Alfred Kubin
Encyclopedia
Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin (April 10, 1877 – August 20, 1959) was an Austrian
printmaker, illustrator
and occasional writer
. Kubin is considered an important representative of Symbolism
and Expressionism
.
in the town of Litoměřice
, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From 1892 to 1896, he was apprenticed to the landscape photographer
Alois Beer, although he learned little. In 1896, he attempted suicide on his mother's grave, and a short stint in the Austrian army the following year ended with a nervous breakdown. In 1898, Kubin began a period of artistic study at a private academy run by the painter Ludwig Schmitt-Reutte, before enrolling at the Munich Academy in 1899, without finishing his studies there. In Munich, Kubin discovered the works of Odilon Redon
, Edvard Munch
, James Ensor
, Henry de Groux
and Félicien Rops
. He was profoundly affected by the prints of Max Klinger
, and later recounted: "Here a new art was thrown open to me, which offered free play for the imaginative expression of every conceivable world of feeling. Before putting the engravings away I swore that I would dedicate my life to the creation of similar works". The aquatint
technique used by Klinger and Goya
influenced the style of his works of this period, which are mainly ink and wash
drawings of fantastical, often macabre subjects. Kubin produced a small number of oil paintings in the years between 1902 and 1910, but thereafter his output consisted of pen and ink
drawings, watercolors, and lithographs. In 1911, he became associated with the Blaue Reiter group, and exhibited with them in the Galerie Der Sturm
exhibition in Berlin in 1913. After that time, he lost contact with the artistic avant-garde.
Kubin is considered an important representative of Symbolism
and Expressionism
and is noted for dark, spectral, symbolic fantasies, often assembled into thematic series of drawings. Like Oskar Kokoschka
and Albert Paris Gütersloh
, Kubin had both artistic and literary talent. He illustrated the works of Edgar Allan Poe
, E.T.A. Hoffmann
and Fyodor Dostoevsky
, among others. The best known of Kubin's own books is Die Andere Seite (The Other Side) (1909
), a fantastic novel
set in an oppressive imaginary land. The Other Side has an atmosphere of claustrophobic
absurdity
reminiscent of the writings of Franz Kafka
.
From 1906 until his death, he lived a withdrawn life in a small castle on a 12th century estate in Zwickledt, Upper Austria. In 1938, at the Anschluss
of Austria and Nazi Germany
, his work was declared entartete Kunst or "degenerate art
", but he managed to continue working during World War II
. Kubin was awarded the Great Austrian State Prize in 1951, and the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art in 1957.
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
printmaker, illustrator
Illustrator
An Illustrator is a narrative artist who specializes in enhancing writing by providing a visual representation that corresponds to the content of the associated text...
and occasional writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
. Kubin is considered an important representative of Symbolism
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
and Expressionism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
.
Biography
Kubin was born in BohemiaBohemia
Bohemia is a historical region in central Europe, occupying the western two-thirds of the traditional Czech Lands. It is located in the contemporary Czech Republic with its capital in Prague...
in the town of Litoměřice
Litomerice
Litoměřice is a town at the junction of the rivers Elbe and Ohře in the north part of the Czech Republic, approximately 64 km northwest of Prague....
, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From 1892 to 1896, he was apprenticed to the landscape photographer
Landscape photography
Landscape photography is a genre intended to show different spaces within the world, sometimes vast and unending, but other times microscopic. This popular style of photography is practiced by professionals and amateurs alike. Photographs typically capture the presence of nature and are often free...
Alois Beer, although he learned little. In 1896, he attempted suicide on his mother's grave, and a short stint in the Austrian army the following year ended with a nervous breakdown. In 1898, Kubin began a period of artistic study at a private academy run by the painter Ludwig Schmitt-Reutte, before enrolling at the Munich Academy in 1899, without finishing his studies there. In Munich, Kubin discovered the works of Odilon Redon
Odilon Redon
Bertrand-Jean Redon, better known as Odilon Redon was a French symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist.-Life:...
, Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionist art. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of love, fear, death, melancholia, and anxiety.- Childhood :Edvard Munch...
, James Ensor
James Ensor
James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor was a Flemish-Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for almost his entire life...
, Henry de Groux
Henry de Groux
Henry de Groux was a Belgian Symbolist painter, sculptor and lithographer. His 1889 painting Christ aux Outrages, widely described as his masterwork, depicted Jesus being attacked by a mob...
and Félicien Rops
Félicien Rops
Félicien Rops was a Belgian artist, and printmaker in etching and aquatint.-Early life:Rops was born in Namur as the only son to Nicholas Rops and Sophie Maubile. He was educated at the University of Brussels...
. He was profoundly affected by the prints of Max Klinger
Max Klinger
Max Klinger was a German Symbolist painter, sculptor, printmaker, and writer.Klinger was born in Leipzig and studied in Karlsruhe. An admirer of the etchings of Menzel and Goya, he shortly became a skilled and imaginative engraver in his own right. He began creating sculptures in the early 1880s...
, and later recounted: "Here a new art was thrown open to me, which offered free play for the imaginative expression of every conceivable world of feeling. Before putting the engravings away I swore that I would dedicate my life to the creation of similar works". The aquatint
Aquatint
Aquatint is an intaglio printmaking technique, a variant of etching.Intaglio printmaking makes marks on the matrix that are capable of holding ink. The inked plate is passed through a printing press together with a sheet of paper, resulting in a transfer of the ink to the paper...
technique used by Klinger and Goya
Francisco Goya
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown, and through his works was both a commentator on and chronicler of his era...
influenced the style of his works of this period, which are mainly ink and wash
Wash (painting)
thumb|Example of a wash drawing by [[R. G. Skerrett]].A wash is a painting technique in which a paint brush that is very wet with solvent and holds a small paint load is applied to a wet or dry support such as paper or primed or raw canvas. The result is a smooth and uniform area that ideally lacks...
drawings of fantastical, often macabre subjects. Kubin produced a small number of oil paintings in the years between 1902 and 1910, but thereafter his output consisted of pen and ink
Quill
A quill pen is a writing implement made from a flight feather of a large bird. Quills were used for writing with ink before the invention of the dip pen, metal-nibbed pens, the fountain pen, and, eventually, the ballpoint pen...
drawings, watercolors, and lithographs. In 1911, he became associated with the Blaue Reiter group, and exhibited with them in the Galerie Der Sturm
Der Sturm
Der Sturm was a magazine covering the expressionism movement founded in Berlin in 1910 by Herwarth Walden. It ran weekly until monthly in 1914, and became a quarterly in 1924 until it ceased publication in 1932....
exhibition in Berlin in 1913. After that time, he lost contact with the artistic avant-garde.
Kubin is considered an important representative of Symbolism
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
and Expressionism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
and is noted for dark, spectral, symbolic fantasies, often assembled into thematic series of drawings. Like Oskar Kokoschka
Oskar Kokoschka
Oskar Kokoschka was an Austrian artist, poet and playwright best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes.-Biography:...
and Albert Paris Gütersloh
Albert Paris Gütersloh
Albert Paris Gütersloh was an Austrian painter and writer.Gütersloh worked as actor, director, and stage designer before he focused on painting in 1921....
, Kubin had both artistic and literary talent. He illustrated the works of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
, E.T.A. Hoffmann
E.T.A. Hoffmann
Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann , better known by his pen name E.T.A. Hoffmann , was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist...
and Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov....
, among others. The best known of Kubin's own books is Die Andere Seite (The Other Side) (1909
1909 in literature
The year 1909 in literature involved some significant new books.-New books:*L. Frank Baum - The Road to Oz** - Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work *André Billy - La Derive*René Boylesve - La Jeune Fille bien élevée...
), a fantastic novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
set in an oppressive imaginary land. The Other Side has an atmosphere of claustrophobic
Claustrophobia
Claustrophobia is the fear of having no escape and being closed in small spaces or rooms...
absurdity
Absurdity
An absurdity is a thing that is extremely unreasonable, so as to be foolish or not taken seriously, or the state of being so. "Absurd" is an adjective used to describe an absurdity, e.g., “this encyclopedia article is absurd”. It derives from the Latin absurdusm meaning "out of tune", hence...
reminiscent of the writings of Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
.
From 1906 until his death, he lived a withdrawn life in a small castle on a 12th century estate in Zwickledt, Upper Austria. In 1938, at the Anschluss
Anschluss
The Anschluss , also known as the ', was the occupation and annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in 1938....
of Austria and Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
, his work was declared entartete Kunst or "degenerate art
Degenerate art
Degenerate art is the English translation of the German entartete Kunst, a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany to describe virtually all modern art. Such art was banned on the grounds that it was un-German or Jewish Bolshevist in nature, and those identified as degenerate artists were...
", but he managed to continue working during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. Kubin was awarded the Great Austrian State Prize in 1951, and the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art in 1957.
Literary works
- The Other Side (19091909 in literatureThe year 1909 in literature involved some significant new books.-New books:*L. Frank Baum - The Road to Oz** - Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work *André Billy - La Derive*René Boylesve - La Jeune Fille bien élevée...
) - The Looking Box (19251925 in literatureThe year 1925 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* April: F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway meet in the Dingo Bar on rue Delambre, in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris, France shortly after the publication of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and shortly before...
) - Of the Desk of a Draughtsman (19391939 in literatureThe year 1939 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*December 25 - A Christmas Carol is read before a radio audience for the first time....
) - Adventure of an Indication Feather/Spring (19411941 in literatureThe year 1941 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Frank Herbert marries Flora Parkinson.*F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished work, The Last Tycoon, is edited and published by Edmund Wilson.-New books:...
) - Sober Balladen (19491949 in literatureThe year 1949 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Arthur C. Clarke becomes Assistant Editor of Science Abstracts.*Bertrand Russell receives the Order of Merit....
) - Evening-red (19501950 in literatureThe year 1950 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Kazuo Shimada wins the "Mystery Writer Of Japan" award for his book Shakai-bu Kisha .*Jack Kerouac has his first novel published....
) - Fantasies in the Boehmerwald (19511951 in literatureThe year 1951 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*E. E. Cummings and Rachel Carson are awarded Guggenheim Fellowships.*Flannery O'Connor is diagnosed with lupus....
) - Daemons and Night Faces, (19591959 in literatureThe year 1959 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*April 30 - Theatrical première of Bertolt Brecht's Saint Joan of the Stockyards, originally performed on radio in 1932....
, (autobiographyAutobiographyAn autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...
)