The City Towards the East, 1903/04

The draftsman Alfred Kubin (1877–1959) noted the title The City Towards the East in fine pencil writing on the left margin of the graphic work. Dark masses of clouds are gathering over a city, depicted on the horizon and located in an infinitely wide, empty landscape. In the midst of simple, rectangular houses with deep windows and doors, a minaret-like tower is rising into the ominously fogged sky. The mysterious settlement at whose outskirts we are looking has been thrust to the right edge of the picture. The empty plane of a wasteland extends in front of it – and at its center a stooped figure in a cassock-like garment with a long train is heading towards the abandoned city, leaning on a stick and dragging itself forward in a laborious, hunchbacked effort. Where is Kubin taking us? To the much-cited “distant land”, an unsettling landscape of the soul, a place of longing or a distressing, alien world?

MH, 2021