In cooperation with the Leopold Museum in Vienna, the Kunsthaus Zug is now presenting that institution’s extensive and important Alfred Kubin collection. Some 140 works from all periods of the Austrian artist’s career are on view, enhanced by the Kunsthaus Zug’s own Kubin holdings. While tribute has been paid to Kubin’s œuvre in New York and Paris over the course of the past years, presentations of his work in Switzerland have been very few and far between. The exhibition now being featured by the Kunsthaus Zug is the first in Switzerland to introduce Kubin – one of the twentieth century’s most prominent draughtsmen – as an illustrator and author as well.

Alfred Kubin was born in Litomerice, Bohemia (now Czech Republic) in 1877 and completed his initial training in Salzburg and Klagenfurt. He began studying art in Munich in 1898. From 1906 until his death he lived in the secluded town of Zwickledt in Upper Austria, was a co-founder of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists’ Association of Munich) and participated in projects of the Blauer Reiter.Kubin had a true double gift. In addition to his Fantastic-Surrealist drawing œuvre, he published a novel – Die andere Seite (English translation: The Other Side) – in 1909. Among those to express their appreciation of this work were, for example, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Kafka and Ernst Jünger; it was moreover significant for later Expressionist poetry. Kubin’s relationship to literature also manifested itself in his activities as an outstanding illustrator. Apart from his own texts he illustrated some sixty books by authors of importance to him such as Balzac, Canetti, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, von Hofmannsthal, Kleist, Poe and Strindberg.

The Kubin Context – Works from the Collection Spatially interwoven with the Kubin show is a presentation of works from the Kunsthaus Zug providing a context for the Austrian draughtsman’s idiosyncratic œuvre. Works by representatives of Viennese Modernism as well as the Blauer Reiter are included here. Examples of Swiss art likewise shed light on this outstanding and influential artist’s impact and continued relevance.

A Gallery for Gustav Klimt On the occasion of the 150th birthday of Gustav Klimt in 2012, the majority of the Kunsthaus collection’s (Stiftung Sammlung Kamm) Klimt holdings are on display in a separate gallery along with a complementary group of drawings from the Leopold Museum.