Possessed by Dybbuks

By R. H.

The spadework has been ruthless, the disinterment squads never tire. One might think that all the minor figures of early 20th century art had by now been exhumed and dusted off, and that no reputations were left to be polished. Not quite true. A case in point is that of Alfred Kubin (1877-1959), some of whose drawings are presently on show at the Serge Sabarsky Gallery in New York. For years, Kubin was regarded as a mere footnote to Austrian Expressionism--a man whose chief importance was vicarious, having influenced the young Paul Klee and provided enough indicative puffs of fantasy with his drawings and book illustrations to qualify him as a "precursor" of Surrealism.

But even a small show like this demonstrates that Kubin was much more: he was one of the masters of fantasy, a Callot with a richer and, so to speak, post-Freudian imagination. The images he conjured with the insect-like scratchings of his inked nib possessed him as dybbuks their host.

"I do not see the world 'just like that,'" Kubin once declared. "In moments of strange half-wakefulness I am astounded to behold its transmutations, which are often almost imperceptible, so that in my first stage of awareness they are seldom clearly seen, but must be groped for and gradually hunted out."

Often the transformations were of a fairly familiar kind: the witches and sphinxes, the demons and pop-eyed St. Anthonys that had haunted earlier European painters also infested Rubin's head, and even the massive silhouettes and delicately sprayed tones of gray in his backgrounds seem devised as a tribute to Goya's oneiric etchings.

He could produce highly wrought political caricature--Government, 1901, is a superb image of the state as machine, a cross between palace and steam roller, drawn years before the invention of the tank but moving blindly across a dead landscape manned by a gunner and some top-hatted diplomats, popes and kings. But his most memorable images were elegies of dispossession: of that dark tract between social role and inner imagination whose verbal maps were drawn by Kubin's Middle European contemporary, Franz Kafka. The Guilt, 1902, is quintessential Kubin: a starveling figure immersed to his knees in water, bent double under the weight of a fat, disaffected-looking seal--slimy, absurd and immovable. The beast is not even malevolent enough to make his victim look brave. It was with such images that alienation became identifiable as a state of art and its rule over the European imagination began.

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