In January 1902, the German art dealer Paul Cassirer, a major proponent of Berlin Secession artists, as well as the conduit through which French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism gained currency in Germany, presented a show at his Berlin gallery (Galerie Paul Cassirer) in which he juxtaposed two highly original yet antithetical artists. Both artists were rather unknown at the time, but one-half of this visionary curatorial diptych would become a household name, instantly recognizable for his bold colors, thick brushwork, and troubled life. The other artist would gain little recognition and appreciation outside of the German-speaking world for much of his life or even posthumously. In one section of his gallery, Cassirer displayed nineteen paintings by Vincent van Gogh—the first exhibition of van Gogh’s works in Germany—while in the other a young Alfred Kubin (1877–1959) enjoyed his first solo show.

Upon opening the handsomely bound catalogue for the first time, the reader is greeted with a photograph of Kubin. Only twenty-one at the time and living in Munich, he appears innocent and placid, an image of tranquility noticeably absent in the creative maelstrom that was conjured by the force of his imaginative powers, philosophical predilections, and Symbolist affinities. Curator of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, and organizer of the exhibition, Annegret Hoberg’s essay introduces the reader to Kubin by offering a biographical sketch of the first thirty years of his life, from his turbulent childhood in Zell am See and his highly productive, artistic sojourn in Munich as a young man, to his subsequent evolution in style along with his acclaimed 1909 novel, Die andere Seite (The Other Side). As the result of a family life characterized by anxiety, illness, death, and alienation, Kubin was keenly aware of loss and suffering from an early age. As one might expect, his troubled relationship with his father and with women have provided much material for psychoanalytic interpretations of his life.

Hoberg’s reconstruction of Kubin’s formative Munich years is insightful. We learn about his thirst for the philosophical pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, his exposure to and subsequent preoccupation with the graphic works of Max Klinger, Francisco de Goya, and Félicien Rops; Hoberg notes that “Kubin’s works, with their riveting ‘embodiments of the uncanny, intangible powers that dominate us,’ became a furtively spread insiders’ tip” in the avant-garde circles of Munich’s bohemian district Schwabing where Kubin had taken up residence (22). In 1902, Kubin has his first solo exhibition. In 1903, the so-called “Weber portfolio” with fifteen of Kubin’s drawings is produced. An article in the Berliner Illustrirte, “which Kubin himself always described as the best article ever written about his early work,” describes the portfolio in the following manner: “The characteristic feature of this strange art is that it attempts to depict the extrasensory, to provide symbols for the mysterious forces to which we are subjected in our daily lives but which we do not know—indeed, that is revealed to us only in wild dreams and fantasies, in states of clairvoyant nervous strain” (24). How appropriate when the article’s author writes that “this art, which dispenses with every depiction, every illustration of being, has a convincing power to make things present and will grip you and sweep you away, conveying to you ideas and moods of uncanny reality that will burn themselves into your brain as if with hot iron punches” (24). It becomes clear that Kubin’s apocalyptic fantasy, the lasciviousness of his nightmarish landscapes, his gruesome grotesques, and disturbing scenes of perverse sexuality were beginning to make an impression.

In his essay “Alfred Kubin; or, The Cruelty of Images,” Klaus Albrecht Schröder argues that Kubin’s drawings “are reflections of his awareness of an age that had reached its end” and “have a diagnostic force that makes them interesting both for historians and psychoanalysts” (42). He finds in Kubin’s “youth and troubled relationship to the opposite sex” the primary inspiration for his angst-ridden drawings, and argues for the primacy of Kubin’s troubled biography, the link between anxiety and dream, and “the uncontrollable and inexorable cruelty of fate” (44). Apparently, Kubin possessed a morbid fascination with morbidity itself. Cruelty, suffering, and depravity abound. Yet it is a stateless, indeterminate suffering. Kubin, then, appears as a strikingly ahistorical figure, one less interested in the “historical horizon of his era” and more the product of his gloomy adolescent landscape (42). Indeed, for Schröder, Kubin’s biography is not only inextricably linked with his art, but it also provided the fundamental concordance of motifs to which Kubin would later repeatedly return. While Kubin’s oeuvre has been divided into two primary phases (essentially pre- and post-Zwickledt) with associated variations in both form and content, Kubin’s work is rather uniform, even universal in its topography. Schröder writes, “Kubin’s renunciation of the garb of actual politics, concrete places, or depictions of war machines lent his images of destruction and threat the power of universally valid symbols” (50). To this I would add timeless as well, for his horrific images of torture and deprivation are no less powerful today than when they first entered the world through Kubin’s pen. His ability to transform personal, psychological trauma and anxiety into a very public idiom is nowhere more apparent than in his depictions of women, for “hardly any other theme preoccupied Kubin as often and in so varied a fashion as that of woman” (50). Schröder contextualizes Kubin’s angst regarding women by linking it with a certain sentiment that was prevalent at the time, typified by Otto Weininger’s “epochal, much-read book Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903)” (51). As Schröder writes, “Sexuality for Kubin was the epitome of the irrational and animalistic” (52).

Peter Assmann’s essay, “Artistic Sources for Another Modernism, Alfred Kubin and His Visual Work,” draws similarly on the rich biographical detail of Kubin’s life, yet Assmann emphasizes Kubin’s “synthesizing gaze” (55). Whereas one senses from Schröder’s essay that Kubin’s art was entirely a product of his troubled (early) life, Assmann presents an image of Kubin as both predecessor and successor, an enthusiastic student of art history (in the non-academic sense) as much as he was a creative and original artist. Assmann emphasizes in particular the influence of Belgian and French Symbolists such as Rops, Henry De Groux, and James Ensor, along with Edvard Munch, and less commonly acknowledged though astutely observed, the Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert. The reader learns that Kubin’s ability to juggle disparate elements spawned the adjective “Kubinesque,” a term that “has come to be applied to suggestively disconcerting systems of classification that bring together contradictory elements” (56). However, Assmann reveals an acute sensibility for the resolutely elusive nature of Kubin’s art and the difficulty of discerning artistic lineage when discussing stylistic (dis)similitudes with Klinger. Whereas the latter reveals a technical precision, “on the ‘other’ hand, on Kubin’s ‘side,’ [one discerns] an atmospheric development of what is more sensed than actually seen and transformed” (62). In this way, Assmann problematizes artistic lineage while nevertheless observing the truly visionary in Kubin’s art.

If Kubin’s drawings were visionary, his literary oeuvre was no less remarkable, as Andreas Geyer demonstrates. His essay, entitled “‘. . . perhaps I am a writer . . .’ Alfred Kubin as Literary Figure,” is a fascinating and insightful analysis of Kubin’s “other side.” Geyer skillfully explicates the origins of Die andere Seite, its narrative and interpretative difficulties along with its reception, and concludes with a brief look at Kubin’s late literary work. Although it was Kubin’s first and only novel, Geyer argues that “it is all the more remarkable that Kubin’s literary debut proved to be one of the most important and influential texts of the early twentieth century” (70), one that “served as essential inspiration for no less a figure than Franz Kafka” (88). Geyer situates Kubin within his historical context. He refutes the commonly held myth of Kubin as an isolated artistic genius, and argues instead that Kubin was a product of his era, i.e., of decadent culture. He establishes Kubin’s literary lineage, which ranged from “the Black Romanticism of the likes of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe, and . . . authors such as Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarmé, and Joris-Karl Huysmans, to the ‘Neoromanticism’ of the fin de siècle” (70). Geyer echoes Assmann’s argument for Kubin as a synthesizer of diverse materials when he writes, “Kubin’s novel turns out to be a highly complex text that draws equally from autobiographical, mythological, philosophical, artistic, and literary sources, and is thus interwoven with a corresponding diversity of references and allusions” (87). How did Kubin conceptualize himself—as writer or artist? In 1909, he writes, “I will never write anything more in my life, I hope” (89). While his fictional output ceased, Kubin remained a prolific letter writer, a point that Geyer neglects to mention in an otherwise excellent essay. Among his many associations, Kubin exchanged letters regularly with Hans Fronius, Vasily Kandinsky, Ernst Jünger, and Hermann Hesse.

The catalogue concludes with two contributions that situate Kubin’s oeuvre within the larger framework of European and Viennese modernism, respectively. Werner Hofmann’s erudite essay, “The ‘Other Side’ of Modernity,” is an attempt “to use Kubin to convey the value of the ‘other modernism’ and to remind the reader that these positions—as alternative voices—have occupied European art at least since the age of Enlightenment” (95). Olaf Peters’s “Demons of Dust, Alfred Kubin between Viennese Modernism and Conservative Revolution” focuses on the complicated reception of Kubin’s novel by the German writer Ernst Jünger and its relationship to the so-called Conservative Revolution. In addition, Peters “locate[s] Kubin and his early work in the overall context of Viennese modernism around 1900” and its associated themes of self-alienation as well as depictions of women and of violence and its related themes (107). In the first part of his essay, Peters covers familiar biographical ground. However, his analysis of the relationship between Kubin and the radical Jünger offers a fascinating glimpse into an unlikely association. Moreover, he points to the problematic relationship between art and history, and suggests that Kubin could be an important case study in further research into “constellations as a methodology for art history” (117). With Kubin as their focal point, both Hofmann and Peters invite the reader to appreciate Kubin from a distance—within a broader, historical context.

If one can speak of genius, then Kubin’s genius was manifold. Yet it remains largely unknown in the United States. As the Neue Galerie’s director, Renée Price, writes in the foreword to the catalogue, “Although well-known in Austria and Germany, Kubin is rarely cited as a major artist in the United States” (10). The catalogue and exhibition attempt to rectify this oversight. And perhaps therein lies the catalogue’s primary value. Its scholarship is impressive, for it contains essays by six authors who are attuned not only to the intellectual, aesthetic, literary, philosophical, and biographical nuances of one of Austria’s most important draftsmen, but also to his place in the narrative strand of modernism. It offers much for the specialist and non-specialist alike. More importantly, it is one of the few substantial treatments available in English on Kubin, and as such it initiates the English-speaking reader into his strange and fantastic world. Additionally, there have been no major exhibitions of his work in the United States. Therefore, this catalogue must serve as an invaluable starting point, an introduction for the English-speaking audience, particularly in the United States, to explore further—or even to explore for the first time—this highly imaginative if disturbing artist.