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The Austrian artist Alfred Kubin (1877-1959) began his career just as Freud released “The Interpretation of Dreams.” Accordingly, the Neue Galerie’s “Alfred Kubin: Drawings, 1897-1909” is replete with the terrors of the freshly analyzed psyche. Monsters, demons and mythical beasts roam free; humans abandon themselves to bestial impulses. Done in black-and-white pen, ink and spray on heavy paper used for cartography, Kubin’s drawings map the shadowy corners of the unconscious.The show, organized by Annegret Hoberg of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich’s municipal gallery, also offers viewers an alternative to the image of Viennese art as sumptuous, decorative and refined. You would never guess that Kubin was a contemporary of Gustav Klimt; he is closer in spirit to the Belgian James Ensor and the Norwegian Edvard Munch, visionaries who expressed modernity’s spiritual toll and anticipated some of the horrors of the 20th century.
Like the Symbolist artists Odilon Redon, Max Klinger and Félicien Rops, Kubin was inspired by literature: he read (and illustrated) Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Poe. The writings of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, current at the time, also offered countless points of departure for artists who wished to agonize over the human condition.
Playing to the art’s dark themes, the Neue Galerie’s third floor has been made over in the sensationally macabre style of a Tim Burton movie. The walls are painted black and brown; red crushed-velvet curtains hang in the doorways; and Kubin’s death mask is displayed in a coffinlike glass case. These ghoulish touches are gratuitous and a bit puzzling. They seem designed to make the exhibition more appealing to the young, but parents may have reservations about the often explicit sex-and-death imagery. (The New York Times)
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