Alfred Kubin - The Aesthetic of Evil

Alfred Kubin - The Aesthetic of Evil / ISBN 9783775757737 / 224-page hardcover, 9.75 x 9.75 inches, published in 2024 by Hatje Cantz *** Kubin’s eerie, unsettling illustrations reveal his preoccupation with the world’s evils For Austrian artist Alfred Kubin (1877–1959), evil was intrinsic to his life and work. After a traumatic childhood growing up in Zell am See and subsequent mental crises, he began his artistic training in Munich in 1898. He processed his nightmares and obsessions in a large number of fantastical drawings. His subjects, perpetually pessimistic, remain relevant a century later: war, famine, pestilence, death and every horror in between. Kubin had a pronounced fear of the feminine, sexuality, night time and of being at the mercy of fate, all of which visited him in uncanny dreams. For Kubin, the aesthetic of evil proved to be the antithesis of the idyll: the deliberate suppression of a hideous reality. Drawn from the Albertina Museum’s collection of over 1,800 drawing