Death Jump 1902

Alfred Kubin made this drawing, Death Jump, with ink on paper. Look at the way he built up those huge land masses with such delicate hatching, it feels like the kind of marks that take time, days of building tone on tone, like the earth itself, bit by bit. But then you see the diver, all sharp angles, diving right into that black abyss. It’s a total rupture. I wonder, is it erotic? Or terrifying? Maybe both? The texture feels so important here, it makes the image both so personal, a world we enter into, and kind of brutal. Like the earth is opening up. Think of Goya, how he explores the dark side of the imagination, or even the humor in Redon's dreamscapes, Kubin is in that zone. Art lets us hold these questions, these contrasts, without needing to resolve them.