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“If Albright does not flatter others, he does not flatter himself.” From his first known self-portrait in 1931 (replete with smudged flies buzzing around his head) all the way up to his very last piece, a post-stroke etching of his own delicate and trembling eyes, Ivan Le Lorraine Albright represented himself with the same obsessive and macabre honesty that defined the rest of his work. Self-Portrait at 55 East Division Street, no exception to this rule, is actually a lithograph composite of two oil paintings from 1934 (created for the WPA) and ’35 (a commission from advertising executive Earle Ludgin) in which Albright portrays himself as a substantially aged-up dandy sitting down for a postprandial drink. All are carefully calibrated images of effervescence and decay. Albright created nine lithographs between 1938 and 1980 based on his own paintings—some near-replicas, some with embellishment (and a few, including Self-Portrait, that were commissioned by the American Artists Association). Because his modus operandi as a painter involved meticulous layering of minuscule brushstrokes over detailed reference drawings, it’s interesting to note how he translated this excess and abundance into the necessarily two-dimensional lithograph format. Two obvious solutions? Add more objects, and make everything more intricate. If in 1934 he painted himself with a drink in hand and in ‘35 with a cigarette, then the 1947 lithograph will have him holding both. The plain, blue-gray tablecloth of the painted self-portraits is replaced with something absurdly lacy, which is then reflected in every glass and metal surface on the table. All of this, in turn, is tilted with a violent precarity toward the viewer. It’s almost too much to take in. Albright’s star was well on the rise by 1947. A few years prior he’d made the titular portrait for MGM’s 1945 feature “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” In 1946 he had a successful New York co-exhibition with his twin brother, Malvin, and that same year he married the wealthy newspaper heiress, philanthropist, and aviator Josephine Medill Patterson (daughter of New York Daily News founder and publisher Joseph Medill Patterson). Together, Josephine and Ivan moved into a new home at 55 East Division, little snatches of which (a dresser drawer, a door, a hint of a stairwell) are visible in the lithograph’s background. These newfound levels of success are reflected in Self-Portrait (and make clear why the American Artists Association dubbed Albright the “high priest of decadence in art”). The wine of the old, painted portraits has here turned to champagne on ice; the carving on the chair has become more ornate; everything is just a little shinier and more crystalline. But the details Albright borrows from vanitas still-lifes also hint at an uneasy relationship to this luxury. The half-burned cigarette and cut flowers are reminders of time’s fleetingness; Albright’s expression floats somewhere between haunted and contemplative, and his figure is at least partially consumed by the riches that surround him. A second glass places us (the viewer) at the table across from him, inviting (or forcing) us to take in this scene not at a remove but rather as an intimate acquaintance, contemplating alongside him the questions that arise organically from the composition: Are we living well, or trying to escape the fact that (as Albright succinctly put it) “the body is our tomb”? Does this opulence and grandeur have a point? What does it all add up to in the end? To inquire about this work, head here.
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