ALFRED KUBIN, The Horror, c. 1902 © Leopold Museum, Vienna | Photo: Leopold Museum, Vienna © Eberhard Spangenberg, München/Bildrecht, Wien 2022
STARTING APRIL 16
ALFRED KUBIN
Confessions of a tortured soul
“Perhaps this is precisely what life is: A dream and an anxiety.”
Alfred Kubin, diary entry
ALFRED KUBIN
Confessions of a tortured soul
The art of Alfred Kubin, the great drawing artist, illustrator, and author of the novel The Other Side, seems more topical than ever today—not least in view of current geopolitical conflict and military confrontation: violence, war destruction, epidemics, natural disasters, manipulation of the masses, and other abysses of the human condition all informed his strongly narrative works. The oeuvre of this fantastic creator confronts us with pessimistic visions that—in the spirit of Schopenhauer, whom Kubin greatly revered—lay out “the worst of all possible worlds.” They bring everyday reality into view as well as mysteries and enigmas behind and beyond the visible world.
Kubin’s childhood and youth were marred by failure and depression: being expelled from high school, dropping out of an apprenticeship as a photographer, the early loss of his mother, an attempted suicide by her grave, a nervous crisis after a short period in the military, and other blows of fate characterize his traumatic coming-of-age. Kubin’s way out was moving to Munich in 1898, where he began to study art.
ALFRED KUBIN, Death as a Horseman, 1906 © Leopold Museum, Vienna | Photo: Leopold Museum, Vienna © Eberhard Spangenberg, München/Bildrecht, Wien 2022
His first visit to the Alte Pinakothek left him “ravished with bliss and amazement.” He described viewing Max Klinger's etchings as a “torrent of visions of black-and white-images.” As he related in his autobiographical notes, he subsequently became “acquainted with the entire graphic work of Klinger, Goya, de Groux, Rops, Munch, Ensor, Redon, and similar artists." From this variety of impressions and artistic positions, but above all from his own worlds of experience and sensation and an abounding imagination, Kubin created an incomparable, mysteriously fantastic oeuvre.
His first successes came in 1901. In the fall, he met the art patron Hans von Weber who published and successfully sold a portfolio of facsimile prints of drawings by Kubin. His artistic breakthrough followed in the winter with an exhibition at the renowned Paul Cassirer Gallery in Berlin. Kubin's cosmos of motifs was in tune with the spirit of the times and was inspired by the Décadence philosophy of life to which he adhered during his dandyesque period in Munich.
In addition to a melancholic doomsday mood, neurosis, hysteria, and excessive sensuality, one also indulges in an unleashed libidinousness located between the poles of eros and thanatos, libido and death wish. Kubin's typology of an aestheticized image of woman endowed with an oversexualized habitus also refers to mythological models that experienced a renaissance in Symbolist art around 1900: Salome, Judith, Sirens, and Sphinxes became popular projections of modern ideas of the femme fatale.
During a stay in Schärding in March 1903, where Kubin's family had moved, the artist met his future fiancée Emmy Bayer, who tragically died of typhoid fever in the same year. This was another heavy blow of fate for the 26-year-old Kubin, which caused a prolonged creative crisis. In 1906, Kubin moved to Zwickledt Castle, a secluded country estate in Wernstein am Inn in Upper Austria, where he found the peace and quiet to write his novel, The Other Side. It was written in just eight weeks and illustrated in four more. The literary success was followed by commissions for book illustrations that keep him afloat financially - including for works by Edgar Allan Poe, Otto Julius Bierbaum, Gérard de Nerval, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and E. T. A. Hoffmann.
His meeting with the painter Paul Klee in 1911 marked the beginning of an intensive artistic exchange. Following the advice of Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter, Kubin left the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in 1911 and joined the newly founded Blaue Reiter group as an external member. The deaths of fellow artists August Macke (†1914) and Franz Marc (†1916), during World War I, such as August Macke (†1914) and Franz Marc (†1916), with whom he exhibited as a member of the Blaue Reiter, affected him greatly. Due to his fragile state of health, Kubin himself was spared a wartime deployment - but the constant fear of receiving a draft order increasingly exhausted him.
Kubin dealt with the barbarity and inhumanity of the war in his drawings. He designs demonic counter-worlds fed by the unconscious, populated by animal figures or human-animal hybrids, which appear as ominous figures of fate and that hold powerless men at their mercy. But it is not just that this bestiary of hybrid creatures threatens humankind from outside, keeping them—surrounded by chaotic wilderness, dark caves and ravines—in fear and terror. The crises and catastrophes of archaic violence originate not least from humans themselves. For Kubin, the seizure of power by the National Socialists meant loss of income, financial restrictions, and difficulty finding publishers for his works. He also worried for his wife Hedwig, who had Jewish ancestors.
“Death, nothingness is the goal of the world, and hence of what is in it, the individual forces that together make up the world. Everyone categorically runs down the outlined path like a machine”
Alfred Kubin
With his participation in the Venice Biennale in 1950 and 1952 and the award of the Austrian State Prize for Literature, Music and the Fine Arts in 1951, Kubin finally received broad public recognition in Austria after 1945. Four years before his death, Kubin bequeathed his estate of drawings to Austrian and the province of Upper Austria in return for a life pension. When Kubin underwent medical treatment on his deathbed in 1959, he uttered a sentence exemplary of his life and work: "Don't take away my fear, it is my only capital."
Curator: Hans-Peter Wipplinger
- The Belgian artist Fernand Khnopff studied at the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. In the 1890s, Khnopff exhibited throughout Europe, including his first exhibition in Vienna in 1895. His mysterious allegories, melancholy landscapes and impressive portraits influenced artists as diverse as Gustav Klimt and Alfred Kubin.
Fernand Khnopff reflects the interplay of Eros and Thanatos – the life and death instincts first described by Sigmund Freud – in the figure of the sphinx. Half woman, half lion, the sphinx symbolizes enigmatic femininity. The androgynous angel stands over the dangerous hybrid creature as an armored victor. - The Belgian artist James Ensor was fascinated by the ambivalence of outer appearances and inner realities: Curiosities, chinoiseries and masks in his mother's souvenir shop had stimulated Ensor's imagination when he was a child. His artistic means include absurdity and exaggeration as well as black humor. The artist, who trained at the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, was a fellow student of Fernand Khnopff and found a kindred spirit in the illustrator Félicien Rops. Kubin held the Belgian artist in high esteem and added an etching by Ensor to his private collection.
- The work The Lady on the Horse, made famous through publications and exhibitions in Berlin in 1901 and 1903, considerably unsettled contemporary critics, perhaps because, in its comparably modern, “realistic” guise, it illustrates the destructive power of the feminine even more than Kubin’s archetypal, “timeless” pictorial symbols. The rendering shows a lady, clad in a Belle Époque riding costume with top hat, riding a wooden rocking horse, her head turned with an imperious air.
