Kubin’s Poetic Paintings

Alfred Kubin used art to delve into the human condition and found sparks to light the darkness, to bring meaning into the void

Alfred Kubin was a troubled artist who expressed his dark imaginings to help him deal with them in an ongoing quest to rekindle his awe for the world. He recognised that there were sparks of light in the darkness. Like stars in the night sky. Like moments of sparkling joy that break through dark despair. He wrestled with depression and dark compulsions all his life. To him, the darkness was an all-consuming, daunting void. Yet a little light could lend it meaning, and sometimes a fierce beauty.

What, at first glance, appears to be a dark abstract, or a Turner-esque stormy nocturne, may reveal itself to be a painting of some imagined deep-sea creature dredged up from the ocean depths. A notion brought to light from the deep subconscious.

‘Aus der Tiefe’ (c.1906) one of a series of ‘Paintings From the Deep’ by Alfred Kubin [view license] *

Kubin was a much-underrated Austrian illustrator who has since been credited as being a major early influence upon Expressionism, Symbolism and Surrealism. He was famed for dark, disturbing drawings that explored existential aspects of the depression that beleaguered him, and also a few fantastical paintings of animals and landscapes that attempted to capture the strange beauty and power of nature — what the…