“That Which I Should Have Done But Did Not Do (The Door)” Review

“That Which I Should Have Done But Did Not Do (The Door)” by Ivan Albright is a painting that gets under your skin. The subject of the piece is relatively simple; a large wooden door with a funeral wreath hung upon it, and a greying hand reaching from the edge of the painting towards the doorknob. Yet there is something about the obsessive intricacy of the painting style, the rancid decay of the subject and the uncomfortable scale of the work (eight feet tall, three feet wide) that makes this piece of art especially difficult to stomach. It’s hard to study the painting at any length without your mind wandering to the artist himself. It’s easy to imagine a frazzled, obsessive Albright, awake late at night, stopped over the canvass, lumpy oil paints mixed into bizarre colors. He is painting with a tiny brush in the light of a small candle while rain pounds against the windows and thunder crashes outside. Albright is Dr. Frankenstein and “The Door” is his monster.

Alvin Albright, Ivan’s father, was a renowned landscape painter in the late 1800’s, and often used his son as a model for his sweet, nostalgic paintings of children playing in pastoral settings. Ivan found his father’s artwork impotent and silly, and decided that yes, he would pursue art too, but his work would be powerful and gripping.

From the beginning Ivan had an obsession with the macabre, while in school at the Art Institute of Chicago he would insert dark touches into his homework. An assignment to paint a simple hillside would become a rainy cemetery, when asked to sketch a bird, the drawing would end up as a pair of bird’s wings, apparently ripped from the corpse of the animal, lying crumpled on a cement sidewalk.

In all of Albright’s work there are hints to death and spirituality, subjects that he became obsessed with. But Albright’s obsessive nature didn’t just send him towards specific subject matter, it also led him to develop a fanatical, obsessive style of painting. He was well known for using single-hair brushes and taking years to finish a piece. This style of painting is no more apparent than in “The Door,” a painting with detail so minute it took Albright almost ten years to complete.

“The Door” is a sickening and uncomfortable piece, but there is something beautiful about the way Albright confronts death and decay with such honesty and clarity. He savors the putrification of it all and works incredibly hard to communicate the rot to the viewer. In this way, Albright succeeds without question. The painting is so hard to look at, a majority of visitors to the Art Institute seem to avoid it, but if you force yourself to dissect the painting there is no way to deny the subtle, moldy beauty of “The Door.”