Ivan Le Lorraine Aibright’s forcefully realistic figure paintings made him one of the most celebrated artists in Chicago during the second half of his life. He grew up in an area that is now part of Chicago. In 1910 his family moved to Hubbard Woods, Illinois. He studied drawing with his father, the artist Adam Emory Aibright (1862-1957), and attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and the University of Illinois at Urbana, where he studied architecture. While serving in the army, 1918-19, he drew medical illustrations, becoming chief draftsman with the American Expeditionary Force Medical Corps in 1919. He worked in an architectural office and did illustrations, some of them medical, before deciding in 1919 that he wanted to become a painter.

Albright studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1920 to 1923 and then briefly attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the National Academy of Design in New York. From 1927 to 1947 he maintained a studio at Warrenville, Illinois, and later moved to Chicago. During the late 1920s and 1930s he developed his distinctive style in which the textures of his distorted and dimpled surfaces are developed with seemingly obsessive detail; this technique makes the flesh of the figures seem to be diseased and decomposing. From November 1943 to September 1944 he was in Hollywood, painting the canvas The Picture of Dorian Gray (Art Institute of Chicago) for the film of the same name. Honors came to him in the 1940s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Marilyn Robb, "Ivan Le Lorraine Aibright Paints a Picture," Art News 49 (June-August 1950): 44-47 § Katharine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 23-37, with chronology § Art Institute of Chicago and New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Ivan Albright: A Retrospective Exhibition, exh. cat., 1964, with essays by Frederick A. Sweet, Jean Dubuffet, and Ivan Albright, chronology § Peter Pollack, "The Lithographs of Ivan Albright," American Art Journal 8 (May 1976): 99-104 § Michael Croydon, Ivan Aibright (New York: Abbeville, 1978), with bibliography, chronology.