Ivan Albright’s Picture of Dorian Gray might be the most disgusting image I’ve ever seen.

I truly apologize if you just ate before coming to read this. But I take no responsibility for your clicks. 

What makes Picture of Dorian Gray so interesting, aside from the attention to detail conveyed in its creation, is that it's part of a trifecta of art in three different mediums. But let’s start at the beginning, and talk about how it came to be. 

Ivan Albright was absolutely fascinated by death and decay. Some of us love flowers or fashion. Albright was obsessed with entropy. He was the son painter Adam Emory Albright, and would later study oil painting at the Chicago Art Institute, but it was during World War I, when he served as a medical draftsman in France making drawings and sketches of injured soldiers, where he really honed his skill capturing the horrors of human anatomy. 

Before the painting, "The Picture of Dorian Gray" was initially an Oscar Wilde book in which a young man frightened of losing his good looks makes a deal to never age. But his soul pays the price, decaying in the image in his portrait. In the mid 1940s, MGM studios were well underway in adapting the book into a feature film. For the most important part of the film, they’d need someone who could convey the power behind Dorian's portrait, and ultimately the state of his soul. So they commissioned Albright to do what he did best. 

The film is mostly in black & white, but the one shot that is in color is Albright’s portrait. Could you imagine going to the theater in 1945 and seeing something like that? Especially since color was rarely seen in films of the time. It’s a fantastic way to put Albright’s incredible work on display at the movie’s most pivotal moment, and the movie went on to win an Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

What’s even more impressive is that due to studio constraints and a speedy filming schedule, Albright only had a year to paint the work. This was a feat as Albright was known known for taking so much time for his portraits that his subjects, having aged so much, often looked different than the finished product when it was finally completed.

Picture of Dorian Gray stands at a unique three way intersection, where literature, art, and film meet. Albright had to work to bring to life an image that before his painting and the film, had only existed inside people’s minds. He had to live up to the vivid imagery Oscar Wilde's words had described. He wound up doing such a good job in his raw, realistic approach, that it became this image that a whole new generation of people associated with the story of Dorian Gray.