Ivan Albright executed this painting sometime between January and April 1929, when he took an extended working vacation to Laguna Beach, California. At the time he was suffering from severe back pain that he mistakenly believed was symptomatic of a fatal illness. He had just completed what he feared would be his last work, Heavy the Oar to Him Who is Tired, Heavy the Coat, Heavy the Sea (1929, The Art Institute of Chicago). During this period of uncertainty Albright began to produce the subjects for which he is best remembered today: dark and disturbing full-length representations of bedraggled men and women whose physical flaws are painstakingly delineated in a hyperrealist manner. These imperfect and unflattering images often engendered public controversy. Woman (1928, Museum of Modern Art, New York), for instance, offended viewers when it was exhibited at the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, in July 1929. And although the imagery of There Were No Flowers Tonight is less extreme than many of Albright’s other works, it also shocked many visitors when it was first shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1931.
Albright’s model for this work was Lady Frances Curie Milburne, a niece of the Duke of Northumberland, who was in Laguna Beach acting in amateur theatrical productions. The Art Institute of Chicago’s press bulletin noted Albright’s odd, singular approach: “The modeling of this young woman is remarkable. There is a sculptural quality about the painting that gives the arms, bosom and legs a genuine third dimensional quality. But there is something peculiar and individual about the painting which arrests the visitor at once. It is the color. There is only one painter in the United States using that strange color and that meticulous technique.” Eleanor Jewett of the Chicago Tribune described its subject as “gray, puffed like a pneumatic tire, with legs that astonish and a bosom that affrights the observer.” A Philadelphia critic had previously remarked that the painting was “low in tone and somewhat depressing in its effect.”
Albright presents the aging ballerina in a moment of introspection after a performance. Pressed up against the picture plane and filling the composition, she leans forward to remove her left ballet slipper and seems to intrude into the viewer’s space. A small sketch of the painting in one of Albright’s notebooks [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] Ivan Albright, Sketch for There Were No Flowers Tonight, Ivan Albright Archive, Notebook 7, Jan. 1929, 25, The Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, The Art Institute of Chicago shows the figure placed within a cube, suggesting that he wanted to define her form with a strong sense of volume. The woman gazes absently in the general direction of a bouquet made, as the work’s title stresses, not of flowers but of oak leaves (a symbol of faith and endurance in adversity) that rests on the floor in the left foreground. Her distinctly tattered appearance is far removed from the lithe, athletic figure one normally associates with a ballerina, and indicates that she is past her prime. Emerging in stark relief from the dark background, the woman’s physical imperfections are depicted with unrelenting detail in a range of peculiar, rather sickly colors. Repelled by the painting, a critic reported that Albright’s “pictures of women give me the gooseflesh; they look like a horrible satire on the female species, painted by a bitter misanthrope.”
In accordance with his habit of composing titles that encourage viewers to imagine a narrative and contemplate the philosophical meaning of his unconventional subjects, Albright first titled the Gallery’s painting Midnight before changing it to There Were No Flowers Tonight. The painting’s original title suggested a fading performer whose day in the limelight was ending. There Were No Flowers Tonight similarly indicates that the older dancer no longer receives accolades or bouquets of flowers for her performances. She is instead left to consider the imminent demise of her career and, by extension, her own mortality.
There Were No Flowers Tonight dates from Albright’s critical formative period in the late 1920s and marks an important point in the development of his magic realist style. Beauty and decay would continue to fascinate the artist for the remainder of his career, as seen in works such as the modern vanitas subject Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida [fig. 2]
[fig. 2] Ivan Albright, Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida, 1929–1930, oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1977.34 and, later and perhaps most famously, in the painting he created for the 1945 Oscar-winning film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1943/44, Art Institute of Chicago). When There Were No Flowers Tonight was exhibited in the landmark exhibition American Realists and Magic Realists at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, Albright observed, “I have painted . . . women whose torrid flesh folds resembled corrugated mush, lemons and imitation fur, purple glazed leaves that exuded a funeral odor . . . calla lilies that drooped from their overload of paraffin. . . . But all things, whether a bluebottle fly or red flying hair, have had their points and counterpoints.”
Robert Torchia
August 17, 2018
