Alfred Kubin: Die Sammlung Leopold / The Leopold Collection

by Rudolf Leopold, Romana Schuler, Fritz Koreny

Alfred Kubin is one of the most accomplished draughtsmen of visions of the 20th century. Born in 1877 at Leitmeritz in Bohemia, Kubin spent his youth and years of study at the School of Applied Arts in Salzburg. He later studied art and took drawing lessons in Munich. Inspired by his fascination with the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and influenced artistically by Goya, Klinger, Ensor, Redon, Rops and Munch, Kubin first found his own idiosyncratic "Kubinesque" set of motifs, rooted in dream visions, at the turn of the last century. He called his imagery a vital "escape into the unreal": ghostly figures, hybrid creatures, variants of torture and self-torture, dream, vampirism, spiritualism, decadence, sex, death and birth. His extraordinary oeuvre comprises more than 20,000 drawings, a large part of it pen drawings and portfolio pieces as well as illustrations for more than 70 books, all of them testifying to his gloomy world view. This book features a representative selection of master sheets by the bizarre multi-talented artist.

Genres: Art

144 pages, Paperback

First published March 2, 2003

Reviews

[Samuel Snoek-Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

The introduction, biography, and reflective essay that preface the sketches and paintings are rather aggrandizing, elevating Kubin's genius artificially and attempting to mythologize his work. It's a strange move because he doesn't seem to need any such artifice: For one thing, when he was in a good mood, he aggrandized and mythologized himself plenty--the guy had an ego as outrageous as his neurotic pessimism, and he was prone to lavish, fictionalized embellishments of his own biography. But more importantly, his work is already genius enough without any excess praise piled on; it's like the authors of these various introductory materials felt it necessary to sell the idea of Kubin, but Kubin's art speaks plenty loudly for itself. Which is why, if I could, I'd actually give this 3.5 stars, because for all the faults of the front matter, the artwork here is brilliant. Disturbed and often unnerving, but fascinating and beautiful. His is truly involving art, abosrbing you into a distorted and sometimes demented world view that anyone would likely recognize from their childhood nightmares, like a weird philosophical blend of Charles Addams and Maurice Sendak, but in execution bearing more of the the darkness of H.R. Giger and the twisted whimsy of Mark Ryden (who, for me, actually reads like a latter-day Kubin). If you buy this book, skip the front matter, but I do highly recommend this or any other collection of Kubin's work, because his vision is unsettling but moving, and his execution is unconventional but excellent.