Schopenhauer, one of Kubin’s great influences, indulges in a kind of faux-disbelief at the purposelessness of suffering, in order to flip it around into a positive cognitive experience. Kubin observes a similar split between incredulity and faith. He revels in the accidents of association which allow for a symbolic language to arise, but is strangely disbelieving in their existence as mere accidents. This is a kind of negative path to faith, to magic. He, like Schopenhauer, is a sweet darkness, like treacle or liquorice. An acquired taste, for sure, but generally rich as a rule.
Much like Schopenhauer’s late-career aphorisms, and also, weirdly, much like contemporary internet memes, Kubin’s drawings operate as self contained units of cultural consciousness, presenting a narrative as rich as a Goethe story all at once in a single frame, in one image. Like a comet with its tail of light, their immediate form trails energy, historical significance, and emotional depth.
The Fate of Mankind III shows exactly Shopenhauer’s “taskmaster,” sweeping the living towards the cliff of their deaths. Though ‘master’ is a misgendered term here - the figure is a faceless but all-powerful woman. There’s a psychosexual element at play.
The Hour of Death shows Kubin’s philosophic imagination at its most ingenious. The scything hand of the clock beheads men as it turns, the severed heads caught in a net below. Though it’s horrifying, it cannot comfortably be said to be pessimistic. We delight in its creativity and ingenuity, even as we recoil from the graphic imagery and stark invocation of mortality. By turns we are repulsed and compelled, like with all the best horror.
Schopenhauer the philosopher is often said to have had the mind of a poet or artist, but the overwhelming achievements of his predecessor, Goethe, meant that he (and his near-contemporaries in German metaphysics) turned to philosophy as their imaginative outlet. Certainly, he takes a sort of monochrome delight in conjuring images, correlatives and metaphors to elucidate his theory of the metaphysical ‘will’ of the world. In the compulsive picture-making of the Austrian Kubin, many of Schopenhauer’s rhetorical imagery find its visual form.
