Fin de Siècle - Alfred Kubin (1877-1959)

BIOGRAPHY

(Text by Alex Goluszko)

Before Edward Gorey there was Kubin. In a time when graphic artists were shunned in favor of avant garde painting, there was Kubin. And wherever the grotesque and the macabre waltz together, there was and always will be Kubin.

From almost the day his life began, Alfred Kubin, born April 10th, 1877 in Bohemia, suffered losses and torments which could break a man and inevitably made the artist. His beloved mother died at the age of ten, his stepmother soon thereafter, in her first childbirth. The devastated father translated his grief into violence toward his only son, who was growing up a peculiar and melancholy child, making friends with butchers and gravediggers.

At nineteen came the first desperate act: old rusty revolver in hand, Kubin attempted suicide over his mother's grave but the gun failed him. A brief army career followed and ended in a prolonged hospital stay due to delirium, which in turn produced a vast array of strange and horrid visions, later morphed into ink, pencil and gauche.

Finally, in the Spring of 1898, Kubin was sent off by his father to Munich to study art The young Alfred had always had a gift for drawing but lacked almost complete in exposure to art. Late 19th century Europe saw the sentimental and fantastical flourish in Symbolist art and Kubin fell under the spell of one influence in particular: Max Klinger had thrilled an entire generation with a set of drawings entitled "Finding of a Glove", a whirl through a world of visions following the finding of a strange lady's glove.

But it was from that time on that Kubin's imitative schoolwork , under the spell of Symbolist spectres, became interspersed with flashes of mad genius, portraying grotesques which have long trudged through his subconscious. The product was his first artistic success - first with an exhibit in Berlin in 1902 and a year later with a series of fifteen small drawings (such as the above A Dream Comes Every Night) which made him famous.

At the same time another disaster struck Kubin: his fiancee, who had come to visit him in Munich, died there in a matter of days. Though brought once again to the brink of suicide, the artist soon recovered in the arms of a young widow whom he soon married.

After 1905, Kubin traveled for the first time throughout Europe, meeting, among others, that most elusive of the French Symbolists, Odilon Redon as well as his doppelganger in the art of subconscious horrors, the yet unknown Franz Kafka.

As with so many misfortunes in his life, the next one was to be a grand turning point in Kubin's life. His father had sought reconciliation after his son became famous and received it, but passed away a few years later in 1907. Soon thereafter Kubin began a novel, "The Other Side", which finally brought narrative to his graphic work, and perhaps some insight as to their nature as well.

As if to counter the tragedies of his youth, the last decades of Kubin's long life were spent in relative peace and privacy of his family home. He continued to exhibit with the modernist crowd, such as Kadinsky and Klee, though he never reflected their experimentation with form - revealing the high regard in which he was held and the influence he would exert later on over the Surrealists.

Though Kubin's style evolved over the many decades of his life and spanned the two world wars, his subject matter remained almost unchanged, grounded firmly in the non-realities of the artist's own mind and in the sentiment toward a disappearing world of representative and symbolic art and of his own Bohemian homeland. Admired by his modernist peers, Kubin himself longed to paint but it was drawing that had chosen him as its medium.

Kubin's legacy can perhaps best be seen in his role as a link - between the "original" surreal work of Goya, Bosch and others to the later grotesques of Dali; between the prolific illustrator / craftsman and the inspired artist; and between the suffering of a man and the triumph of genius.