The “Creature from Mars” is an extraterrestrial, an alien. Alfred Kubin composed this hybrid creature from various animal parts: insect-like bulging eyes, a proboscis-like nose, bird-like legs with sharp claws, a jagged lizard-like back, and the spotted body of a hyena. The gray-greenish head peeks out from a protective neck frill, into which the creature can retreat like a turtle into its shell. The “Creature from Mars” crouches lonely and abandoned on a small hill, surveying a barren heathland beneath a gray sky. The atmosphere is bleak, and one is unsure whether the creature is on Mars or on Earth, whether one should fear it or pity it. Kubin draws from a rich inner reservoir of images. Even as a child, he collected beetles and kept insects, reptiles, and a tame crow. He drew snakes and spiders, lying for hours on the shore of Lake Zell to observe fish, newts, diving beetles, and water striders. The master of eerie phantasms demonstrates here not only his immense imagination but also his virtuoso mastery as a painter and draftsman. The “Creature from Mars” is drawn and painted with pastel chalk and gouache on cardboard. Particularly delicate is the color treatment of the front part of the body and the legs with pink-white tones, which the artist contrasts with the gray-green tones that dominate the entire sheet. When Kubin painted “The Being from Mars” in 1906, he had just moved with his wife to Wernstein in Upper Austria, to the old Zwickledt estate high above the Inn River. In this small castle, he wrote the fantastical novel “The Other Side” in 1908. In the midst of World War I, which triggered a creative crisis in Kubin, he added a dedication on the back of the sheet: “To Marianne, the best mother, wife, and friend, I dedicate this painting created in 1906, Alfred Kubin, Zwickledt, May 1917.” Marianne Grafe (1892–1951), née Weil, was a longtime friend of Kubin’s and the wife of Felix Grafe (1888–1942), a poet and Kubin collector who was friends with the artist. Kubin had dedicated and presented “The Being from Mars” to her in May 1917.