Austrian printmaker, illustrator, and occasional writer, considered an important representative of Symbolism and Expressionism. His work is noted for dark, spectral, symbolic fantasies, often assembled into thematic series of drawings.
Kubin produced a small number of oil paintings between 1902 and 1910, but thereafter his output consisted of pen and ink drawings, watercolours, and lithographs.
Kubin’s only written work was Die andere Seite (The Other Side) (1908), a fantasty novel set in an oppressive imaginary land.
In 1911, he became associated with the Blaue Reiter group, and exhibited with them in the Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin in 1913. After that time, he lost contact with the artistic avant-garde.
Like Oskar Kokoschka and Albert Paris Gütersloh, Kubin had both artistic and literary talent. He illustrated the works of Edgar Allan Poe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, among others. Kubin also illustrated the German fantasy magazine Der Orchideengarten.
From 1906 until his death, he withdrew to a Manor-House on a 12th-century estate in Zwickledt, Upper Austria. In 1938, at the Anschluss of Austria and Nazi Germany, his work was declared entartete Kunst or “degenerate art,” but he managed to continue working during World War II.
Alfred Kubin died on 20 August 1959 at age 82 in Zwickledt near Wernstein am Inn, Austria.
Link to Wikipedia biography