I
Because it is a simpler matter to tell the truth than casuists admit I
shall preface this little sermon on three hallucinated painters by a
declaration of my artistic faith.
I believe in Velasquez, Vermeer, and Rembrandt; the greatest
harmonist, the greatest painter of daylight, and the profoundest
interpreter of the human soul--Rembrandt as pyschologist is as
profound as Beethoven.
The selection of this triune group of genius, one Spaniard and two
Dutchmen, doesn't mean that I'm insensible to the purity of Raphael,
the rich colouring of Titian, or the giant power of Michael Angelo.
Botticelli is probably, so Mr. Berenson thinks, the most marvellous
draughtsman thus far produced by European art (we can still go to old
China and Japan for his masters), and who shall say him nay? Ruskin,
on the strength of one picture, averred that Tintoretto was the
greatest of painters. For William Blake, England's visionary painter,
Rubens was an emissary from Satan let loose on this sinful globe to
destroy art. And Leonardo da Vinci--what of that incomparable genius?
After Haarlem and Frans Hals you may realise that Manet and Sargent
had predecessors; after a visit to The Hague the View of Delft may
teach you that Vermeer was an Impressionist long before the French
Impressionists; also that he painted clear light as it never before
was painted, nor since. As for Rembrandt, the last word will never be
said. He is the eternal Sphinx of art, whether as portraitist,
landscape painter, etcher, or revealer of the night side of life, of
its bestiality, madness, cruelty, and terrific visions. But Velasquez
and Vermeer are more sane.
Anything I may write of Kubin, Munch, and Gauguin should be read in
the light of my artistic credo. These three names do not swim in main
currents, rather are they to be found in some morbid morass at the
equivocal twilight hour, not the hour exquisite, but that
indeterminate moment when the imagination recoils upon itself and
creates shadows that flit, or, more depressing, that sit; the mood of
exasperated melancholy when all action seems futile, and life a via
crucis. Nor is this mood the exclusive possession of perverse poets;
it is an authentic one, and your greengrocer around the corner may
suffer from its presence; but he calls it the blues and resorts to
alcohol, while the artist, ever conscious of the "values" of such a
psychic state of soul, resorts to ink or colour or tone (not always
despising wine).
This Alfred Kubin has done; with his etching-needle he has aroused
images from the plate that alternately shock and exalt; occasionally
he opens the valves of laughter for he can be both witty and humorous.
His Slavic blood keeps off the encroaching danger of himself taking
his own work too seriously. I wish his German contemporaries boasted
such gifts of irony. Kubin is a Bohemian, born in 1877, the son of an
Austrian Army officer. His boyhood was given over to caprice, and he
appears to have passed through the various stages familiar in the
career of romantic pathological temperaments. Disillusionment
succeeded disillusionment; he even contemplated Werther's end.
He found himself in Munich at the beginning of this century with a
slender baggage of ideals, much scorn of life, and a determination to
express his tortured and complicated personality in art. No matter
what comical old women professors (in trousers) tell you of "objective
art" and the superior advantage of drawing from plaster casts, that is
the ultimate aim of an artist (naturally I don't refer to fashionable
face painters, who make a lucrative trade of their slippery paint).
Nevertheless, a more rigid discipline might have smoothed the way for
Kubin, who has not yet mastered the tools of his art. He has always
practised his scales in public.
A man's reading proclaims the man. Kubin's favourite authors for years
were Schopenhauer and Mainlaender, the latter a disciple of the mighty
Arthur and one who put into practice a tenet of his master, for he
attained Nirvana by his own hand.
Now, a little Schopenhauer is an excellent thing to still restless,
egotistic spirits, to convince them of the essential emptiness of
life's coveted glories; but a surfeit of Schopenhauer is like a
surfeit of lobster--mental indigestion follows and the victim blames
the lobster (_i. e._, life) instead of his own inordinate appetite.
Throughout Kubin's work I detect traces of spleen, hatred of life,
delight in hideous cruelty, a predisposition to obscurity and a
too-exclusive preoccupation with sex; indeed, sex looms largest in the
consciousness of the new art.
To burlesque the human figure, to make of it a vile arabesque, a
shameful sight, is the besetting temptation of the younger generation.
Naturally, it is good to get away from the saccharine and the rococo,
but vulgarity is always vulgarity and true art is never vulgar.
However, Kubin has plenty of precedents. A ramble through any
picture-gallery on the Continent will prove that human nature was the
same five hundred years ago as it was in the Stone Age, as it is
to-day, as it always will be. Some of Rembrandt's etched plates are
unmentionable, and Goya even went to further lengths.
Now, Kubin is a lineal descendant of this Spaniard, minus his genius,
for our young man is not a genius, despite his cleverness. He
burlesques the themes of Goya at times, and in him there is more than
a streak of the cruelty which causes such a painful impression when
viewing the Proverbs or the Disasters of War.
Kubin has chosen to seek earlier than Goya for his artistic
nourishment. He has studied the designs of the extraordinary Pieter
Breughel, and so we get modern versions of the bizarre events in daily
life so dear to old Pieter. On one plate Kubin depicts a hundred
happenings. Cruelty and broad humour are present and not a little
ingenuity in the weaving of the pattern. He, too, like Breughel, is
fond of trussing up a human as if he were a pig and then sticking him
with a big knife. Every form of torture from boiling oil to retelling
a stale anecdote is shown. The elder Teniers, Hieronymus Bosch,
Breughel, Goya, and among later artists, Rops, Toulouse-Lautrec, and
Aubrey Beardsley, are apparent everywhere in Kubin's work. Neither is
Rembrandt missing.
Beardsley is, perhaps, the most marked influence, and not for the
best, though the Bohemian designer is a mere tyro when compared to the
Englishman, the most extraordinary apparition in nineteenth-century
art.
Kubin has illustrated Poe--notably Berenice; of course the morbid
grimace of that tale would attract him--Gerard de Nerval's Aurelia,
Maerchen by W. Hauff, and his own volume of short stories entitled,
Die andere Seite, written in the fantastic Poe key and with literary
skill. The young artist is happy in the use of aquatint, and to judge
from his colour combinations one might call him a rich colourist.
Singularly enough, in his woodcuts he strangely resembles Cruikshank,
and I suppose he never saw Cruikshank in his life, though if he has
read Dickens he may have. In his own short stories there are many
illustrations that--with their crisp simplicity, their humour and
force--undoubtedly recall Cruikshank, and a more curious combination
than the English delineator of broad humour and high animal spirits
and the Bohemian with his predilection for the interpretation in black
and white of lust, murder, ghosts, and nightmares would be hard to
find. Like Rops, Kubin is a devil-worshipper, and his devils are as
pleasant appearing as some of the Belgian's female Satans.
I've studied the Sansara Blaetter, the Weber Mappe, and Hermann
Esswein's critical edition of various plates, beginning with one
executed when Alfred was only sixteen; but in it may be found his
principal qualities. Even at that age he was influenced by Breughel.
Quaint monsters that never peopled our prehistoric planet are being
bound in captivity by dwarfs who fire cannon, stab with lances, and
attack enemies from the back of impossible elephants. The portrait of
what Kubin calls his muse looks like a flamingo in an ermine skirt
posing previous to going to jail. Then we see the shadow, a monstrous
being pursuing through a lonely street at night a little burgher in a
hurry to reach his bed. The "shudder" is there. Kubin has read
Baudelaire. His Adventure resembles a warrior in No Man's Land
confronted by a huge white boa-constrictor with the head of a blind
woman, and she has a head upon which is abundant white hair. Puerile,
perhaps, yet impressive.
I shall skip the numerous devil's laboratories wherever people are
being stewed or sawn asunder, also the scenes of men whipped with
leather thongs or broken on the rack. One picture is called The
Finger. An aged man in night-dress cowers against the wall of his
bedroom and gazes with horror at an enormous index-finger which, with
the hand to which it is attached, has crawled across the floor as
would a devilfish, or some such sort of monster. The finger
threateningly points to the unhappy person. Unquestionably it
symbolises a guilty conscience. Franz von Stuck has left his
impression on Kubin. He portrays mounds of corpses, the fruit of war,
which revolt the spectator, both on account of the folly and crime
suggested and the morbid taste of the artist.
Kubin's Salome is the last word in the interpretation of that
mellifluous damsel. It is a frank caricature of Beardsley, partially
nude, the peculiar quality of the plate being the bestial expression
of the face. No viler ugliness is conceivable. And, according to
Flaubert, who created the "modern" Salome, she was fascinating in her
beauty. I fancy foul is fair nowadays in art. Never before in its
history has there been paid such a tribute to sheer ugliness. Never
before has its house been so peopled by the seven devils mentioned in
the Good Book.
In the domain of fantasy Kubin is effective. A lonely habitation set
in nocturnal gloom with a horde of rats deserting it, is atmospheric;
two groups of men quarrelling in sinister alleys, monks of the
Inquisition extinguishing torches in a moonlit corridor, or a white
nightmare nag wildly galloping in a circular apartment; these betray
fancy, excited perhaps by drugs. When in 1900 or thereabouts the
"decadence" movement swept artistic Germany, the younger men imitated
Poe and Baudelaire, and consumed opium with the hope that they might
see and record visions. But a commonplace brain under the influence of
opium or hasheesh has commonplace dreams. To few is accorded by nature
(or by his satanic majesty) the dangerous privilege of discerning
la-bas, those visions described by De Quincey, Poe, or De Nerval.
Alfred Kubin has doubtless experienced the rapture of the initiate.
There is a certain plate in which a figure rushes down the secret
narrow pathway zigzagging from the still stars to the bottommost pit
of hell, the head crowned as if by a flaming ecstasy, the arms
extended in hysteria, the feet of abnormal size. A thrilling design
with Blake-like hints--for Blake was master of the "flaming door" and
the ecstasy that consumes.
A design that attracts is a flight of steps feebly lighted by a
solitary light, hemmed in by ancient walls; on the last step lurks an
anonymous person. A fine bit of old-fashioned romance is conjured up;
also memories of Piranesi.
The drowning woman is indescribable, yet not without a note of pathos.
Buddha is one of the artist's highest flights. The Oriental mysticism,
the Kef, as ecstasy is called in the East, are admirably expressed.
His studies of deep-sea life border on the remarkable. I have seldom
encountered such solicitude for exact drawing, such appreciation of
the beauties of form and surface colouring, as these pictures of
shells, sea flora, and exotic pearls. The Cardinal series must not be
forgotten, those not easily forgotten portraits of a venerable
ecclesiastic.
It is difficult to sum up in a brief article all the characteristics
of this versatile Bohemian, as it is difficult to find a picture that
will give a general idea of his talent. I select the Nero, not because
it exhibits any technical prowess (on the contrary, the arms are of
wood), but because it may reveal a tithe of the artist's fancy. Nero
has reached the end of a world that he has depopulated; there remains
the last ship-load of mankind which he is about to destroy at one
swoop. The design is large in quality, the idea altogether in
consonance with the early emotional attitude of Kubin toward life.