Kubinesque

It’s not really a style, strictly speaking, nor an artistic school or movement. It’s, perhaps, a philosophical more than artistic way to describe the obscure forces of an evil Nature, to use the symbolic element in order to let the spectator regard at the incubus and demonic vision of the author.

One of the most influent artist who tried to give a representation of his demonic visions was the austrian Alfred Kubin. In the rest of this article you will able to find out a confrontation between some works of Kubin (mainly from my own copy of the famous album entitled ” Hans von Weber mappe” for the editor Spangmberg) and other works by hungarian artists such as Sazndor Nagy, Aladar Körösfői-Kriesch, Emil Sarkady, Lajos Gulacsy, Mednyánszky László.

As noticed by Karoly Lyka on the Művészet magazine (“Symbolikus rajzok”, IV year, volume 2, 1905) the black white illustration is the technique “par excellance” in order to charge the lines of the illustration itself of a symbolic value. In particular, after the works by Walter Crane and of the Morris School and the preraffaellite tradition, the use of the line became an effective way to obtain a smooth, curvaceous, indeterminate portrait of a (un)reality, the dream, which is unreal by definition. Using a black and white only technique, the artist can obtain an effective representation in which only reside lights and shadows. And the black/white pencil drawing was the technique mostly used by Alfred Kubin, too.

He studied in Munchen, where kept in touch with the mystic brotherhood named Kosmic Circle (Kreise der Kosmiker). There, the austrian artist knew the philosophical and anthropological theories of the famous German scientist Ferdinand Bachofen, in particular the Bachofen’s studies on the original Mediterranean religion of the Great Mother. At the very beginnings of the european civilization the societies, according to Bachofen, were organized in a matriarchal way, in which the role of the feminine was a first order one, somewhat reproducing in the human society itself the structure of the supernatural powers. In Nature the ruling forces are the feminine ones, and the worship of the Great Mother in the ancient mediterranean cultures was a symbolic way to claim for the mercy of the Goddess. As noticed by the italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari, Kubin was obsessed by thebachofenian thematic of the Great Goddess, representing it in a symbolic manner such as in the drawing entitled “Sumpfplanzen”: