Alfred Kubin
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GALERIE HENZE & KETTERER & TRIEBOLD RIEHEN/BASEL Dr. Alexandra Henze Triebold – Marc Triebold Wettsteinstrasse 4 - CH 4125 Riehen/Basel Tel. +41/61/641 77 77 - Fax: +41/61/641 77 78 www.henze-ketterer.ch - [email protected] ALFRED KUBIN Phantasms and Nightmares October 11th 2019 – February 1st 2020 Due to our Christmas vacation our gallery is closed from December 22nd 2019 until January 6th 2020. The copyright for all images in this catalogue is owned by ©Eberhard Spangenberg/2019, ProLitteris, Zürich. GALERIE HENZE & KETTERER & TRIEBOLD RIEHEN/BASEL Dr. Alexandra Henze Triebold – Marc Triebold Wettsteinstrasse 4 - CH 4125 Riehen/Basel Tel. +41/61/641 77 77 - Fax: +41/61/641 77 78 www.henze-ketterer.ch - [email protected] ALFRED KUBIN Phantasms and Nightmares October 11, 2019 – February 1, 2020 Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin was born on April 10, 1877, in Leitmeritz in North Bohemia (now Czechia), which at the time belonged to Austria. His period of training was hardly crowned by success, and the young Kubin also suffered numerous strokes of fate in his private life. Yet during his lifetime he was held in high esteem by colleagues, art critics, art dealers, and publishers and is now considered to be one of the most outstanding graphic artists, draftsmen, book illustrators, and authors of Expressionism and Symbolism. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1887, when he was just ten years old, and a year later he also lost his aunt and stepmother to childbed fever – his father had married his sister-in-law immediately after his wife’s death. After dissatisfying endeavors at training, Kubin wanted to end his own life. However, in 1896 his suicide attempt using a firearm at his mother’s grave also failed. What had led him there was his pronounced desperation, his innate pessimism, his inferiority complexes and fears of failure, his father’s constant beatings, and the sexual abuse by an older woman as a youth. His “first bride”, Emmy Bayer, died of typhus in 1903, just a few months after they met. His wife, Hedwig Gründler, whom he married in 1904 shortly after making her acquaintance, developed a facial neuralgia that same year. This was followed by prolonged, uninterrupted, shifting suffering and a subsequent morphine addition that plagued her until her death. His father’s death in 1907, with whom he had reconciled in the meantime and with whom even a heartfelt bond of trust had developed, plunged Kubin into another deep depression. In 1948 he then also had to cope with the death of his beloved wife. He spent the two world wars in seclusion in Zwickledt; he was not drafted and was spared ostracism. What troubled him was his poor economic situation due to a lack of commissions and the small number of publications, and his concern for his half-Jewish wife. Alfred Kubin attended secondary school in Salzburg for two years with only moderate success and had to return to the parish school in Zell am See without a diploma. The 14-year-old subsequently began training as an applied artist at the state-run vocational school in Salzburg, which he likewise had to leave due to bad grades. He made one last attempt and entered a photographer apprenticeship with his uncle Alois Beer. However, he fell out with him in the fourth year of his training and was dismissed without notice. Despite misgivings about his weak constitution, Kubin was subsequently admitted to the army, for which he had volunteered, but three weeks later he suffered a nervous breakdown, which took him to the psychiatric ward of the garrison hospital in Graz for treatment. In the spring of 1898 Kubin moved to Munich, where thanks to an inheritance from his grandparents he began studying art at the private drawing school of Ludwig Schmid-Reutte, where he trained in drawing nudes and heads. A year later he was admitted to the drawing class of Nikolaus Gysis at the academy of visual arts, whose lessons Kubin only attended sporadically; he soon abandoned his studies altogether. The source of inspiration for Kubin’s early works was the painter and graphic artist Max Klinger, whose series of etchings “Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove” had a particular influence on his first creative phase, until 1903, of carefully executed nightmarish and fantastic, spattered and washed – a technique the artist developed himself – ink drawings. Moreover, during his visits to the Neue Pinakothek in Munich he studied works by James Ensor, Edvard Munch, and Francisco de Goya, for whom expressive intensity was more important than the beauty of form. However, these visits to the temple of art also led to attacks of melancholy, because he perceived himself as too insignificant compared with the great masters and therefore resorted to alcohol and other distractions of the like. It was not until he read Schopenhauer that he regained a sense of security, as he shared his pessimistic worldview. And it was during this period that Kubin finally enjoyed his first successes, beginning in 1901, when his first solo exhibition was mounted at the prominent Galerie Paul Cassirer and when a portfolio with facsimile prints of his drawings was published in 1903, which met with a positive response by the public. This was followed by his participation with 12 drawings in the spring exhibition of the “Vienna Secession” and with more than 30 at the exhibition of the artists’ association “Phalanx” led by Wassily Kandinsky. In 1905 it would be works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder that brought him out of a creative crisis through a series of glue-pigment paintings (watercolors mixed with glue), which, however, were only moderately successful. In 1906 he made the acquaintance of the Symbolist painter Odilon Redon in his studio. During this period he also produced tempera works with exotic- seeming compositions influenced by works by Gauguin and the Nabis, with which the “painter monk” Willibrord Verkade had made him familiar. Beginning in 1907, Kubin devoted himself repeatedly and Page 2 of 21 GALERIE HENZE & KETTERER & TRIEBOLD RIEHEN/BASEL Dr. Alexandra Henze Triebold – Marc Triebold Wettsteinstrasse 4 - CH 4125 Riehen/Basel Tel. +41/61/641 77 77 - Fax: +41/61/641 77 78 www.henze-ketterer.ch - [email protected] intensely to book illustrations, which from now on would become one of his main jobs, and with a novel that he produced within just a few weeks in a creative frenzy but would remain his only one: “The Other Side”, which he also elaborately illustrated himself. The novel was published in 1909 by the Georg Müller Verlag in Munich and was enthusiastically received by, among others, Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Thomas Mann. He wrote the novel in out-of-the-way Zwickledt, where the Kubin couple had sought refuge and lived in an old house without any particular comfort. This fantastic novel describes a (bad) dream world in the broadest sense of the word – a world of fantasy, wishful thinking, states of anxiety, hallucinations, and apocalyptic visions. A friend invites the main character, like the author a draftsman and illustrator in Munich and narrated in the first person, into his imaginary world. At first, this dream world gives cause for enthusiasm, which, however, gradually changes into a feeling of unease until the fantasy city apocalyptically disintegrates, from which the main character can miraculously escape and commit his experiences to paper in a mental institution. The author’s worldview and inner world are summarized in this novel in word and image, which permeate and complement one another. At the request of Alexej von Jawlensky, that same year Kubin joined the “Neue Künstlervereinigung München” (New Artists’ Association Munich), founded by Kandinsky, in whose first, at the Galerie Thannhauser in Munich, and second exhibitions he participated. Because of the success of his novel, Kubin received increasingly more and more frequent commissions to create book illustrations, among others for works by writers such as Hans Christian Andersen, Honoré de Balzac, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Heinrich von Kleist, Edgar Allan Poe, Georg Trakl, and Voltaire. “This effort to completely permeate the writer’s oeuvre extends far beyond the hours spent at the drawing table. In my case, the devoting, somewhat feminine component in the illustrator is rather pronounced, and each time I feel affected by the most peculiar shudders when I become deeply familiar with the literature to which I have to give a body. When I am then imbued with the environment and have immersed myself in the plot, then something like an electric mental tension develops, charged with moist, fertile sprouts from which the figures emerge.” Kubin specialized on the illustration of so-called noir literature. His drawings to accompany the publications do not depict passages of text; rather, they are intended to capture and describe the atmosphere in the stories and augment them with narrative elements. Kubin himself perceived his literature illustrations as decoration, not as ornament but rather as the emphasis and highlighting of the content by means of appropriation. He introduced his illustrations as coequal companions. In the same way that jewelry always has a life of its own, Kubin’s drawings also remain independent; while they may be inspired by the content of a book, they are not dependent on it. They deviate from, add to, or question what has been written. In 1911, he joined “Der Blaue Reiter” as an external member from Zwickledt and presented 17 drawings at its second exhibition at the art dealership Hans Goltz in Munich; he contributed 3 reproductions to the Almanach of “Der Blaue Reiter”. A close friendship with Paul Klee also had an influence on his creative work when the artist showed him his book illustrations for Voltaire’s “Candide”.