Alfred Kubin

Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin was born on 10 April 1877 in Leitmeritz, Bohemia, then part of Austria-Hungary and now Litomerice in the Czech Republic. His family later moved to Zell am See and then to Salzburg, where Kubin attended secondary school but left before completing it. From 1892 to 1896 he apprenticed as a photographer under landscape photographer Alois Beer in Klagenfurt, an experience he later said taught him little. In 1896 he attempted suicide at his mother's grave, and the following year a brief stint in the Austrian army ended in a nervous breakdown, episodes that are consistently documented in his standard biographies.

In 1898 Kubin moved to Munich to pursue art, studying first at the private academy of painter Ludwig Schmitt-Reutte and then, from 1899, at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in the class of Nikolaos Gysis. He did not complete his studies at either institution. His first solo exhibition took place in 1902 at the gallery of Paul Cassirer in Berlin, establishing him within the German art scene despite mixed reviews. In 1906 he settled at the Zwickledt estate near Wernstein am Inn, Austria, where he would live and work for the rest of his life. He died there on 20 August 1959; most major reference sources, including Wikipedia, Artnet, and Sotheby's, converge on this date, though one source gives 24 August 1959 as a minority reading. He was buried in the Wernstein cemetery.

In his later years Kubin received a series of Austrian state honors, including the Prize of the City of Vienna for Visual Arts (1950), the Grand Austrian State Prize for Visual Art (1951), and, two years before his death, the Austrian Cross of Merit, First Class, for Science and Art (1957).

Kubin is treated in standard art-historical accounts as a key transitional figure between Symbolism and Expressionism, and his macabre, dreamlike drawings are frequently cited as forerunners of Surrealist imagery. His reputation in the United States rested for decades on a single 1941 gallery show at Galerie St. Etienne in New York, later reinforced by a 1983 exhibition there of 52 drawings and watercolors reviewed in The New York Times. The Neue Galerie's 2008 to 2009 exhibition "Alfred Kubin: Drawings, 1897 to 1909," organized with the curator of the Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich, was described by the museum as the first major museum exhibition of his work held in the United States, a marker of his slow but steady institutional rediscovery outside German-speaking Europe.

Kubin's auction market centers on drawings and works on paper, with results concentrated in Germany and Austria and occasional standout results abroad. The current auction record is "Epidemie" (Epidemic), a pen-and-ink drawing restituted from the Lenbachhaus, Munich, to the heirs of Max and Hertha Morgenstern, which sold for GBP 963,000 including premium (approximately USD 1.22 million) at Sotheby's, London, on 19 June 2019, a result reported by The Art Newspaper as triple the previous artist record.

There is no single gallery or estate entity that formally represents Kubin today. His work moves through specialist drawings dealers, art fairs, and the major auction houses, and no published catalogue raisonne currently exists to anchor attribution, which places extra weight on provenance and on the judgment of recognized Austrian Expressionism specialists. Auction volume is modest relative to his institutional standing, so a single strong or weak result can move the picture of his market considerably.