Ivan Albright

Catalogue entry

Ivan Albright born 1897 [- 1983]

T02316 Josephine Medill Patterson Albright 1954

Not inscribed
Bronze, 13 5/8 x 8 7/8 x 10 9/16 (34.5 x 22.5 x 26.8)
Presented by Mr and Mrs Michael Croydon through the American Federation of Arts 1978
Prov: Mr and Mrs Michael Croydon, Libertyville, Illinois (cast for presentation)
Lit: Michael Croydon, Ivan Albright (New York 1978), p.221, repr. pl.113
Repr: exh. catalogue Ivan Albright, Art Institute of Chicago, October-December 1964, p.56 (the Art Institute of Chicago cast)

A portrait head of the artist's wife Josephine Medill Patterson Albright, whom he married in 1946. She is the second daughter of Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, founder of the New York Daily News and a distinguished First World War officer; her sister Alicia Patterson Guggenheim is the wife of Harry F. Guggenheim. The sculpture was made at the artist's ranch at Dubois, Wyoming, in the summer of 1954 using an oil-based clay and took three and a half months to complete. The first bronze cast of it, made at the Fonderia Marinelli in Florence, was presented by the artist to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1966. The Tate's cast is the first of a later edition of three cast by the Meisner Foundry, New York, early in 1978; the second now belongs to the Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris and the third is owned by the artist himself.

Albright studied with two American sculptors, Albin Polasek in Chicago and, later, with Charles Grafley at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. However only five different bronzes by him exist: 'Now a Mask' 1930, 'Turn the Other Cheek' 1931 (modelled from the daughter of Mr and Mrs Art Stanford), 'Head of Marie' 1933, 'Head of Adam Emory Albright' 1935 and the present work. This was therefore the first sculpture he had made since 1935 and he has made no more since (information from Michael Croydon, 24 October 1978).

Published in:
Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, pp.7-8, reproduced p.7

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