Than Tears Are the Little Blue Flowers." A year later he painted an aging, sagging ballerina whose haunted eyes are clearly staring Albright's vision of human mortality in the face; he titled this work, "There Were No Flowers Tonight (Midnight). Over the next couple years he completed another study of the tragedy of time and lost beauty: "Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida" depicts another moldering Albright figure sitting forelornly at that piece of furniture we have so aptly given the name "vanity".

But strangely enough, all was not vanity of vanities to Ivan Albright. Nor is despair the message or intended effect of his work. If -- as he so desperately urges us to do -- we can get past appearances, we find his vision is powered by a compassion for the frailty of the human condition. We see masses of flesh, yes, but even "Ida" is animated by a "soul", a spiritual principle. Albright's imagery, notes biographer Michael Croydon (who lectured as a part of the exhibition),

. . . seems to spring from nature bound by terrestrial shadow, a nature limited by the inadequacy of its imperfect inhabitants, a macabre, pessimistic world. This macabre quality is precisely why many have "backed off" from his imagery. They have responded instinctively to the gloom but failed miserably to witness the inner illumination that is truly the epicenter of his vision. His assertions of humanism, compassion, faith, and the frailty of personal dignity have often gone unnoticed, and this is perhaps an indictment of our age. Albright is today that rara avis, a man of faith -- a religious painter.

Indeed, Albright filled notebooks with devotional musings; his words are animated by an urgent reverence for nature and humanity, and especially, for God. "Spirit, let they soul reach out into the depths of nature and see the grandeur of God," he wrote in the winter of 1928-1929, Croydon tells us. During the exhibition at the Art Institute, many of Albright's notebooks were on display in cases in the school library. I was struck reading through them by the artist's unexpected Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the glory of each individual. His notes for one painting include the goal to "Let it make the onlooker more Godly."

A year after he painted the picture of Dorian Gray, Ivan Albright married a Chicago newspaper heiress and adopted her two children (one of whom was married to, and so passed along his name, to our present Secretary of State, Madeline Albright). In the mid-Sixties, Albright and his wife moved to New England where, at the age of sixty-eight, he began work on a painting called "The Vermonter (If Life Were Life There Would Be No Death"). According to program from the 1997 Art Institute exhibition, Albright in this work "clearly aimed to make an image that would celebrate the miraculous process of life, in which the body is transformed and finally even transcended by the spirit." And he succeeded: despite the characteristic Albright flesh and decay, there is something vital about this work -- and here is the key -- a vitality which transcends the crumbling bounds of organic matter.

Albright completed "The Vermonter" after twelve years' work, after which he was over eighty and nearly blind. He underwent a pair of successful corneal transplants and experienced a virtual rebirth as an artist, producing a series of self portraits. He also became very interested in the Shroud of Turin -- look for a small copy in his 1976 charcoal work, "Hail to the Pure (Portrait of Chigi Piedra)" in our online exhibition. Albright had never been simply a painter, producing works in ink, pencils, watercolor, among other media, including etchings and sculpture. In fact, he was working on a sculpture based on the face in the Shroud when he died in 1983 at the age of eighty-six.

"I like a cold light -- what some people might call a cruel light -- the kind of light that no actress would want."
-- Ivan Albright

The awkward visual pun brushed aside, Hurd Hatfield regaled the Film Center crowd with one Hollywood story after another, name-dropping his way from the start of his show biz career to what he'd been up to lately. These chatty Tinsel Town reflections were sharply at odds, of course, with the profound meditation upon life and death we'd just seen. There was a sense, I couldn't help but conclude, in which we were witnesses to what you might call "the Dorian Gray phenomenon" in reverse: all the depth and tragedy of human existence seemed to have gone into the celluloid portrait; the real-life Hurd Hatfield seemed shallow, surfacey and, sadly enough, transient indeed (within two years he would be dead.)

Oscar Wilde -- who would have loved all the Hollywood gossip -- knew only too well the vulgar sloppiness of real life as compared to the beauty and purity of art -- which he claimed to prefer. But despite his own Tinsel Town -like veneer, Wilde, it cannot be forgotten, was also the author of Dorian Gray. He lived more deeply than he pretended to, though perhaps not as deep as Ivan Albright, whose penetrating vision could see beyond the festering ugliness of his own paintings to the beauty of reality beneath.

"All that we perceive is a world of surfaces. The real center is never seen. But it is just that which the artist should strive to find and body forth. I try to reach the essential and to give it form -- to express it."