More Than a Portrait

Chicago's sawed-off, white-fringed Ivan Le Lorraine Albright is noted for painting old bottles, dead fish, seaweed, rot and decay with a relentlessly realistic brush. When human beings squirm into his paintings, he makes them look as if they had just been removed from a freshly opened grave. Now, at 60, Albright has painted a commissioned portrait (his first) of a woman--alive.

The courageous sitter is Chicago Art Patron Mary Block, daughter of the late Adman Albert Lasker, wife of an Inland Steel Co. vice president and director, Leigh Block. Undaunted by such Albright canvases as Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida, the study of a time-battered prostitute, That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do, the portrait of a moldy door, and the flotsam-and-jetsam-cluttered watercolor, Ah God--Herrings, Buoys, the Glittering Sea, Mary Block put her best face forward and hoped. Albright put aside (temporarily) his work in progress of the past twelve years (TIME, Aug. 9, 1954), the still-unfinished, cosmically titled Poor Room-There Is No Time, No. End, No Today, No Yesterday, No Tomorrow, Only the Forever, and Forever, and Forever, Without End, and went to work.

Lavish with time (his wife was Josephine Medill Patterson, daughter of the founder of New York's Daily News), Albright tackled the portrait with his customary punctilio. For the first six months, Mrs. Block sat five times a week, two hours a sitting, then came twice a week for the next 18 months. Albright rigged up an ingenious arrangement of black window shades that allowed him to concentrate the eerie light exactly where he wanted it. He brandished up to 25 brushes at a sitting, most of them not much thicker than an eyelash, applied them to a palette consisting of little mounds of paint no bigger than a pimple. It took two years to finish the portrait.

In the Blocks' opulent, near-northside apartment, hung with the works of Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard, Vuillard, Degas, Van Gogh and Manet, the new portrait of the lady of the house last week had the place of honor. Albright's Mary Block (see cut) sits in a phosphorescent glow by a cluttered table with a clock turned away from her (because she was a clock watcher at sittings, and, Albright quips, "it makes the painting timeless"), grim, bejeweled, glaring back at her beholders, a macabre vision tinted with a pale green note of decay.

"If I had merely wanted a portrait as such," said a pleased Mrs. Block, "I would have had a color photograph taken. But I wanted one of the great artists of this country to do a suggestion of me, which would also be a great painting. I settled on Ivan as one of the outstanding artists in the U.S." Some of Mrs. Block's friends were less pleased. Growled one guest: "Looks like a dead woman."

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