Clip & save art notes - discussion of Ivan Albright's Into the Wolrd There Came a Soul Called Ida

Arts & Activities, Dec, 2002 by Guy Hubbard

Ivan Albright (American; 1897-1983). Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida, 1929-30. Oil on canvas; 142.9 x 119.2 cm. Gift of Ivan Albright, 1977.34, image [c]Art Institute of Chicago.

ABOUT THIS PAINTING

Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida is the most popular of Albright's paintings. It is also an excellent example of the way in which most of his pictures were created. He would first ask a person to be a model for a painting. He would also prepare elaborate arrangements of objects to surround the figure and complete the composition of the picture. Choosing and arranging these supporting objects might take weeks before Albright was satisfied. And, the model might sit repeatedly for him over a period of many months before the painting was finished.

Whenever Albright began a picture, he would carefully draw the whole composition on prepared canvas using charcoal. This step might take him several months to complete; and only when he was satisfied with it would he be willing to begin using paint. When he painted over the charcoal drawing he did so with extreme care and deliberateness only covering a 1/2-square-inch in any five-hour working day. And, once painted, he never retouched or corrected any part of it.

Each object in a painting would require a new palette of colors, but because he painted such small areas each day, the paint quantities were extremely small. At the end of each day's work he would put small pins on the model in the area where he would continue painting the next morning and white specks on the canvas where he would be painting.

Because Ivan Albright was greatly attracted by the great painters of Northern Europe, he tried to emulate their working habits in every way possible. For example, instead of using oil paints available in stores, he ground his own colors. He then mixed them with poppy-seed oil, rather than the more commonly used linseed oil. The result was that the thinly painted surfaces seem to glow, almost like oil-stained water--and very much like the art of early masters of oil painting who worked in Holland, Flanders and Germany, such as Martin Schongauer, Quentin Massys and Hieronymus Bosch. He also used hundreds of brushes, some of which--because of his obsession with detail--consisted of a single hair. He was also scornful of the use of varnish, which is a quick way for artists to make the surface shine and also to protect it.

Albright's approach to painting was unique and so were his interpretations of his subjects and the objects surrounding them. He transformed whatever he saw in front of him into something quite different on canvas. He painted people and objects to suit his own thoughts and sometimes he altered them into what he wanted them to be. But he never put on canvas what he saw in front of him. His models and the objects surrounding them were there only as a point of departure for his own ideas. Nothing in his pictures was left to chance. He once wrote that "Things are nothing. It's what happens to them that matters."

Not surprisingly, therefore, when we look at this finished painting, we do not see an image of Albright's 19-year-old model, who was a pleasant, young, married woman and mother named Ida Rogers. The artist transformed her into a woman of late middle age, sadly inspecting her reflection in a mirror and mourning the loss of her youthful good looks. This message lay very much at the heart of Ivan Albright's paintings, as it did in the work of early Dutch artists where subjects often focused on the shortness of life of all kinds--people, fruit and flowers. He was very much aware of the inevitability of decay and death as a part of life, an idea that Dutch artists called "Vanitas." He tried to convey these deep feelings through this and other paintings.

In this painting, Albright presents viewers with an image of the inevitability of aging and death. It appears most prominently in the figure of Ida. Not only is her face ravaged by advancing age, the rest of her body shows similar signs of decay. Even her clothes are worn and old. She tries in vain to reverse what is happening through the use of face powder and a powder puff, but with the knowledge that nothing can be done. Ida is also surrounded by other objects that carry the same message as her body. The flowers in the vase on the dressing table, for example, are dying. The burning cigarette and the crumpled dollar bills are other examples of things that are fleeting, as are strands of hair that have been pulled out as a result of combing. Despite the overall sadness in the message of this painting, Albright seems to give Ida the strength to continue with life and a refusal to give up.

Among American painters, Albright is probably best linked with the Ashcan School of painters who worked in New York City at the beginning of the 20th century. In their work, they acknowledged the grimness of life for large numbers of people but also their perseverance to continue, regardless of the obstacles they faced.