Alfred Kubin's The Other Side

[rich]

http://dxsuperpremium.blogspot.com/2007/10/other-side-by-alfred-kubin.html

another Vheissu-like dream of annihilation. Kubin's only novel. known
more for his artwork

Written in 1908 and hailed by artists such as Kandinsky, The Other
Side describes a dream kingdom that becomes a nightmare and a journey
to Pearl, a mysterious city created deep in Asia that is also a
journey into the subconscious'

http://calitreview.com/1624

wonderful drawings. if u like Goya and the Wall

In Munich and Berlin it reached for a vehement, grotesque, fantastic
linguistic means, for a wild primitive-sounding syntax, from which an
“other modernism” gradually emerged. Kubin helped create this anarchic
opening, which ignored the norms of taste of peinture and ultimately
still avowed the ancient Horatian delectare—that is, an experience of
the moment in which we recognize a variation of Lessing’s “pleasure.”
Kubin had something quite different in mind: with his hallucinatory
incantations he was seeking to disturb the viewer; he felt driven to
solve the riddle of humankind and creation in a spellbinding act. In
the process he exposed himself to the anxiety that Worringer wrote had
been controlled by the Oriental peoples, since they see “in the world
nothing but the shimmering veil of Maya.” Kubin’s studies of occult
doctrines and Buddhism did not provide him with the refuge for which
he had hoped, however. As early as 1908 he was warning his friend
Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando against Buddhism: “a watertight but
sterile system” that “is incompatible with an artistically creative
existence.”

rich