Human Misery (Lidske Bidy) Portfolio Wrapper

While Otakar Kubin chose to publish the print portfolio Human Misery (Lidské Bídy) in Paris, his very choice of the woodcut medium for the six prints it contained reflects strong associations with expressionistic impulses in recent European art outside the French capitol. As a genre, the modern woodcut print is most closely identified with the late nineteenth-century French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin (in particular, his prints from the Tahiti period) and the German artistic groups Die Brücke (The Bridge) and Die Blaue Reiter (Blue Reiter) active in the decade before the outbreak of World War I . This pan-national expressionist impulse was widely recognized by critics at the time: In 1913, the year before he published Human Misery, Kubin himself staged a one-person exhibition at Der Sturm, the prominent gallery in Berlin showcasing leading figures of French Cubism and German Expressionism.