Alfred Kubin
1877 - 1959
Lives in Austria.
Austrian draughtsman, illustrator, painter and writer, who was widely known for his illustrations of writers of Balzac, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Gustav Meyrink and Edgar Allan Poe. In 1902 Kubin had his first one-man show at the Galerie Cassirer in Berlin, which was well received by the critics. Besides ink drawings, in 1905 he experimented with a colour paste paint technique he had learnt from Kolo Moser (works like Tsar by the Tombs of his Ancestors (1905; Munich, Lenbachhaus)).
In 1906 Kubin travelled to Paris to visit ageing Redon, and later that year he settled in Zwickledt. He continued illustrating books, such as Die Tatsachen im Falle Waldemar (Berlin, 1908). After 1909 Kubin was a member of the Neue künstlervereinigung münchen and exhibited with its successor the Blaue Reiter in 1911, as well as contributing drawings to Der Blaue Reiter in 1912. Kubin was deeply affected by World War I. Occasionally he treated the war directly in his work, as in The Mortar, but usually he approached it more obliquely. Kubin’s work of the 1930s was generally less savage than earlier but retained a strong suggestive power, as in the dark Meeting in the Forest (c. 1931–2; Munich, Lenbachhaus). There is an archive at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich, containing drawings, paintings and other material by Kubin. - Christoph Brockhaus, 2009
