There is hardly a fear of modern times or a sore spot in the soul that the painter, graphic artist and author Alfred Kubin has not portrayed in at least as frightening a picture in the almost sixty years of his work.

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Around 1900, like Ludwig Meidner (years later), he only anticipated the horrors of the First World War and found eternally valid images for the twentieth century, the era of catastrophes.

In his apocalypticism, however, Kubin is not completely timeless - his (nightmare) dream images are hardly imaginable without Sigmund Freud and CG Jung's theory of archetypes.

In his rare gift of capturing allergic reactions of the soul to the terror he sees in pictures and thereby rendering them harmless to a certain extent, Kubin's fear condensates are as topical as ever.

Without any irony, the artist once called himself an “organizer of the unknown”.

And the 162 works in the exhibition “Alfred Kubin.

Confessions of a tormented soul" in Vienna's Museum Leopold with its "black art" in both senses of the word hung on the same walls, unusual enough for a house of modernism.

Unlike Goethe's desire for "more light" on his deathbed, shortly before his death in 1959, Kubin was said to consistently tell the doctor treating him with the words "Don't take away my fears.

She is the only asset I have!”.

Why the show is nevertheless a highly pleasing visual pleasure of the remote is already evident from the thirty-six “dialogue partners” to be seen in it (if one counts the Höllen-Breughel, which is always very present in Vienna, in Kubin’s landscapes as an unmistakable “elephant in natural space”, one would come one even at thirty-seven, all of the highest quality).

To name just the best-known, these are above all Francisco de Goya, Félicien Rops, James Ensor (whose influential grotesque masks an entire chapter of the exhibition is dedicated to), Max Klinger, Odilon Redon and Edvard Munch, from whose motivic reservoir Kubin draws and that he repeatedly remodels and appropriates.

Using the no less obscure vocabulary of authors such as ETA Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe and Gustav Meyrink, he carves his own novel The Other Side.

The beast features in Christian iconography

On “Ins Unknown” from 1900/01, an endless procession of naked, defenseless people marches into the gaping jaws of a gigantic monster with the features of a hippopotamus.

Today's associations with sociable to friendly happy hippos should not deceive here - the beast is in the Christian iconography, which Kubin had firmly internalized and amalgamated again and again, for the Old Testament horror of the behemoth, the counterpart of the no less horrific Leviathan.

The front rows of the faceless mass of people are already sinking into his gullet.

Kubin's "Into the Unknown" became an anti-icon for everything totalitarian that devoured people,