On this Halloween Eve, we’d like to lift back the curtain and revisit the rather spooky work of the Austrian artist, Alfred Kubin (1877–1959). Although a contemporary of Gustav Klimt, Kubin eschewed the lushly decorative, and instead inhabited the subconscious realm of morbid dreams and nightmares. Kubin focused on basic human drives—desire, fear, hope, and loss.

Born in 1877 in Leitmeritz in northern Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was the eldest child of Johanna and Friedrich Kubin, a land surveyor. Kubin’s mother died of tuberculosis when he was ten years old, a tragic loss which marked Kubin for years to come. His troubled adolescence culminated in a failed suicide attempt at age nineteen while grieving over his mother’s grave. The drawing entitled Dying, illustrated above, may refer to this event. Here, Kubin portrays his own demise, gripping the bed with clawlike hands as if desperately clinging to a worldly existence while eerily envisioning his death mask floating above him. This haunting image suggests that his close brush with death marked him profoundly. On his actual deathbed many years later, Kubin reportedly pleaded with his doctor: “Don’t take away my fear, it is my only asset!”

Kubin’s artistic preoccupations vacillated between fear and menace, desire and repulsion. Man in a Storm, shown above, appears to be the visualization of a nightmare. Here, a huge insect with an oversize stinger, swoops down and nearly pierces an almost skeletal male figure. The man strides toward an unseen light source, as if unaware of the threat looming above him. His shadow is transformed into a ghostly doppelgänger.

But Kubin had a humorous side too, as evidenced by some of his tongue-in-cheek creations, which offer a gently mocking commentary on the human condition. The Fat and the Lean, shown below, is one of the most potent examples of his satirical wit. In this work, an odd menagerie of couples is gathered as if for a party. Most are stripped naked, yet any sense of lewdness is undermined by their less than ideal physiques and rather dour expressions.

Gifted with a vivid imagination, his work was deeply rooted in literary sources. Over the course of his career, Kubin illustrated the stories of many authors, especially those with a lurid bent, including Fyodor Dostoevsky and Edgar Allan Poe. In 1908, Kubin wrote and illustrated a novel himself, Die andere Seite (The Other Side). Filled with autobiographical references, Kubin completed the book after his father’s death. Although their relationship was fraught, Kubin was nonetheless distraught by his passing and he dedicated the book to his father. The title of the book refers to the other side of reality—that is, a dream realm. The town’s inhabitants are known as “dream people.” Die andere Seite (The Other Side) is set in a city called Pearl, located somewhere in central Asia and built from old buildings imported from Europe. Initially presented as a utopian paradise, it quickly becomes evident that it is not as idyllic as it might seem.

Everything in Pearl predates 1860, and all conveniences are eschewed. An otherworldly, tyrannical lord named Patera, a name that derives from the Latin word for “father,” oversees society. The narrator is an artist who represents Kubin’s alter ego. Kubin’s decadent tale of Dark Romanticism appropriately reaches an apocalyptic conclusion after the arrival of a wealthy American businessman, who is determined to transform Pearl from a faraway backwater into a modern one ruled by commerce and industry. Kubin was certainly not alone in his attack on progress and bourgeois ideals, and many of his peers admired his literary effort. Lyonel Feininger wrote approvingly to Kubin: “I live much in Pearl, you must have written it and drawn it for me.” Thereafter, Kubin focused his talents on his artistic, rather than literary, aspirations. But later in life, he opined: “I hope that my written works reveal the inner truth just as much as my drawings do.”