A journey from technical medicine painter to the painter: Who is Ivan Le Lorraine Albright?

US painter. He interpreted images from life with a nationalist perspective. He was born on February 20, 1897, in New Harvey, Illinois. His father was a portrait painter. Before World War I, he studied architecture at Northwestern and Illinois universities. Apart from that, he was busy with painting. During the war, he worked as a technical medical draftsman in Nantes (France). The precise, detailed drawings required by this work were reflected in his later style.

Ivan Le Lorraine Albright (February 20, 1897 – November 18, 1983) was an American painter, sculptor and print-maker most renowned for his self-portraits, character studies, and still lifes. Due to his technique and dark subject matter, he is often categorized among the Magic Realists and is sometimes referred to as the "master of the macabre".

After the war, he worked on painting at the Art Institute of Chicago for four years. Then, he continued his education for about a year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design in New York. He settled near Chicago in 1927 and focused entirely on painting. During this period, the wealth of his family allowed him to maintain a long and meticulous style of work. He opened his first solo exhibition in Chicago in 1930. Chicago Art in 1964. He had two retrospective exhibitions at the Institute, and a year later at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Objects and human figures in Albright's works are rendered with precision down to the finest details. A realism that can be said to have reached its limits appears in harmony both in the individual elements and in the whole of his painting. He has displayed the wear and tear of time in a highly personalized style, creating a dramatic effect.

Into the World Came a Soul Called Ida, completed in 1930, is a portrait of an aging prostitute looking in the mirror.

In his work The Picture of Dorian Gray, he portrayed the hero of this novel at the end of his decadent life. He reflected the destructive effects of time in the objects he included in his paintings. In That Which I Should Have Done, I Did Not Do, one of his most important works, which he realized a work of ten years, a woman holding a handkerchief shows her hand with a dilapidated door on which a wreath was hung.

Although it has been suggested that Albright should be considered a Surrealist because of these features and atmosphere in his painting, it cannot be said that he has much in common with this movement. His personal style should be regarded as a typical and prominent example of the understanding that interprets images from life with a nationalist perspective in the USA.

In 20th-century US painting, where European influences and tendencies to establish a national tradition still did not reconcile, social realism gained importance around 1930 when the great economic depression was experienced. At a time when the focus of social life began to shift from towns to large, vibrant cities, Albright's paintings reflecting obsolescence, collapse, and death, with intensity and a bit of nostalgia for the past, are considered an original embodiment of this social realism.

WORKS:

God Created Man in His Own Image, 1929-1930,

Into the World Came a Soul Called Ida, 1930,

The Dead Doll, 1931-1932,

That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do, 1931-1941,

The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1943-1944,

Portrait of Mary Block, 1956

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Ivan Albright: List of works

https://www.wikiart.org/en/ivan-albright/all-works#!#filterName:all-paintings-chronologically,resultType:masonry