The present work, Kopf mit abgeschnittener, is a remarkable distillation of Kubin’s intense angst and anguish in single human form – a man alone, his gaunt skull-like face, disfigured with the gaping absence of a nose. Kubin’s oeuvre is defined by his preoccupation with nightmarish visions of gigantic or hybrid animals, of humans distorted into near unrecognisable monstrosities, and by images of torture, pain, disease and death, often rooted in literary precedents. Inspired by the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and, in particular, Arthur Schopenhauer, the weight of the modern world and its precarious future fell heavily upon Kubin. William Blake and Francisco Goya influenced his visionary draughtsmanship, influences that would be amplified and made entirely his own in his illustrations for Edgar Allen Poe, famed for his macabre bleakness, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

The present work was used in Kubin’s book of illustrations, Dämonen und Nachtgesichte, published in 1926, though the work itself was made nearly two decades earlier. Dämonen und Nachtgesichte (Demons and Nocturnal Visions) is populated by spectres, horrifying images of death occupying the mortal world, and the grotesque, the human world turned into a living nightmare. This head is perhaps both the subject of the nightmare, a terrifying, deformed vision, and the originator of the nightmare, the individual man, alone in the world, comprehending the illogical pain and suffering and the uncertainty of humanity on the brink of war and at the mercy of the relentless progress of industrialisation.