In Living Color

There’s a great moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the door to the black-and-white Kansas farmhouse after the twister sets it down and finds a whole Technicolor Land of Oz outside. I can only imagine how breathtaking the color was to audiences in 1939, but I know that I paid great attention when I first saw it as a kid. A similar phenomenon happened in the career of Odilon Redon. Born April 22, 1840, Redon excelled as a draftsman. His father pressured him to become an architect, but Redon longed to draw the fantasies dancing in his head. A fan of Edgar Allen Poe and other authors of the bizarre, Redon drew mind-boggling works such as Eye-Balloon (above, from 1878) almost exclusively in black and white. It was as if the images themselves were so powerful that he couldn’t comprehend them in living color at the same time. Like many hard-to-fathom visionaries, Redon languished in relative obscurity until 1884, when Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel À rebours (Against Nature) featured an aristocrat who collected Redon's drawings. Huysmans descriptions of Redon’s art created an instant demand among connoisseurs of the avant garde. But just as Redon hit the big time in black and white, he decided to branch out into living color.

From the 1890s on, Redon painted some of the most eye-popping pastels and oils of any artist working at the time. Henri Matisse and the Fauves would look to Redon’s use of color as a model for their own art. Redon’s Saint John (above, from 1892) shows just how Redon could achieve breathtakingly saturated blues. Matisse claimed that he found in skies and waters of the south of France the blue he’d been looking for all his life, but Redon’s blues must have come a close second. As amazing as the blue of Saint John appears in reproduction, I’m sure it’s even more powerful in person. I recall seeing some pastels by Redon at the Musee d’Orsay and mentally comparing them to those by Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec nearby. Although they were all near contemporaries, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec are much more into gesture than Redon, who builds up his images with a great deal of density. Next to Degas, Redon seems almost ponderous. Degas colors actually seem to move and vibrate, whereas Redon’s colors seem impossibly still, almost as contemplative as Saint John appears to be here.

Whether in black and white or color, Redon’s strange imagery never seems sinister the way that Alfred Kubin’s or Leon Spillaert’s does. Maybe that is because Redon worked mostly before Freud gave form to much of the mental angst at the beginning the twentieth century. After Freud, Kubin and Spillaert could give free reign to their deepest demons. Redon never really gets that dark, even in his early black and white work. When you look at Redon’s Flower Clouds (above, from 1903) you get a warm and fuzzy feeling, something certainly Kubin never gives you. Redon finds himself lumped in with the Symbolists for lack of a better label, but he’s really beyond category. To me, Redon always is about possibility. You see people standing and actually believe you can see them thinking, as with Saint John. With Flower Clouds and other ship-related paintings, you always wish you could know the mariners’ final destination. When European modern art reached American shores in the 1913 Armory Show, Redon, not Matisse or Picasso, had the largest number of works on display. In an exhibition aiming at showing the newest possibilities in art, Redon was the perfect choice.

Grand Entrance

Meet James Ensor
Belgium's famous painter
Dig him up and shake his hand
Appreciate the man
Before there were junk stores
Before there was junk
He lived with his mother and the torments of Christ
The world was transformed
A crowd gathered round
Pressed against his window so they could be the first
To meet James Ensor
Belgium's famous painter
Raise a glass and sit and stare
Understand the man
He lost all his friends
He didn't need his friends
He lived with his mother and repeated himself
The world has forgotten
The world moved along
The crowd at his window went back to their homes
Meet James Ensor
Meet James Ensor
Belgium's famous painter
Dig him up and shake his hand
Appreciate the man

—“Meet James Ensor” by They Might Be Giants

Introducing a trend towards unconventional depictions of Jesus Christ in late nineteenth century European art, James Ensor’s Christ's Entry into Brussels (above, from 1888) might be the strangest of all. Born April 13, 1860, Ensor struggled with his religious faith for much of his life. Resolving the message of Christ with the modern way of life seemed impossible to him. In Christ’s Entry into Brussels, Ensor depicts just how incongruous Christ would be walking the streets of Brussels, circa 1888. Most of the people flooding the street wear masks, an obsession of Ensor’s and his shorthand way of painting the issues of identity he saw as at the heart of modern alienation. You have to search long and hard to find Christ in the picture. Look for the disc of Christ’s nimbus about his head at the center of the painting, just below the banner stretched across the top. That banner reads “Vive la Sociale” or “Long Live Welfare,” just one of the many texts appearing in the painting, including an advertisement for “Colman's Mustard,” that add a subtext of the political manipulations and commercialism plaguing society. The mayor of the town presides over the parade from a reviewing stand like a modern Pharisee. Such a bizarre image of Christianity hit home later with the German Expressionists and Surrealists who would consider Ensor a father figure.



Ensor suffered from horrible ulcers. Life certainly seemed bleak to him, but he managed to keep a sense of humor about things. Christ’s Entry into Brussels is a bizarre and bleak view of society, but it’s also hysterically funny when seen from a certain perspective. The same perspective allows us to see Ensor’s Skeletons Fighting Over a Smoked Herring (above, from 1891) as a macabre joke. If Christ’s Entry into Brussels serves as a prototype for the Christ-haunted works of German Expressionists such as Emil Nolde (who visited Ensor in 1911), then Skeletons Fighting Over a Smoked Herring looks forward to the skewed humor of Surrealists such as Salvador Dali. The title alone seems like something thought up by the Monty Python troupe. Ensor whistles through the graveyard and plays with the bones with little concern for conventional propriety. That disregard for mainstream mores more than anything else set up Ensor as a hero for later artists of different nations looking for an example to follow.


Ensor had his share of demons. Just look at his Self-Portrait With Demons (above, from 1898). That colored lithograph, almost cartoonish in style, helped open the eyes of other artists to the possibilities of printmaking to capture the devilish pictures dancing in their heads. Alfred Kubin owned several prints by Ensor. Leon Spilliaert, a fellow Belgian, felt the lasting influence of Ensor. Along with Odilon Redon, Ensor set the stage for imaginative art that took advantage of the new field of psychology. Demons no longer were seen as the products of a diseased mind but rather as the consequences of natural psychological reactions to the world. Ensor lived on to a ripe, old age, but he never recaptured the strange elegance of his most fruitful period between 1880 and 1900. I’m not sure it’s possible to sustain such close contact with the darkest corners of one’s mind without losing contact with reality entirely. Ensor stayed tethered to reality and the art world through his admirers, who watched his grand entrance and followed in his footsteps.

Welcome to my Nightmare

Alfred Kubin (1877-1959). Sterben (Dying), ca. 1899. Pen and ink, wash, and spray on paper. 21 x 30.2 cm (8 5/16 x 11 15/16 in.). Private Collection, New York.

“Perhaps that is precisely what life is: a dream and an anxiety,” Alfred Kubin writes in his diary in 1939. At the very beginning of his artistic career, between 1897 and 1909, Kubin draws the anxiety-ridden dreams that haunt him into equally haunting images (such as Dying, above) that stun even today with their violence and troubled sexuality. A contemporary of Sigmund Freud, whom Kubin read only years later, and an early influence on Franz Kafka, who borrowed motifs from Kubin’s illustrated novel, Kubin presents a fascinating case of an artist riding on the very knife’s edge of modernity yet whom most people know nothing about. A new exhibition at the Neue Galerie, accompanied by the catalogue Alfred Kubin: Drawings 1897-1909 (edited by Annegret Hoberg), presents Kubin in all his weird wonderfulness and restores him to a rightful place in the cultural and art history of turn of the century Austria and Germany. Kubin’s “works struck a nerve,” Hoberg writes in the catalogue, “connecting with the mood of upheaval and cultural crisis current at the time and manifested as a catastrophic existential threat to the modern human soul.” By showing how Kubin connected with his contemporary zeitgeist, this catalogue and exhibition demonstrate how Kubin connects with our own times as well.

Alfred Kubin (1877-1959). Jede Nacht besucht uns ein Traum (Every Night We are Haunted by a Dream), ca. 1902-03. Pen and ink, brush, wash, and spray on paper. 39.1 x 31.8 cm (15 3/8 x 12 1/2 in.). Albertina, Vienna.

Kubin’s life story reads like a Freudian case study. Born April 10, 1877 to a domineering father and a passive mother, Kubin lived a largely unhappy childhood. Months after Kubin’s mother dies when he is only 10 years old, he is sexually molested by an older, pregnant woman, setting the stage for years of sexual confusion that would later play out in his art. In 1896, Kubin attempts suicide at his mother’s grave and is saved by the failure of the rusty pistol’s mechanism. After a nervous breakdown during a stint in the army, Kubin’s father grudgingly accepts his son back into the fold and Kubin begins studying art seriously. “Frustrated and disoriented” by the Old Masters he tries to study, Kubin turns to reading Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and soon forms even a darker view of humanity. Kubin’s early works “are ironic or grotesque,” Hoberg writes, “often Biedermeier-like pen-and-ink drawings in a naïve, caricatural style that presents human drives and fears, social deformations, and the relationship between the sexes in ever-new variants.” Every Night We Are Haunted by a Dream (above), featuring a faceless female torso with blade-like limbs, represents just one of those troubled sexual “variants.” Death Leap, which shows a tiny man diving into giant female genitalia in a possible homage to Courbet’s Origin of the World, may be the most extreme sexual image by Kubin. Kubin, however, finds no catharsis in creating such images. “On the contrary,” writes Klaus Albrecht Schroder in his essay, “Alfred Kubin; or, The Cruelty of Images, Kubin “almost tried to cultivate his obsessions and anxieties so as not to break the spearhead of his creativity.”

Alfred Kubin (1877-1959). Die Dame auf dem Pferd (The Lady on the Horse), ca. 1900-01. Pen and ink, wash, and spray on paper. 39.7 x 31 cm (15 5/8 x 12 1/4 in.). Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Kubin-Archiv.

Kubin’s two main themes remain the femme fatale, as shown in such cold characters as The Lady on the Horse (above), and the imposing father figure, who strides across many of Kubin’s drawings in the form of a cruel giant. Only in 1904, when Kubin marries a widow just months after the death of his fiancée, does Kubin come to some kind of peace with his sexuality. “I am almost afraid of my happiness,” Kubin writes in a letter about his impending wedding. The death of Kubin’s father in 1907 closes the door further on his earlier obsessions and marks a shift from present-tense anxiety to past-tense anxiety both in terms of content and style. Kubin’s earliest works shocked critics not only for their themes but also for their “amateurish” technique , full of “unusual hard and vacant areas of line and composition,” Hoberg writes, and a “hyperclarity of appearances” that affects viewers “even more directly than the Surrealistically inclined realism of [Max] Klinger.” After 1907, however, Kubin covers his works with “a delicate web of pen-and-ink work that lends the pieces a dreamy, enraptured character of ‘memory’ or ‘the past.’” As Schroder puts it, for Kubin, “the world was only bearable as a memory.” Images of torture in Kubin’s art, Schroder points out, “do not point to actual sufferings, nor are they saturated with authentic experiences,” but instead show torture and pain in general as “a symbol of existence.” Kubin looks back with a sense of nostalgia not on happy moments of childhood but rather the emotional strife that made him the unique artist he had become.

Alfred Kubin (1877-1959). Der Letzte König (The Last King), ca. 1902. Pen and ink, and spray on paper. 37.1 x 28.2 cm (14 5/8 x 11 1/8 in.). John S. Newberry Fund. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Kubin created an entire nostalgic dream world in his 1909 illustrated novel Die Andere Seite (The Other Side). A Kubin double called “The Draftsman” narrates the fall of the dreamland of Perle into disease, violence, and sexual chaos. Ruled by the mysterious Patera, Perle becomes “a negative utopia,” Schroder writes, that is simultaneously “a reflection on the impossibility of creating such an idyll.” In an essay focusing on Kubin specifically as a writer, Andreas Geyer calls Perle “equally a realm of dreams and of death… as Kubin’s novel circles again and again around these two great equations of decadence.” For Kubin, things always fall apart. Entropy always rules the day. Kubin’s drawing The Last King (above) exemplifies this inevitability Kubin felt was the fate of the world. “Whatever happens, everyone runs down the prescribed path like a machine,” Kubin once said fatalistically. The Other Side soon became an underground cult classic among contemporary artists and writers, including Kafka, who used many of Kubin’s ideas in works such as The Trial and The Castle. Kafka often receives credit for being a wholly original writer who rose from nowhere, but this catalogue reestablishes the lost link to Kubin that resurrects Kubin’s importance without diminishing Kafka’s brilliance.

Alfred Kubin (1877-1959). Selbstbetrachtung (Self-Observation), ca. 1901-02. Pen and ink, wash, and spray on paper. 31.5 x 39.4 cm (12 3/8 x 15 1/2 in.). Albertina, Vienna.

Kubin himself presents a problem when it comes to influence. “Did Kubin discover for himself” like-minded artists such as Klinger, “or did these worlds of fantastic visual art and literature find him, one who was particularly receptive to them?,” Schroder asks. It’s tempting to read Kubin as a product of Freud until one realizes that Kubin’s earliest work predates Freud’s 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams. Even when Kubin did read Freud years later, he rejected much of it. Only after developing his own style, which spawned from his early emotional misdevelopment, did Kubin discover an affinity with Goya, Odilon Redon, and Klinger and form relationships with Edvard Munch, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, and others. After the period examined in this study, Kubin reached back further and further into art history, to Durer, Bosch, and Brueghel, for kindred spirits, but despite “borrow[ing] motifs, us[ing] specific compositional elements, or [finding] inspiration in their atmospheres,” Kubin never takes “his orientation from a single art-historical direction,” writes Peter Assmann in “Artistic Sources for Another Modernism: Alfred Kubin and His Visual Work.” In “The ‘Other Side’ of Modernity,” Werner Hofmann points to a 1902 dual exhibition at Paul Cassirer’s Berlin gallery of Vincent van Gogh and Kubin side by side as exemplifying the distance between Kubin and the rest of modern art. Those “two artistic idioms,” Hofmann writes, Van Gogh’s, which “communicates in vital color, overpowering us with its boundless vitality,” versus Kubin’s “contempt for this world and addiction to death,” concisely illustrate how Kubin took the road less taken. Olaf Peters adds a fascinating coda to the discussion of Kubin’s influence and reception centering on Ernst Junger and the “Conservative Revolution” of post-World War I Germany in which the once-shocking Kubin found acceptance from radical nationalists who shared a contempt for German bourgeois society. In one respect, illustrated beautifully in Self-Observation (above), Kubin remained a typical modern artist in his never-ending introspection and self-alienation as he continually stepped outside himself as an artist and measured himself against contemporaries and greats of the past.

Alfred Kubin (1877-1959). Die Promenade (The Promenade), ca. 1904-05. Pen and ink, watercolor, and spray on paper. 31.5 x 40 cm (12 1/2 x 15 3/4 in.). Private Collection.

The fact that Kubin, Freud, Kafka, and so many other unique, yet similarly unique figures all came from the same geographic area at the same time leads you to believe in the idea of a zeitgeist shaping the souls of a generation. Each of these figures takes a different path to approximately the same destination. Kubin’s seems strange in isolation, but almost understandable in context. The Neue Galerie’s exhibition and the companion catalogue hold up Alfred Kubin as another piece of the puzzle of turn of the 20th century German culture. By discovering Alfred Kubin we rediscover part of what went into that early link in the great chain of modern art. Like the strange figures marching in Kubin’s The Promenade (above), Kubin finds a place in line and adds another voice to the twentieth century’s weird and wonderful parade.

[Many thanks to the Neue Galerie for providing me with a review copy of Alfred Kubin: Drawings 1897-1909, edited by Annegret Hoberg, and for the images above from the exhibition.]