by Joseph Aaron Friedman

Created on: November 28, 2008

Into This World There Came A Soul Called Ida A painting by Ivan Albright.

When one encounters Ivan Albright's Into This World Came A Soul Called Ida, their initial reaction might be one of disgust. The portrait, a woman sitting on a chair at a vanity contemplating her reflection in a hand mirror, suggests the inevitable process of aging. The portraits subject, Ida, is dressed in a style which for the time, the late 1920's, would have been deemed as risqu. She is dressed in an open silk over shirt covering a slip type undergarment which reveals she has no restriction in the form of a brassier. Her patchwork skirt exposes a prodigious amount of her thigh lending to the presumption that Ida is a woman of loose morals.

Aside from Ida, the other entity in the portrait is the vanity she sits before. Upon the vanity sit a vase with flowers, and two crystal jars places atop lace matting. In the forefront sit a comb, folded money, a container for her face powder, a lit cigarette, and a burnt match. The floor of the room she is in consists of worn and torn carpeting well past its prime, and littered with a variety of debris.

Albright uses Ida as a metaphor for life lending itself to death. She sits in a meager room, surrounded by her creature comforts, while in the background nothingness prevails. He paints the room to be almost at an angle pointing downward, slipping off into some mysterious abyss. While all is slipping away, Ida contemplates herself in the hand mirror with vacant eyes. The reflection she is met with is the inevitability of death, as that reflection has all the semblance of a corpse. While one hand powders her breast in an effort to preserve herself, the index finger on the hand holding the mirror intentionally points upwards toward heaven indicating that between the nothingness in the past behind her, or the abyss she is slipping into, she would prefer the alternative of heaven, should it present itself.

Ida sees herself as dead and clinging to life. Albright expresses this by painting her as a corpse in decomposition. The brightest colors he uses are red, blue and purple. Ida's skin is the color of death; it is ashen and pallid representing her very existence. "In religious symbolism, the color purple reflects pain and suffering" (Kohl), which is represented in Ida's blouse and gives the impression of a funeral bunting. "Red is Representative of fire and blood" (Kohl), which is only evident in patches on her skirt of "blue representing truth" (Kohl),

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