Polibek Otce

When Otakar Kubin first moved to Paris, he initially stayed with his friend, the today little-known Czech writer and literary critic Otto Klein. The six woodcuts forming Kubin’s print cycle Human Misery (Lidské Bídy) are accompanied by one of Klein’s poems, which is published in Czech and entitled A Father’s Kiss. Much like other tales of seafaring in western literature—from Ulysses in Homer’s epic classical Greek poem The Odyssey to Captain Ahab in Herman Melville’s nineteenth-century novel Moby-Dick—Klein’s text relates heroic action, but the trope here is tinged with an Expressionist spirituality—divine intervention and human salvation.

Rather than acting as simple illustrations of the poem’s narrative action, four of the six compositions (prints numbered II through IV by the artist) feature a single contorted male caught in bands of vertical light and dark striations that abstractly capture the inner psychology of the protagonist. The two embracing male figures in the first print (no. I, see Accession no. 20011.46.3), however, directly relates to the paternal love called out in the poem’s title. Similarly, the plants and dark sky in the final print (no. VI, see accession no. 2011.46.8) evoke the final revelatory passage of the poem: “The conscious night glows with the white silver in a birch tree / and the day is like a dream of sparkling streams.”