Death as a Horseman, 1906

In his 1906 work Death as a Horseman, a gruesome, yet captivating vision of terror, the Austrian draftsman and graphic artist Alfred Kubin (1877–1959) uses gouache on cadastral paper to create a gloomy grisaille of soft and flowing shapes and brownish shades of gray depicting a skeleton, dressed in a wide female garment and leaning forward, riding on the croup of a horse struggling through roaring floods. The tortured face of the horse reflects the animal’s exhausting battle against the forces of nature. The ground beneath its hoofs seems to be slipping and the horse appears to be trying desperately to reach the shore. In the apocalyptic scene, countless humans are drifting in the gurgling floods, fighting for survival. Some of them seem to have exhausted their strength. A few helpless bodies have found an illusive refuge on a sandbank-like promontory. The floods will take them away. A solitary figure is balancing on a beam that protrudes over the raging waters. Kubin uses an oval brightening to bring out this oppressive hallucinatory scenario of pandemonium, which thus appears lit as if by a spotlight shining into darkness. The diffuse background rendered with nebulous, frothing agglomerations of color further enhances the notion of utter hopelessness.

MH, 2021