Art: Lavender & Old Bottles

Chicago art lovers, startled by Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida, fascinated by prize-winning That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do, were proud when the Chicago Art Institute this week announced that it had bought, for Chicago’s very own, Ah God—Herrings, Buoys, The Glittering Sea.

“Ida,” “That Which,” “Ah God” are all painted by cheerful little grey-haired Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, who works happily in the husk of an abandoned Methodist Church in Warrenville, Ill., an hour’s drive outside Chicago. All three pictures have a microscopic detail that is more real than real life, a funereal rose and lavender cast, all are of subjects which look worn and battered by eternity.

Ivan Albright calls himself a super-realist, says of surrealism: “I don’t like tags. Surrealism means 1941—and a New Year is just around the corner.” Some pictures, such as the wreath on a mortuary door, which he calls “That Which,” take him as long as ten years to finish. The mortuary door last month won a $500 prize at the Institute (TIME, Nov. 3), in 1938 came in third in the Carnegie International’s popularity contest. It’s an eight-foot picture of a decayed and time-cracked surface, on which detail swarms like ants, with an ancient-looking, heavily jeweled hand caressing the battered molding.

“Ida,” a bluish portrait of a massive, flabby, seminude, varicose-veined prostitute primping herself before a tumbledown Victorian table with a crumpled dol lar bill on it, caused a storm of protest several years ago when it was exhibited. But art connoisseurs had to admit that its lugubrious, shadowy surfaces, which shone like crushed tinfoil, were unparalleled in modern painting.

“Ah God,” the watercolor Chicago bought this week, was comparatively mild, for an Albright: a clutter of old bottles, dead fish, seaweed and barnacle-encrusted driftwood on a table overlooking a harbor.

During World War I Painter Albright sneaked into military hospitals in France, made methodical, painstakingly realistic sketches of wounds. The medical corps, struck with the accuracy of his anatomical paintings, requested a complete set for its permanent files.

Back in the U.S. after the war, Ivan Albright set up his studio in Warrenville with his artist father, Adam, now 79 (who founded the family fortune in real estate), and his twin brother Balvin (who prefers the name Zsissly, so he will come last in catalogs). There Ivan started developing the macabre, superphotographic style that has made him one of the most original figures in U.S. art. Because his portraits looked as though their subjects had been removed from newly opened graves, nobody gave him commissions. So Painter Albright painted himself. One of his self-portraits, an imaginative picture of a dour, wrinkled man sitting by a table with a still-life arrangement on it, was bought by Chicago’s Adman Earle Ludgin, most enthusiastic individual Albright collector in the U.S.

Many a museum has bought his paintings, but no other collectors. One reason is the fabulous prices Ivan Albright asks for them: as much as $30,000 for his biggest works. Independent Artist Albright, already well off on the proceeds of the Albright family real-estate business in Warrenville, really doesn’t care very much whether people buy his paintings or not. He raised his prices exactly 41% when President Roosevelt devalued the dollar, still sells his work on the gold standard.