Unnerving realism of Ivan Allbright.

• Author: Donnell, Courtney Graham

The artist "enlarged every facial wrinkle, birthmark, and stray hair and captured every blemish and bulge of exposed skin."

The son of an artist and the twin of another, Ivan Albright was one of Chicago's greatest and most original painters. He did not look at all like the gnarled and wrinkled figures in the pictures he created. A friendly, capricious man, he resembled an elf--mischievous, fun-loving, and full of life. Though his paintings ostensibly are brooding, dark meditations on decay, he did not see them as a record of decline, but believed that his work presented life "viewed clearly and honestly."

Albright and his identical twin brother, Malvin, were born in North Harvey, Ill., a southern suburb of Chicago, on Feb. 20, 1897. They died not quite nine weeks apart in 1983. Their father, Adam Emory Albright, was a successful real estate investor and popular painter, known for his rural scenes of children in sunny landscapes. Clara Wilson Albright, their mother, was the daughter of a physician. Over the years, the Albright family had homes and studios in several towns around Chicago.

Ivan Albright served in World War I as a medical draftsman documenting war wounds and operations for the army at a hospital in France. This experience often had been cited as the rationale behind his macabre vision. Albright denied this, but did state at one time that studying X-rays during his enlistment "was the best art training" he ever had. Although Albright had an interest in architecture, he enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1920, graduating in 1923 with honorable mention in life and portrait painting. After graduation, the twins spent time in Philadelphia and New York, attending art classes and sharing studios, returning in 1926 to paint in their father's studio in Warrenville, Ill.

Ivan Albright's paintings soon appeared in major museum exhibitions, winning prizes. By 1930, his work had been included in exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.; The Brooklyn Museum; the Pennsylvania and Buffalo Academies; and the 1928 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. Highly competitive, he entered hundreds of juried exhibitions, drawn particularly to those that awarded prizes, of which he won his share. He did not have a dealer and placed high prices on his pictures, partly to discourage purchases. For him, selling a painting was like losing a child. Nevertheless, he wanted his work to be in museums.

Although Albright's...