Alfred Kubin

Biography

In 1902 Kubin showed his drawings at the Cassirer Gallery in Berlin, and that was the beginning of his reputation. A year later the Munich publisher Hans von Weber issued a portfolio of fifteen of his sheets as reproductions, and the work travelled much further than an exhibition would have carried it. One critic of the time called his art “the darkroom of the modern soul”.

He was born on 10 April 1877 in Litoměřice (then Leitmeritz) in Bohemia, the son of a land surveyor. He lost his mother at ten and took her death hard. From 1887 he attended a gymnasium (secondary school) in Salzburg, and from 1892 he spent several years apprenticed to a photographer in Klagenfurt, though by all accounts he learned little there. A short stint of military service in 1897 ended in a nervous breakdown. In 1898 Kubin moved to Munich and entered the private school of Ludwig Schmitt-Reutte. On 2 May 1899 he was enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in the painting class of Nikolaos Gyzis, but he soon abandoned his studies. Far more important were Klinger’s prints. He recalled later that a new art had opened before him and that he had sworn to devote his life to similar works. In Munich he also came to know Redon, Munch, Ensor and Rops; in the early sheets, done in ink and wash, the influence of Klinger and Goya can be felt, and the subjects are mostly fantastic and often macabre. He painted little in oil, in 1902–1910, and what remained afterwards was pen drawing, watercolour and lithography.

In February 1904, at the house of Karl Wolfskehl, he met the widow Hedwig Gründler, sister of the writer Oscar Alexander Heinrich Schmitz, and soon married her. With her money the old estate of Zwickledt, near Wernstein am Inn in Upper Austria, was bought. After several journeys in 1905 he settled there in 1906 and lived there for the rest of his life.

“The Other Side” was written at Zwickledt and came out in 1909. The narrator, a draughtsman like the author himself, receives an invitation from a school friend to the “dream realm” the friend has created, and spends three years there. His initial delight turns to horror, and the dream city of “Pearl” is destroyed in an apocalyptic catastrophe. The narrator escapes and writes everything down while in a sanatorium. Kubin had first prepared the illustrations for Gustav Meyrink’s “The Golem”, but that novel was delayed, and he worked them into his own. The novel later influenced a number of German and Austrian writers, among them Franz Kafka and Ernst Jünger. In that same year, 1909, Kubin, together with Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Adolf Erbslöh, Gabriele Münter, Marianne von Werefkin and Karl Hofer, founded the New Artists’ Association of Munich. The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) emerged from it; in 1911 Kubin became associated with the circle of that group, and in 1912 he took part in the second Blue Rider exhibition, which consisted only of graphic works. In 1913 he showed work at the Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin. After that his ties with the avant-garde weakened.

Kubin illustrated about sixty books: by Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Voltaire and Oskar Panizza. Among his portfolios are “Dance of Death” (1918), “At the Edge of Life” (1921) and “Adventures of a Drawing Pen” (1941). He left thousands of pen drawings. In 1931 he designed the staging of Richard Billinger’s play “Rauhnacht” for the Munich Kammerspiele. From 1928 he corresponded with Karl Rössing and Hermann Hesse. He belonged to the Prague Secession and, from 1930, to the Prussian Academy of Arts.

Under the Nazis Kubin was a member of the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts, and his participation in fourteen group and two solo exhibitions up to 1941 is documented. But much of his early work did not fit the official canon, and in 1937, in the campaign against “degenerate art”, a large number of his prints and drawings were confiscated from German museums. He went on working during the war. It seems to me that this double position still sits badly with the familiar account of him.

In 1955 he bequeathed his entire artistic estate to the Austrian state and the province of Upper Austria, in return for a modest life annuity. His honours include the City of Vienna Prize (1950), the Grand Austrian State Prize for Visual Art (1951) and the Austrian Medal for Science and Art (1957).

He died on 20 August 1959 at Zwickledt and was buried in the cemetery at Wernstein. His works are held in the Albertina in Vienna and in the Upper Austrian State Museum in Linz; the Kubin archive is at the Lenbachhaus in Munich.