Printmaker, illustrator, and painter Alfred Kubin was born Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin on April 10, 1877 in Litoměřice, Bohemia, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now the Czech Republic). His early childhood was difficult, marked by death and emotional isolation, and any inclination he had toward art went uninvestigated until his early twenties. As a youth he apprenticed for four years with a lphotographer but was not drawn to the craft and was eventually let go. Suffering from severe depression, Kubin attempted suicide in 1896 at age nineteen. He was sent into the army the following year, but his mental and physical health further declined and, after a mental breakdown, was released from duty.

Desperate to help his son, his father required that Kunbin take a year to rest. This proved helpful, as he began teaching himself to draw and found that he had talent for it. His father then sent him to study at the studio of Ludwig Schmitt-Reutte, where he studied for a year before enrolling in the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in 1899. It was there that he found his true artistic path, inspired by the works of Redon, Munch, Rops, de Groux, Goya, and Ensor, whose expressive, often dark or deeply emotional works resonated with the young man whose life had been so marred with strife. Of particular interest to Kubin were the etchings of Max Klinger, especially his "Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove" series. He found a home among the Expressionists and Symbolists and he soon left the Academy to pursue etching and aquatint techniques on his own time. His first participation in a major exhibition took place a the Cassirer Gallery, Berlin in 1902. His first portfolio of etchings was published in photogravure the following year by Hans von Weber, and was received with critical praise.

Another source of inspiration for Kubin was Nietzche and Schopenhaur, whose writings on the metaphysical and godlessness became a kind of comfort to Kubin, who had long felt detached from religion and the lighter emotions of friendship and love. After his father's death in 1907 triggered a period of artist's block, he began writing instrad. In 1909 Kubin wrote and published his only novel, The Other Side, a dark fantasy for which he used drawings originally intended the book Golem by Gustav Meyrink. It proved to be enormously influential to writers and thinkers such as Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Joseph Roth, among many others.

By 1911 he was associated with the Blue Reiter group and exhibited regularly with them, and became close friends with Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinski. However, within two years he had distanced himself from the avant-garde, partially owing to his general withdrawal from society. He lived in rural Austria from 1906 until his death, retreating to his estate for longer and longer stretches as time went by. This allowed him to skirt much of the persecution of the Nazi regime, even after some of his work was confiscated and deemed "degenerate." 

Though the bulk of his work continued to meditate on pain, grief, and strange manifestations of nightmares, he had moments of lighter output in the early 1910s owing to his first romantic relationship and subsequent engagement to Emmy Bayer in 1903. Tragically, she died before they could wed. This appears to have cemented his pursuit of dark imagery on his own time, but he continued to work as an illustrator books by Poe, Dostoevsky, Balzac, and Mann. He married Hedwig Grundler, a wealthy woman who had been widowed at a young age, and they maintained a respectful friendship for the rest of their lives, and were buried next to one another. 

Kubin received the City of Vienna Prize for Visual Arts (1950); the Grand Austrian State Prize for Visual Art (1951), the Austrian Medal for Science and Art (1957), and was awarded a Gustav Klimt medal as a member of the Vienne Secession. While his focus was on Symbolism and Expressionism, his work is now rightly credited as having great influence on the Surrealists. He died in Zwickledt, Upper Austria, on August 20, 1959.