In the clutches of evil

Alfred Kubin’s drawings disturb and fascinate in equal measure. He takes the viewer into worlds in which evil, the frightening and the gruesome prevail. An exhibition at the Albertina Modern in Vienna presents early works on paper from the collection of 1800 drawings.

Alfred Kubin (1877-1959) was a loner and individualist. In his works, he processed his mental anguish and depicted dream worlds with an oppressive atmosphere. In his drawings, he explored the darker sides of the human psyche and dealt with his fears of the feminine, sexuality, the night and the feeling of being at the mercy of fate. He depicts these fears with fantastic creatures, grotesque grimaces and menacing scenes. At the same time, he also took up the investigations of Sigmund Freud, who wanted to uncover the secret drives and fears of the human soul. One theme that Kubin repeatedly explored in his works was war. In the work “The War”, created around 1918, a gigantic warrior with hoof-shaped feet crushes an army of soldiers. But war also played a central role in other drawings over the years.

Kubin’s departure from traditional iconography and the diversity of his graphic oeuvre can be seen in the 100 or so works on display from the early phase of his career. Almost prophetically, the artist succeeds in picking up on the emerging tensions of the 20th century. He struggled with the advancing scientification, mechanization and bureaucratization and had the feeling that he was a person who belonged to the past. The dissolution of the individual in the masses, unable to find his place in the modern world, was also a theme that repeatedly preoccupied him. At the same time, however, he also created works that are still relevant today. Wars, prisoners, torture and persecution as well as epidemics and pandemics are (once again) part of the world situation and the news today.

Alfred Kubin’s youth was marked by strokes of fate. His mother Johanna died at an early age. She was the first person he saw die and one of those closest to him, to whom he had to say goodbye at a young age. He also observed with curiosity how the fishermen in Zell am See, where he grew up, regularly retrieved bodies from the water. He incorporated these impressions and also his attempted suicide at the age of almost 20 at his mother’s grave into his works of art.
His role models included the German painter and sculptor Max Klinger (1857-1920) and the Spanish painter Francisco da Goya (1746-1828). While Klinger provided him with inspiration for his fantastic worlds, Goya’s depictions of brutality and directness from the graphic cycle “The Horrors of War” served him as a model for the atrocities depicted in his drawings. Whereas in Goya’s work the soldiers commit atrocities against their victims, in Kubin’s work it is women and men from everyday life. In addition to these artists, he was also inspired by others.

The feminine also plays a central role in Kubin’s work. Alfred Kubin shows both misogynistic traits and a panicked fear of women. In his work, the woman appears as a mother, but without showing maternal traits, but also as a femme fatal, to whom men are often at the mercy of as victims. These mostly negative depictions of women, in which they devour men, reflect the zeitgeist of the late 19th century. Artists portrayed women in the fin des siècle as both innocent and seductive; they could be angels or vamps. In addition to the visual arts, literature also issued a warning to men: Beware of women and their sexuality – ultimately, this warning can be understood as a fear of the incipient emancipation of women. At the same time, however, there are also works in which Kubin has the man act as a tamer or pimp for the women, keeping them under control. However, the drawings in which the woman chases the man, seduces him and lures him into her net dominate his work. He found his models for these depictions in Symbolist artists such as Félicien Rops (1833-1898), Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) and Franz von Stuck (1863-1928).

He captivates viewers with his dark works, even if some of the horrors in the drawings only reveal themselves at second glance, on closer inspection. But then they show the viewer their own humanity and shake them. They are often images that do not let go and show the inevitability of death. As much as his fears may have tormented him, they were crucial to his work, serving as an inexhaustible source of inspiration. His pastor reportedly said at the end of Alfred Kubin’s life: “Without his fears, he would be robbed of his existence.” Kubin’s art unfolds in the interaction between personal expression and contemporary analysis. It is an impressive testimony to man’s inner conflicts and fears, which are both individual and universal. His works reveal the torments he lived through and show a world in which man views himself and his environment with a mixture of horror and fascination, as the exhibition makes clear.

The exhibition Alfred Kubin. The Aesthetics of Evil can be seen at the ALBERTINA Modern in Vienna from August 14, 2024 to January 12, 2025. It was curated by Elisabeth Dutz and Laura Luzianovich. A catalog in German and English has been published to accompany the exhibition.

Pictures: ALBERTINA, Vienna © Eberhard Spangenberg, Munich / Bildrecht, Vienna 2024