An ink drawing printed initially of Alfred Kubin’s 1952 assortment Abendrot (night twilight) reveals the artist airborne, connected to a big balloon, thumbing his nostril at what he’s abandoning. Since that is Kubin (1877-1959), the incomparable grasp of the weird in his artwork in addition to his writing, we see not solely what we’d anticipate, the medieval manor home Zwickledt (his long-time residence), but additionally a big elephant—a creature extra prone to seem in a Kubin drawing than wherever in northern Austria.
There are, it appears, no such alternatives for escape in Kubin’s early works, on show on the Albertina Trendy in Vienna (till 11 January). Descending into the museum’s windowless bowels, as I did on a scorching Austrian summer season afternoon, you’ll encounter a younger artist nonetheless firmly within the grip of his demons. An elephant was there, too, having an axe swung towards its head by a tiny human (The Butcher, round 1900). The diminished palette of colors utilized by the curators—the partitions are painted both champagne or burgundy, whereas the mattes used for the photographs alternate between burgundy and eggshell white—enhances the impression that, for so long as you might be right here, there isn’t any exterior to that inside.
Encyclopaedia of horrors
Alfred Kubin: The Aesthetics of Evil is the attractive catalogue accompanying the exhibition. It faithfully reproduces Kubin’s nascent encyclopaedia of horrors and covers the twenty years from 1899 after his deserted research on the Munich Academy. Throughout the artist’s early years, tragedy was, as Elisabeth Dutz’s introductory essay reminds us, in ample provide. On the age of 10, Alfred watched his mom die, solely to see his weeping father stagger by the home clutching her limp physique. Kubin elder went on to marry, inside a 12 months, his useless spouse’s sister and, occasional beatings apart, had little time for his son, who additionally endured sexual abuse by the hands of an older lady. Younger Kubin picked up some disturbing habits, torturing small animals or watching the native gravedigger drag the our bodies of drowned individuals from the lake: an expertise mirrored in Beached Corpse (round 1900), the place a waterlogged useless lady, her head grotesquely swollen, has had her hair caught by a department on the shore. At 19, Kubin tried to kill himself on his mom’s grave, however his rusty pistol jammed.
It’s laborious not to consider Kubin’s early drawings as private cries for assist. But, within the catalogue, the artwork historian Natalie Lettner emphasises cultural context as an alternative, claiming that Kubin’s studying (Arthur Schopenhauer and Otto Weininger), inventive influences like Francisco Goya and Franz von Caught, and garden-variety fin-de-siècle misogyny formed his unflattering portrayals of ladies. Contemplate The Egg (round 1900), which includes a puppet-like, featureless lady, her pregnant stomach distended like an insect’s egg sac, standing subsequent to an open grave: womb-as-tomb.
In Kubin’s distorted world, explains Lettner, ladies appear monstrous merely due to what they’re, whereas males flip into monsters solely due to what they do: a press release maybe certified by a piece corresponding to A Dream Visits Us Each Night time (1902-03), the place a faceless feminine cyborg with blades for legs and arms, summary in her inhuman magnificence, sails throughout the night time sky, able to slice into no matter is in her means.
Alfred Kubin’s The Oneberry (1900)© Eberhard Spangenberg, München/Bildrecht
Knee-deep in a pool of blood
There are, after all, loads of pictures of aggressive masculinity in Kubin’s early work. For a wonderful instance, take a look at the bushy-mustachioed, muscular executioner standing knee-deep in a pool of blood (The Executioner, round 1899). However for every of these we get a number of others that includes helpless males hacked to items, roasted over a fireplace or pursued by a military of flying bugs with stingers the scale of spears. It’s clear the place Kubin himself felt he belonged. In an early self-portrait, The Weakling (1903), he seems wrapped in a huge fur-lined coat, his skinny legs caught in high-heeled boots, a gender-ambiguous Pierrot determine dwarfed by an unidentifiable black form behind him: a mountain? A pile of dust?
The actual downside, for Kubin, was not gender as a lot as individuals. It’s sobering to see his prophetic portrayals of warfare, drawn initially of a blood-soaked century: a devastated panorama suffering from crosses (Battle Recreation, round 1900); a military of tiny males marching obediently into the gates of Hell (Entrance to Hell, round 1900-01); an enormous bare warrior, with one iron-shod, furry foot raised above a sea of miniature spears (Battle, round 1918). In one among Kubin’s best-known compositions, an illustration of a mass hanging carried out in the course of the Austrian Peasant Wars, two modern wolves ponder the grotesque show of our bodies dangling from a tree, marvelling on the issues people will do to at least one one other (Hausham Linden, round 1900-01).
Sharply contoured and totally legible, Kubin’s early drawings don’t but have the claustrophobic opacity, deepened by copious hatching and crosshatching, of his later work, the place it’s typically unattainable to separate the human figures from their atmosphere. In her essay for {the catalogue}, the sleep researcher Brigitte Holzinger means that Kubin might need discovered aid from his persistent troubles in psychoanalysis. However Sigmund Freud, Kubin’s close to up to date, believed that our desires, correctly understood, would assist us to raised stay our lives. With Kubin, one can’t be so certain that there’s, certainly, a life exterior the one made seen in our worst nightmares.
In Kubin’s solely novel, The Different Facet (1909), an inspiration for Franz Kafka’s The Fort (1926), he has an artist determine very very similar to himself journey to a metropolis named Perle, the capital of a distant utopian group someplace in Central Asia known as Traumreich (dream realm). Right here, the residents, who personal solely previous issues and costume in garments trendy many years in the past, spend their days beneath a completely overcast sky. Quickly sufficient, this retrogressive dream world seems to be a moribund dystopia of the worst type, a group of Kubin’s most dramatic fantasies made manifest. Rising up towards one another, the “dreamers” destroy the city and themselves. Kubin’s narrator survives by the pores and skin of his tooth, torn, for the rest of his life, between eager to die and mindlessly occurring with the enterprise of residing. He’s additionally now not ready to attract. Which does distinguish him, in spite of everything, from his prolific creator, whose one viable escape from his and his century’s pervasive fears—no fancy balloons wanted—was to maintain reimagining them.
• Alfred Kubin: The Aesthetics of Evil, Elisabeth Dutz (ed), Steven Lindbergh (trans), Hatje Cantz, 232pp, 180 col and b/w illustrations, £44 (hb), 5 September 2024
