Swarm Spirits, c. 1904

Lashing out dynamically, the skeleton of a brontosaurus is brandishing its bony neck in a diagonal, oblique S-shaped line through the work’s landscape format. Its huge body grows out of the foreground and is only partly visible in the shape of the gigantic, hilly structure of its back. Alfred Kubin (1877–1959) places the prehistoric monster in an infinite open plane with a conglomeration of small houses on the horizon. A closer inspection of Kubin’s pen and India ink drawing Swarm Spirits, created around 1904, reveals that it represents a brilliant picture puzzle and an exquisite shift in perception levels: The gigantic skeleton is not formed of bones, but of wildly swirling human bodies. Arranged in a loose composition, recalling a shoal of mackerel or a flock of starlings, they make the distant past visible in a dynamic exchange. After discontinuing an apprenticeship as a photographer in Klagenfurt and aborting his painting studies in Munich, Kubin went on many study trips and turned out to be a superb autodidact, as evidenced in this early work. He made a name for himself in art history as an imaginative presenter of alternative worlds and a fantastic narrator of surreal ideas.

MH, 2021