Alfred Kubin (1877-1959) was an artist who fought against innumerable odds to learn his craft and to find his medium and his audience. Although in both his life and his art he often exhibited a capricious disregard for causality and revelled in inconsistencies, his work conveys his determination to interpret, analyse, and illuminate the world as he saw it. He felt that his own being was ravaged by a struggle between the demands of logic and the seduction of imagination. His life ranged between these polarities, and his finest art was created during those moments when he brought the two extremes into balance.