Leopold Museum Shows Alfred Kubin in a Dialogue with Art-Historical Role Models and Contemporaries from Goya to Ensor

15.04.2022

The large-scale spring exhibition is dedicated to the creator of fantastical, mysterious visions and to his sources of inspiration

In view of geopolitical disputes and military conflicts, the oeuvre of this “organizer of the uncertain, the hermaphroditic, the dusky and the oneiric”, as he described himself, appears more current than ever before. His works, which are shaped by violence, wartime destruction, pandemics, natural disasters, the manipulation of the masses and other abysses of human existence, focus as much on everyday reality as on the enigmas beyond the visible world. On an entire level of the Leopold Museum, spread out over eleven exhibition rooms and grouped around various key themes, the exhibition Alfred Kubin. Confessions of a Tortured Soul places Kubin’s work into a dialogue with his art-historical role models and contemporaries. Artists like Francisco de Goya, Félicien Rops, James Ensor, Max Klinger, Odilon Redon, Gustav Klimt and Edvard Munch influenced Kubin’s motifs and formal esthetics, while authors including E. T. A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Gérard de Nerval, August Strindberg and Gustav Meyrink were among his literary sources of inspiration.

“Exploring Alfred Kubin’s works means traveling into the artist’s innermost emotional worlds, into the labyrinth of his soul, and to follow his exuberant powers of imagination. It also means delving into the art-historical and social phenomena that shaped the intellectual atmosphere of the declining Habsburg Empire and influenced both Kubin’s character and art.”
Hans-Peter Wipplinger, exhibition curator and Director of the Leopold Museum

“A torrent of visions of black-and-white images” – a creative rush after a moment of awakening

Kubin’s childhood and adolescence were marred by haunting experiences, setbacks and depression – he was dismissed from high school, abandoned his photography apprenticeship, lost his mother at an early age, attempted suicide at her grave and suffered a nervous breakdown after a short stint in the military. These are only some of the blows of fate that characterize his traumatic biography. Kubin moved to Munich in 1898, where he initially attended a private drawing school and subsequently studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, but abandoned his studies shortly afterwards.

Seeing Max Klinger’s etchings at the Munich Kupferstichkabinett was an awakening for him which caused “a torrent of visions of black-and-white images” and led to a creative rush that lasted several years. His extraordinary early oeuvre, shown during his first eminent exhibition in 1901/02 at the Berlin gallery of Paul Cassirer, met both with indignation and admiration. Over 60 years, Kubin created an extensive, multifaceted oeuvre which, though characterized by essential stylistic transitions, kept its continuity in terms of commanding motifs, themes and visions.

“The exhibition Alfred Kubin. Confessions of a Tortured Soul aims to explore Kubin’s oneiric worlds, which all too often enter nightmarish-somber spheres, in terms of their relation to the unconscious. His works are placed into a dialogue with works by artists of the 19th century and of Classical Modernism from which he derived inspiration. Kubin’s dystopian visualizations, which carry on from Symbolism and the fantastical art of the 19th century, are composed of actual and imaginary reality: a synthesis, in which the uncanniness of these pessimistic realms is often seasoned with humor, irony and exaggeration.”
Hans-Peter Wipplinger, exhibition curator and Director of the Leopold Museum

Oneiric worlds, grotesque masquerades and frightening hybrid creatures

Right from the start, visitors delve into Kubin’s explorations of human abysses in the twilight of existence. Around 1900, the view of the world oscillated between a bourgeois-positivistic faith in science and reason, and an irrational, anti-utilitarian belief in fate which the anxiety-ridden artist could not escape from. In his pictorial motifs, Kubin merged dream and reality, capturing oneiric atmospheres with compositional criteria.

Apocalypse and war

Kubin’s oeuvre was created against the backdrop of political and social upheaval – the demise of the Habsburg Empire and the horrific events of the two World Wars. While the artist was exempted from military service owing to his feeble constitution, he was still haunted by the fear of being called up and of possibly dying in the war. Works he created around 1900 already show war scenarios filled with torment, torture, chaos and murder. Kubin experienced World War II in the seclusion of his country estate in Zwickledt and adopted a careful and reticent stance towards the National Socialists, who deemed his art to be “degenerate”.

Decadent female images, demonization of the female and male projections of omnipotence

The exhibition further addresses Kubin’s projections of the female which were shaped by early traumatic experiences. At the age of ten, he suffered the tragic loss of his mother. In his catalogue essay, the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist August Ruhs highlighted the sensitive fact that, after one year, his father married Alfred Kubin’s aunt, making her his stepmother. A year later, his biological mother’s sister passed away as well, and the father later remarried again. Kubin further received lasting trauma from a sexual assault he suffered at the hands of an adult pregnant woman when he was eleven, and by the death of his first great love, Emmy Bayer.

In the era of the fin-de-siècle, especially, male artists often depicted women either as demonic beings or as mothers and saints. In Kubin’s work, the image of the female as a threat is dominant, with fear and terror burdening the relationship between the genders. The art of Symbolism and the world model of Decadence are full of countless typologies of the femme fatale. Using the male gaze, common in the art of the late 19th century, Kubin embedded female archetypes into allegories of fate, power, doom and destruction. His oeuvre manifested the prevailing gender roles of the time, according to which the empowerment of the woman went hand in hand with the disempowerment of the man. Kubin depicted men either as weak victims or – echoing the impending loss of patriarchal structures of domination – as violent aggressors.

The crisis of the individual, monstrous forces and powerless subjection

Another focus is on the crisis of the individual at the turning point around 1900 when the self underwent a critical reappraisal. Sigmund Freud’s ground-breaking publication The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), and especially Carl Gustav Jung’s concept of archetypes, were fascinating to Kubin, who repeatedly addressed questions of birth, life and death: “Death, nothingness is the fate of the world […]. Each and every one runs down a predestined path, unconditionally, like a machine,” the only 27-year-old artist declared during his time in Munich. In her analyses of the works in this exhibition, the Kubin expert and long-standing head of the Kubin Archives of the Munich Lenbachhaus, Annegret Hoberg, describes this state of helpless subjection to the powers of fate as the “inescapable thrownness of man into a cosmic void” – be it with regards to natural disasters, an image of femininity that is perceived as a threat or a pandemic.

Primeval cosmoses and eerie places

The presentation also shines the spotlight on Kubin’s depictions of women as birth-givers within lush primeval nature, and on his general interest in underwater landscapes and primeval beings. Derived from Johann Jakob Bachofen’s theories on the mother as a life-giving goddess in swampy nature, this mythology of the creation of the world resulted in a dualistic view of femininity which resonated with Kubin. To Bachofen, women not only gave life but at the same time also created the prerequisites for death.

The last exhibition room uncovers the eerie places in Kubin’s oeuvre which are the venues for apocalyptic natural disasters, such as floods and storms. His manor in Zwickledt, which for decades served as a refuge to him and his wife Hedwig, appears to have had gloomy facets akin to those in the dream realm “Perle” he described in his novel The Other Side. While Kubin’s fears diminished with age, they never went away completely. It seemed that the most eerie places of all would be the beyond and thus death. Undergoing medical treatment on his deathbed in 1959, he made a statement that exemplifies both his life and oeuvre: “Don’t take my fear away from me, it is my only capital”.

Exhibits and catalogue

The presentation Alfred Kubin. Confessions of a Tortured Soul was made possible thanks to the generous support of Austrian and international lenders. The exhibition comprises 248 exhibits, including 50 archival documents. Around half of the 162 works by Alfred Kubin hail from the Leopold Museum’s Collection. The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive catalogue in German and English with essays by Annegret Hoberg, August Ruhs, Burghart Schmidt, Lena Scholz and Hans-Peter Wipplinger.

 

Curator: Hans-Peter Wipplinger

In cooperation with August Ruhs

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