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A Corpse in the Countryside (Geländete Leiche)
A Corpse in the Countryside (Geländete Leiche)
A Corpse in the Countryside (Geländete Leiche)

A Corpse in the Countryside (Geländete Leiche)

Maker (Austrian, 1877 - 1959)
Date1919
MediumLithograph
DimensionsStone: 5-7/8 x 4-3/16 in. (14.9 x 10.6 cm)
Sheet: 16-1/16 x 12-1/8 in. (40.8 x 30.8 cm)
Credit LineGift of Andrea L. Weil and John A. Weil
Collections
Object number2001.61f
Status
Not on view
Description
Both artist and writer, Alfred Kubin illustrated the poems and short stories of the nineteenth-century American Romantic Edgar Allan Poe, who is known for his tales of mystery and the macabre.  The best known of Kubin's own books is The Other Side (Die Andere Seite) (1909), a fantastic novel set in an oppressive imaginary land.  The Other Side has an atmosphere of claustrophobic absurdity reminiscent of the existential writings—filled with the themes and archetypes of alienation, physical and psychological brutality, terrifying quests, and mystical transformations—of the Czech writer Franz Kafka, who admired Kubin’s The Other Side. Such thematic tendencies appear in this small landscape print, in which the idyll of a country house is broken unexpectedly by the unexplained presence of naked human corpse in the foreground.