U. S. ART: ALBRIGHT

Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida is perhaps Painter Ivan Le Lorraine Albright's most monumental work. It has been shocking the staid since its first appearance eleven years ago. One Chicago critic saw the picture and headlined his review: "Horror Features Exhibit." The detailed enormity of Ida, with her fat, sagging, varicose-veined and slightly lavender flesh, is Albright's hallmark. Merry-minded artist of ultra-gloomy pictures, Ivan Albright of Warrenville, Ill. increased his reputation with one of last season's most shuddered-at paintings. That Which I Should Have Done, I Did Not Do. The picture Albright did do occupied him for ten years, won a $500 prize at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Temple Gold Medal at Pittsburgh's Carnegie. It is an intricate, super-exact picture of a moldering mortuary door, and show's one touch of life--a woman's gnarled, bejeweled hand. The girl model for the hand posed every Sunday for a year. "She had a wonderful leg," quips Ivan of that which does not appear in the picture at all. The model for the funeral wreath had to be renewed about five times in the course of the work because the wax flowers drooped every couple of years.

Artist Albright is not only a painstaking artist; he is also one of the most original painters the U. S. has produced. A "literary" artist, as his titles show, he owes little to any modern school of painting, more to the macabre spirit of Poe, the methodical realism of Dreiser.

He was one of twins born to Adam Emory Albright in 1897. Adam painted pictures as cheerful and innocent as Ivan's are gruesome. Adam named Ivan after the great landscape painter, Claude Lorraine, twin Malvin Marr after Carl Marr. Brother Lisle Murillo went into business, but Ivan and Malvin, used as models for the senior Albright's sentimental pictures of childhood, reacted by staying with art in a grim way.

All three live happily in Warrenville, where streets are named after them, not because of their renown as painters, but because Albright senior's real-estate ventures turned out O.K. In 1928 they bought an abandoned frame Methodist church where many of Ivan's shockers were created while Father Albright's portraits of children looked serenely on.

Of Ida's unprepossessing complexion, Ivan has said: "I don't know why I painted her that way --except that she looked as though she would get varicose veins later on." Nobody but Albright has ever commissioned Albright to do a portrait. "I just paint myself," he says, "and then I don't have to cut out the wrinkles" (see cut).

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