Grandeur in Decay

Perhaps only a city that grew up around a stockyard could appreciate the art of Ivan Albright, now 67. And last week there it all was, 60 works in Chicago's Art Institute, in a fantasia of wattles, dewlaps and varicose veins, the lifetime work of Chicago's painter laureate. It is an exhibition for strong stomachs. Limbs were blotched and misshapen, rolls of flesh sagged swollen and pocked. In the background of the paintings were tumbles of battered objects, microscopically detailed, and all in ripe decay. Presiding over this exhumation was the master himself, smooth jowled, red cheeked and full of protesting innocence. "What I am really trying to do is to make a coherent statement about life," he said, "one that will force people to meditate a bit. I want to jar the observer into thinking, to make him uncomfortable. But I am not telling him what to think."

Fish from the Freezer. Uncomfortable the viewers most certainly were. Albright, who was tapped by Hollywood to portray Dorian Gray in his penultimate desuetude, collects adjectives like "loathsome," "gruesome," "morbid," "putrescent" and "repulsive" the way other painters collect gold medals. But, he protests, "in any part of life you find something either growing or disintegrating. Let's say I'm equally interested in growth and decay."

Albright, who got his start as a medical illustrator in a World War I base hospital, assembles his painting props with all the care of a pathologist preparing for an autopsy. For one painting, titled Poor Room--There Is No Time, No End, No Today, No Tomorrow,

Only the Forever, and Forever and Forever Without End, on which he has worked for 21 years, he selected each brick from a yard in Aurora, added a baby shoe lovingly plucked from an ash heap in Warrenville, and topped it off with a corset that belonged to his mother. One still life required him to keep fish in the freezer for three months, taking them out for three hours a day. "As soon as they began to thaw, I would stick them back in the freezer," he explains. Title of this work? Ah God, Herrings, Buoys, the Glittering Sea. Why? Confesses Albright brightly, "It sounded better than A Bunch of Fish."

Controlled Chaos. Albright also insists that live models be present while he paints. Among them have been a Mexican-Indian fisherman, a union leader and onetime bootlegger, an 81-year-old Rosicrucian monk, and Mary Lasker Block, the wife of a vice president of Inland Steel.

And yet for all the meticulous care Albright takes (he once painted Lincoln's portrait on each penny in a painting), he is far from being a mere copyist. "Everything in the canvas is fighting," he points out of Poor Room, etc. "Some objects are falling, others are rising, others are spiraling in a kind of controlled chaos. I compose in motion. I wish to create tension and conflict." Nor, after the first shock has passed, are his models bereft of their own kind of grandeur. Decay, once faced, gradually loses its morbid horror. Albright seems more the dedicated diamond cutter who positions his gem, then splits it into perfect fragments of glitter and decay. Albright's real goal is thus to make the viewer feel the precise sense of death implicit in life, and that split second when both are terribly real.

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