Inge Morath

 Inge Morath, Self-Portrait, Jerusalem 1958

Inge Morath (1923-2002) was born in Graz, Austria. Her parents were scientists whose work took them to different laboratories and universities in Europe during her childhood. Educated in French speaking schools, Morath and her family relocated to Darmstadt in the 1930s, and then to Berlin, where Morath's father directed a chemical laboratory. Morath was registered at the Luisenschule near Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse.

 Inge Morath, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, Reno, 1960

Morath's first encounter with avant-garde art was the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition organized by the Nazi party in 1937, which sought to inflame public opinion against modern art. "I found a number of these paintings exciting and fell in love with Franz Marc's Blue Horse", Morath later wrote. "Only negative comments were allowed, and thus began a long period of keeping silent and concealing thoughts."

 This is the 39th production black Leica M2. It was owned by Inge Morath.

After finishing high school, Morath entered Berlin University. At university, She studied languages, and became fluent in French, English, and Romanian in addition to her native German (to these she later added Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Chinese). Towards the end of the war, Morath was drafted for factory service in Berlin-Tempelhof, alongside Ukrainian prisoners of war. During an attack on the factory by Russian bombers, she fled - walking hundreds of miles to Austria.

 Inge Morath, A Llama in Times Square, 1957

Morath encountered photographer Ernst Haas in post-war Vienna. Working together for Heute, Morath wrote articles to accompany Haas' pictures. In 1949, Morath and Haas were invited by Robert Capa to join the newly-founded Magnum Photos in Paris, where she would work as an editor. In 1953, Morath presented her first large picture story, on the Worker Priests of Paris, to Capa, and he invited her to join the agency as a photographer. One of her earliest assignments took her to London for a story about the inhabitants Soho and Mayfair. Morath's portrait of publisher Eveleigh Nash, from that assignment, is among her best known photographs: 

 Inge Morath, Mrs. Eveleigh Nash, The Mall, London, 1953

In 1953-54, Morath worked with Henri Cartier-Bresson as a researcher and assistant, and in 1955 she was invited to become a full member of Magnum Photos. During the late 1950s Morath traveled widely, covering stories in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the United States, and South America for such publications as Holiday, Paris Match, and Vogue. 

Inge Morath, Marilyn Monroe in Misfits, 1961

Having met director John Huston while she was living in London, Morath worked on several of his films. Huston's Moulin Rouge (1952) was her first time working in a film studio. Morath worked again with Huston in 1960 on the set of The Misfits. Morath met Arthur Miller while working on The Misfits, and - following Miller's divorce from Marilyn Monroe - they were married in 1962. Their first collaboration was the book In Russia (1969), which, together with Chinese Encounters (1979), described their travels in the Soviet Union and China. Another long-term project was Morath's documentation of many of the most important productions of Arthur Miller's plays.

 Inge Morath, Sibiu (Hermanstadt), Romania 1958

During the 1980s and '90s, Morath continued to pursue both assignments and independent projects. The film Copyright by Inge Morath was made by German filmmaker Sabine Eckhard in 1992, was one of several films selected for a presentation of Magnum Films at the Berlin Film Festival in 2007. Inge Morath Miller died of cancer in 2002, at the age of 78. The Inge Morath Foundation was established by Morath’s family, in 2003, to preserve and share her legacy.

Albin Egger-Lienz

 Albin Egger-Lienz, Self-Portrait, 1923

Albin Egger-Lienz (1868-1926) was born near Lienz, Tyrol. His first teacher was his father who was a church painter. From 1884 to 1993 Egger-Lienz studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he was influenced by Franz Defregger and French painter Jean-François Millet. From 1894, Egger-Lienz worked as a free artist in Munich. In 1899, he moved to Vienna and married Laura von Möllwals. He was co-founder of the Hagenbund, an Austrian group of artists that was active until 1930.

Albin Egger-Lienz, The Dance of Death Anno Nine, 1906 

 

In 1909, Egger-Lienz became a member of the Vienna Secession, but quit his membership seven years later. One year later, he was proposed a professorship at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. This was however prevented by the Archduke Franz Ferdinand (whose assassination in Sarajewo was one of the causes of WW1) because of Egger Lienz' membership in the Secession, and because his above shown painting The Dance of Death Anno Nine (which had been shown in an exhibition for the 60th jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph), was considered to be not patriotic enough, and, given the advanced age of the honored Kaiser, could not be regarded as "pious".

Albin Egger-Lienz, The Old, 1914

In Egger-Lienz' oeuvre, the motif of death occupies a central position. In The Dance of Death, Death leads on the group of farmers. In the background is the Tyrolean struggle for freedom in 1809, but the theme is detached from the historic event and conceived as a monumental allegory. The four walk on as if they were in a dream, only half in possession of themselves, as if they had a premonition of their destiny. Leon Trotsky remembered an exhibition of the Vienna Secession in 1909: "The most prominent participant in the exhibition was Albin Egger-Lienz. Remember his name! His "Haspinger" [Johann Haspinger was a Catholic priest and leader of the Tyrolese revolt against Napoleon], his "Sowers" are unquestionably perfect paintings". And Carlo Carrà, one of the most important theorists of Italian Futurism, described him as one of three prominent artists of the XIII. International Art Exhibition in Venice.

 

Albin Egger-Lienz, Haspinger, 1908

In 1912, Egger-Lienz started teaching at the art college of Weimar (one of his students was Peter Drömmer), but, in 1913, settled down in St. Justina (near Bolzano, South Tyrol), where he worked as a free artist. He taught at the school of arts in Klausen (Chiusa). From 1914 to 1917, Egger-Lienz was called up for military service. In this time he produced his masterpieces such as For the Nameless:

Albin Egger-Lienz, For the Nameless, 1914

Battlefield painters have the assignment of documenting everyday life in the tactical struggle for position and of recording the heroic deeds of soldiers. This was not the case with Egger-Lienz:. One could claim to see an element of heroisation in the lithograph 1915. However, in Field of Corpses dead corpses pile up in the trench, and the deformed expressivity of the bodies in Finale is an outcry against war:

Albin Egger-Lienz, Finale, 1918

Egger-Lienz also devoted his work to the tragedy of women whose men remained in the field, as in Women of War (below). The Mothers (1922) only receive hope under the sign of the crucified Saviour. The consequences of war are communicated by The Blinded (1918) in their baleful hopeless clumsiness.

 

Albin Egger-Lienz, Women of War, 1918

 

In 1918, Egger-Lienz turned down a professorship at the Vienna Academy. In his last years, he was declared honorary doctor of the Universitiy of Innsbruck. Albin Egger-Lienz died in St. Giustina, now a part of Italy, on November 4, 1926. You can see more works of Egger-Lienz at Zeno.

Red Vienna

Poster for the exhibition Red Vienna (Museum Postsparkasse Vienna), 2010

Between 1923 and 1934, Vienna's socialist administration launched an extraordinary campaign to provide housing for working-class residents. The government constructed 400 apartment complexes - 64.000 new apartments in all - that together housed one-tenth of the city's population. The pride of this gigantic program was the majestic Karl-Marx-Hof, designed by Karl Ehn. Stretching almost a mile along a major railway line, the Karl-Marx-Hof featured five monumental archways, a striking red and yellow stucco facade, and lush interior courtyards as well as state-of-the-art kindergartens, playgrounds, maternity clinics, health-care offices, lending libraries, and laundries.

Karl Ehn, Karl Marx-Hof in Vienna (1927–1930)

As their heroic scale suggests, the Wiener Gemeindebauten (Vienna Communal Houses, as all of the new socialist apartments were called) amounted to far more than mere residential housing. They embodied  a political idea. As Eve Blau points out in her excellent study, The Architecture of Red Vienna 1919-1934, the communal houses were an expression of the working class's ascent to power. The Viennese workers' houses were islands of socialist power in a bourgeois city. With their monumental facades and their entrances accessible only from interior courtyards, they resembled citadels.

 

Hubert Gessner, Karl Seitz-Hof in Vienna (1926-31)

Red Vienna had its beginnings immediately after World War I, when the Austrian Social Democrats, whose leaders included such remarkable Austro-Marxists as Otto Bauer, Karl Renner, and Max Adler, inherited power and established a new republic. Against the backdrop of severe food and housing shortages produced by both the military defeat and the collapse of the monarchy, the Social Democrats won a significant electoral victory in the municipal elections of May 1919, making Vienna the first major European capital to be governed by an absolute majority of socialists. (One of my favourite writers, Joseph Roth, in his The Emperor's Tomb portrayed the decaying Vienna society in the aftermath of Wold War I).

 Plate at Karl-Marx-Hof remembering 29 tenants who fell victim to the Holocaust

There also was a sizable and radical squatters' movement, and settlements were springing up on unoccupied land at the outer edges of the city. The city enlisted several students of Vienna's most prominent prewar architect, Otto Wagner, who is now best known for his Postsparkasse (Postal Savings Bank), to design large-scale public housing. The city building agency favored a "neovernacular architecture", and Wagner's students, notably Josef Hoffmann, Hubert Gessner, and Karl Ehn, seemed best qualified to create it.

Hubert Gessner, Karl Seitz-Hof in Vienna (1926-31), Detail

The Wagner school's predilection for courtyards and monumental facades highlights not only their belief in the social function of architecture but also a certain sensitivity to the cultural memory of Habsburg architecture in the Baroque era. An especially striking example is the Reumannhof. With its large central court flanked by smaller side courts in the Baroque manner, the building alluded to Schönbrunn, the nearby imperial summer palace. 

Hubert Gessner, Josef Bittner - Jakob Reumann-Hof in Vienna (1924–1926)

A number of Vienna's most innovative architects, including the eminent Adolf Loos, who worked for the city administration, criticized the Vienna building agency for failing to produce a unified aesthetic vision. In his view, Vienna suffered by comparison with the sleek, modern satellite towns built in Berlin (today a World Heritage), and in Frankfurt by Ernst May. The Winarskyhof, jointly built by Loos, Peter Behrens, Josef Frank, and Margarete Lihotzky, diverged from both Wagner School monumentality and German functionalism, achieving a more complex balance of tradition and modernity, and a greater diversity of color and detail.

 

Inauguration of the Ferdinand Lasalle monument in front of the Winarskyhof in Vienna (1928). The monument was destroyed in 1936 by the rightwing Schuschnigg government.

In the words of Otto Bauer, the party's leader and most important theorist, Red Vienna fused "sober realpolitik and revolutionary enthusiasm." On the other hand, in his 1980 study Vienna Rossa, the influential Italian architecture critic Manfredo Tafuri, a Marxist, described Red Vienna as a "declaration of war without any hope of victory," condemned to failure by the contradiction between the Social Democrats' radical rhetoric and their reformist strategies. The communal houses, he argued, were, like Red Vienna's socialist administration, "petit bourgeois" and structurally incoherent. 

Erika Giovanna Klien, Revolution in Vienna, 1930

The symbolism of the houses did not go unnoticed by the socialist's fascist opponents. Socialist housing went up in the midst of highly charged, and often violent, political conflict. During the civil war of February 1934, Red Vienna came to a tragic end, as the austro-fascist chancellor Dollfuß ordered Karl-Marx-Hof shelled with artillery, forcing the socialist fighters to surrender after two days of heavy fighting.

 February 1934: Surrender of the last socialist "Schutzbund" fighters. 200 of them died. The Social Democratic Party and all Trade Unions were forbidden, and eight party leaders executed.

Egon Schiele

Anonymous, Portrait of Egon Schiele, 1915

Egon Schiele (1890-1918) was born in Tulln, Austria. His father, Adolph Schiele, worked for the Austrian State Railways as a station master, his mother, Marie Soukup(ová), was from Krumau, (today Český Krumlov) in Bohemia. Since there was no suitable school at Tulln, Schiele was sent away in 1901, first to Krems, then to Klosterneuburg near Vienna. In 1904 the whole family followed him there because of his father's deteriorating health. Adolf Schiele's condition soon degenerated into madness, and in the following year he died, aged fifty-four from syphillis. Egon became a ward of his maternal uncle.

 Egon Schiele, Dead Mother, 1910

Schiele later felt that he had had a special relationship with his father. In 1913 he wrote to his brother-in-law: "I don't know whether there is anyone else at all who remembers my noble father with such sadness. I don't know who is able to understand why I visit those places where my father used to be and where I can feel the pain." On the other hand, he disliked his mother because he felt she did not mourn for his father enough, or give her son the attention he deserved: "My mother is a very strange woman. She doesn't understand me in the least and doesn't love me much either. If she had either love or understanding she would be prepared to make sacrifices."

 Egon Schiele, Gerti Schiele in Plaid Dress, 1909

Schiele's emotions were directed into an intense relationship with his younger sister Gerti, (above), which was not without incestuous implications. In 1906, when he was sixteen and she was twelve, he took her by train all the way to Trieste. The same year, Schiele applied at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) in Vienna, where Gustav Klimt had once studied. Perhaps those in charge scented a troublesome pupil - in any case they sent him on to the more traditional Academy of Fine Arts. Schiele duly passed the entrance examination, and was admitted as one of the youngest students ever. The next year he visited his idol, Klimt, to show him some of his drawings. Did they show talent? "Yes", Klimt replied, "much too much!"

 Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt in blue smock, 1913

Klimt took a particular interest in Schiele, buying his drawings, arranging models for him and introducing him to potential patrons. He also introduced Schiele to the Wiener Werkstätte, the arts and crafts workshop connected with the Vienna Secession. Schiele left the Academy in 1909, after completing his third year, and founded the Neukunstgruppe ("New Art Group") with other dissatisfied students. Klimt invited Schiele to exhibit at the 1909 Vienna Kunstschau, where he encountered the work of Edvard Munch, Jan Toorop, and Vincent van Gogh.

 Anonymous, Egon Schiele, 1914

Schiele found a flat and a studio and set up on his own. At this time he showed a strong interest in children, especially young girls, who were often the subjects of his drawings. Albert Paris Gütersloh, a young artist who was Schiele's friend, remembered that the establishment was overrun with them: "They slept, lazily hung around, combed their hair, pulled their dresses up or down, did up or undid their shoes, like animals in a cage which suits them, they were left to their own." Schiele made many drawings from these young models, some of which were extremely erotic. 

 Egon Schiele, Girl Putting on Shoe, 1910 

Schiele was also fascinated by his own appearance, and produced self-portraits in large numbers. He impressed not only himself, but others with whom he came into contact. The writer Arthur Rössler (below), one of Schiele's staunchest promoters, wrote about him: "Even in the presence of well known men of imposing appearance, Schiele's unusual looks stood out. He had a tall, slim, supple figure with narrow shoulders, long arms and long-fingered bony hands. His face was sunburned, beardless, and surrounded by long, dark, unruly hair. His broad, angular forehead was furrowed by horizontal lines. The features of his face were usually fixed in an earnest, almost sad expression, as though caused by pains which made him weep inwardly."

 Egon Schiele, Portrait of Arthur Rössler, 1910

In 1911, Schiele met the seventeen-year-old Wally Neuzil, who lived with him in Vienna and served as model for some of his most striking paintings. Very little is known of her, except that she had previously modelled for Gustav Klimt. Schiele and Wally wanted to escape what they perceived as the claustrophobic Viennese milieu, and went to his mother's birth town, Český Krumlov in southern Bohemia. Despite Schiele's family connections, he and his lover were driven out of town by the residents, who strongly disapproved of their lifestyle. Today, Český Krumlov is the site of a museum dedicated to Schiele. 

Egon Schiele, Krumau an der Moldau [Český Krumlov], 1913

Schiele and Wally Neuzil then  moved to Neulengbach, near Vienna. As it was in the capital, Schiele's studio became a gathering place for Neulengbach's delinquent children. Schiele's way of life again aroused much animosity among the town's inhabitants, and in April 1912 he was arrested for seducing a young girl below the age of consent. When they came to his studio to place him under arrest, the police seized more than a hundred drawings which they considered pornographic. 

 Egon Schiele, Cardinal and Nun (Tenderness), 1912

When his case was brought to court, the charges of seduction were dropped, but Schiele was found guilty of exhibiting erotic drawings in a place accessible to children. In court, the judge burned one of the offending drawings over a candle flame.The twenty-one days he had already spent in custody were taken into account, and Schiele was sentenced to three days' imprisonment in St. Pölten. While in prison, Schiele created a series of 12 paintings - among them Death and Girl (below) - and remarked: "To restrain an artist is a crime, it means to kill life! I will carry on for my art and for my lover."

Egon Schiele, Death and Girl [Schiele and Wally Neuziel], 1912

The Neulengbach affair had no effect on Schiele's career: In 1912, he was invited to show at the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, and he was also taken on by the famous art dealer Hans Goltz of Munich. The year 1915 marked a turning-point in Schiele's life. He met two girls, Edith and Adele Harms, who lived opposite his studio in Vienna. Schiele was attracted to both of them, but eventually fixed his sights on Edith. In February 1915, Schiele wrote a note to his friend Arthur Rössler stating: "I intend to get married advantageously, perhaps not to Wally." 

 Egon Schiele, Portrait of Wally, 1912

By April 1915 Schiele was engaged to Edith, and Wally Neuzil was rather cold-bloodedly dismissed. Schiele's last meeting with Wally took place at the Café Eichberger, where he played billiards nearly every day. He handed her a letter in which he proposed that, despite their parting, they take a holiday together every summer - without Edith. Wally refused. During the First World War, she joined the Red Cross as a nurse and died of scarlet fever in a military hospital near Split in Dalmatia just before Christmas 1917. Schiele and Edith were married, despite her family's opposition, in June 1915.

 Egon Schiele, Portrait of Edith Schiele, 1918

World War I now began to shape Schiele's life and work. Three days after his wedding, Schiele was ordered to report for active service in the army. He was initially stationed in Prague. In the army, Schiele never saw any fighting at the front, and was able to continue painting and sketching while guarding Russian prisoners of war, and doing light guard duties. By 1917, he was back in Vienna, able to focus on his artistic career. His output was prolific. He was now thought of as the leading Austrian artist of the younger generation.

 Egon Schiele, Poster for the Vienna Secession's 49th exhibition, 1918

Schiele was asked to take part in a government-sponsored exhibition in Stockholm and Copenhagen intended to improve Austria's image with the neutral Scandinavian powers. He was also invited to participate in the Secession's 49th exhibition, held in Vienna in 1918. Schiele had fifty works accepted for this exhibition, and they were displayed in the main hall. He designed a poster for the exhibition (above), which was reminiscent of the Last Supper, with a portrait of himself in the place of Christ. The show was a triumphant success, and as a result, prices for Schiele's works increased considerably. During the same year, he also had successful shows in Zürich, Prague, and Dresden.

 Martha Fein, Egon Schiele's  Death Bed, 1918

Schiele and Edith moved to a new and grander house and studio. Their pleasure in it was brief. In the autumn of 1918, the Spanish flu epidemic that claimed more than 20 million lives in Europe reached Vienna. Edith, who was six months pregnant, succumbed to the disease on 28 October. Schiele died only three days after his wife. He was 28 years old. During the three days between their deaths, Schiele drew a few sketches of Edith. These were his last works.You can see a timeline of Schiele's work in my Flickr set.

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky

 

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Self-Portrait with Red Hat, 1920s

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (1906-1996) was born in Vienna. Her father Edmund Motesiczky von Kesseleökeö was of ancient Hungarian nobility. A talented amateur cellist and devoted huntsman, he died when Marie-Louise was only three years old. Her mother Henriette came from an extremely wealthy and cultured family of Jewish bankers whose relations included many distinguished names from the social and intellectual life of Vienna (among them Richard Strauss, Anton Rubinstein, and Henrik Ibsen). 

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, View from the Window, Vienna, 1925

The family had donated many art works to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and, in their palatial salon opposite the opera, Hugo von Hofmannsthal had read his first poems. Their own art collection at the family's country estate in Hinterbrühl was formidable.The family also made an impact on the origin of psychoanalysis, Motesiczky’s grandmother Anna von Lieben being one of Sigmund Freud’s early patients. Her case is recorded as Frau Cäcilie M. in the annals of Psychoanalysis.

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Psychoanalyst, n.d.

Aged 13, Motesiczky left school – a mistake, as she later admitted. She subsequently attended art classes in Vienna, The Hague, Frankfurt and Berlin. In 1926 she visited Paris where she rented a studio, and saw Max Beckmann from time to time. There she painted a first masterpiece (Paris Workman, below) and shortly afterwards a remarkable statuesque Self-portrait with Comb, now in the Belvedere, Vienna. A year later she was invited by Max Beckmann to join his master class at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Beckmann had been introduced to the Motesiczky family in 1920. He left a strong and lasting impression on Motesiczky both as a person and an artist and was to become a life-long friend. 

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Paris Workman, 1926

Motesiczky spent a decade quietly developing her artistic skills, exhibiting only once, in 1933, with the Hagenbund. In the wake of Nazi Germany's invasion of Austria in 1938, she had to  leave her native country, as her family included Jewish descent. Motesiczky’s older brother Karl, a Marxist, was a friend of Heimito von Doderer and a close collaborator of Wilhelm Reich. Karl refused to leave Austria and used the family house near Vienna to shelter Jewish friends. In 1943 Karl was denounced and sent to Auschwitz where he died shortly afterwards. 

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Portrait of Karl von Motesiczky, n.d.

With her mother Motesiczky went to Holland where she had her first solo exhibition in 1939. Shortly afterwards they left for England and, after a brief stay in London, settled in Amersham. It was here that Motesiczky met the writer Elias Canetti (the 1981 Nobel Prize winner in literature), with whom she became romantically involved. Canetti was a close friend and companion for the next three decades, and she painted him several times. Canetti wrote large parts of his famous Crowds and Power in  Motesiczky's London home. His was the last major portrait she painted in 1993, not long before he died, now in the National Portrait Gallery.

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Elias Canetti, 1930s

Motesiczky was one of a menage à quatre, which Canetti himself characterized this way: "One complains, the other staggers, and the third breathes through gills. The proud owner of three very different women." The plaintiff was his wife Veza Canetti, his lurching lover the poet Friedl Benedikt, and Marie-Louise was the wife with the gills: Motesiczky often dreamed of fishes (they often appear in her paintings too). In 1942, Canetti dedicated a collection of aphorisms to Motesiczky, Aufzeichnungen für Marie-Louise, which was only published in 2005. These are records from the time of the Blitzkrieg, in which we already find Canetti's major themes: language, death, time, and utopia.

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky,The Travellers, 1940

In 1943, Motesiczky joined the Artists’ International Association and took part in several of their exhibitions. The following year, Motesiczky’s first solo exhibition in London took place at the Czechoslovak Institute. She also renewed her acquaintance with Oskar Kokoschka who had been a friend of the family in Vienna. After the war Motesiczky moved to London. Two solo exhibitions in The Hague and Amsterdam in 1952 were followed two years later by one at the Städtische Galerie in Munich and one at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London in 1960. The first success in Austria came in 1966 when the Wiener Secession staged a large solo exhibition which subsequently travelled to Linz, Bremen and Munich. In the early 1960s, she bought the house at 6 Chesterford Gardens where her mother soon joined her. By the time Henriette died in 1978, aged 96, Motesiczky had produced a series of beautiful and moving images of her. 

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, The Magic Fish, n.d.

The artistic breakthrough in the United Kingdom came with the major solo exhibition at the Goethe-Institut in London in 1985 which achieved enormous critical acclaim. By the time the Österreichische Galerie im Belvedere in Vienna held a retrospective exhibition of Motesiczky’s work in 1994, she had already established her reputation as an important Austrian painter of the twentieth century. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky died in London on 10 June 1996.

Alfred Kubin

  

Perhaps that is precisely what life is: a dream and an anxiety - Kubin

 Alfred Kubin, c. 1950

Alfred Kubin (1877-1959) was born in Bohemia in the town of Leitmeritz (today Litoměřice, Czech Republic) which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Kubin spent his childhood and student days in Salzburg, where he attended the arts and crafts school. After that he was a photography apprentice for four years in Klagenfurt. In 1896, Kubin attempted suicide on his mother's grave, and a short stint in the Austrian army the following year ended with a nervous breakdown. 

Alfred Kubin, The Lady on the Horse, c. 1900

In 1898, Kubin moved to Munich where he studied at the private academy of the painter Ludwig Schmitt-Reutte, before enrolling at the Munich Art Academy in 1899 (without finishing his studies there). In Munich, Kubin discovered the works of Odilon Redon, Edvard Munch, James Ensor, Henry de Groux and Félicien Rops. He was profoundly affected by the prints of Max Klinger. After seeing an exhibition of Max Klinger’s etchings in Munich Kubin wrote: 

 Alfred Kubin, Dream Animal, 1903

"I was suddenly inundated with visions of pictures in black and white - it is impossible to describe what a thousand-fold treasure my imagination poured out before me. Quickly I left the theater, for the music and the mass of lights now disturbed me, and I wandered aimlessly in the dark streets, overcome and literally ravished by a dark power that conjured up before my mind strange creatures, houses, landscapes, grotesque and frightful situations."

 Alfred Kubin, The Hour of Death, 1900

Around the turn of the century Kubin got into an ecstasy of creativity, and created more than hundred sheets of his famous "Frühwerk" (early work). In February 1904 he met Hedwig Gründler, sister of the author Oskar A.H. Schmitz, whom he married the same year. She financed the acquisition of the so-called "Schlössl" in Zwickledt near Wernstein/Inn, where they moved in 1906.

 Alfred Kubin, Untitled, c. 1900

Occasional trips to Bohemia, the Balkans, the south of France, Italy, Prague, Berlin, Munich, Zurich or Paris allowed Kubin to meet with artist colleagues and friends. In 1909 he became a member of the "Neue Künstlervereinigung München", which he left in 1911 together with Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter to join the newly founded Blauer Reiter group. In 1913 he exhibited with his friends Paul Klee and Franz Marc in the gallery Der Sturm in Berlin. Kubin produced a small number of oil paintings between 1902 and 1910, but thereafter his output consisted of pen and ink drawings, watercolors, and lithographs.

  Alfred Kubin, Mythical Animal, 1905

Like Oskar Kokoschka, Kubin had both artistic and literary talent. He illustrated more than 70 books  by Edgar Allan Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and others. He was also the author of several books, the best known being his novel Die Andere Seite (The Other Side, 1909), an apocalyptic fantasy set in an oppressive imaginary land which has an atmosphere of claustrophobic absurdity reminiscent of the writings of Franz Kafka.

Alfred Kubin, The Government, 1901

After the First World War many solo exhibitions were dedicated to Kubin. In 1930 he became a member of the prestigious Preußische Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and in 1937 he was awarded the title of a professor. After 1933 more than 60 of Kubin's work were confiscated as "degenerate art" and removed from German and Austrian museums. Alfred Kubin died in Zwickledt in 1959. His artistic estate was split between the Albertina Vienna and the Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum Linz. In 1962 his house and the library became the Kubin-Gedenkstätte Zwickledt (Kubin-Memorial Zwickledt). You can see more of Kubin's work in my Flickr set.