(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
A fractured baby doll’s head frowns on a wooden mannequin-like statue, clinging to the arm of an unsettling figure, inhuman and skeletal. With an expressionless face, its limbs are flailing and contorted. Poppies rest in its hand, against a pale green background. This is the painting that adorns Nirvana’s 1992 compilation album Incesticide, made by Kurt Cobain, showing a grave depiction of the symbols that marred the singer’s life.
Incesticide, released on December 15th, 1992, was compiled from the remnants of Nirvana’s recorded live songs, B-sides and demos that they affectionately referred to as “odds and sods”, and was conceived during the recording sessions for Nevermind. Rather than following their generation-defining opus with a hastily-recorded follow-up LP, Nirvana opted to release a misfit collection that served as a reminder of their punk roots, ones they were desperately trying to maintain their grasp on as sudden fame engulfed them.
The album would also combat the bootleggers who, at the time, were profiting from their outtakes, circulating many of the songs among fan communities. Nirvana, in turn, sought to offer their music to fans at a better quality and reasonable cost. Coincidentally, their former label, Seattle’s Sub Pop, announced that they still possessed a trove of unreleased Nirvana material.
The indie label eventually sold the recordings to Nirvana’s Geffen Records, granting Nirvana more creative control over its output and allowing the final product to reach wider audiences than Sub Pop could. In his book Cobain Unseen, Charles R Cross wrote that Cobain agreed to Incesticide’s release because he would have full reign over the artwork, choosing his acrylic-oil painting that, in its simplicity, bore the weight of his pain.
Common themes infiltrated Cobain’s artwork from his sketches as a child and followed him into adulthood. An early fixation with physiology and human anatomy especially persisted, whether that be shown through handmade collages of human body parts scrounged from science textbooks, or drawings of nightmarish creatures that resembled a human, but wielded the uncanny.
For most of his life, Cobain suffered from an undiagnosed chronic stomach condition, a debilitating ailment that he would later document in his lyrics for Nirvana, particularly on their final album, 1993’s In Utero, where nearly every song makes reference to notions of illness. ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ is perhaps the most blatant, its name in reference to pennyroyal leaves as an abortifacient, as well as ‘Milk It’ (“I am my own parasite / I don’t need a host to live”).
In his artwork, he exorcised his physical ailments by depicting the body in stages of life and death, from fetuses to old, withered beings, which translated into an obsession with fragility and mortality, shown in recurring motifs of newborn babies, womb-like spaces and decaying things (human or otherwise). Increasingly cryptic, there is something beautiful in a lot of Cobain’s work buried beneath the initial shock, a disruptive beauty that, above all else, leans into an uncanny existence. The painting is a primary display of Cobain’s ability to harness this strange paradox.
As quoted in Michael Azerrad’s authorised Nirvana biography, Come As You Are, Cobain remains humble about his painting’s origins, simply stating, “It’s just the image I came up with.” Yet, the image captures a major theme across all of Cobain’s art: innocence.
The painting speaks to a feeling of abandonment: the baby doll, with its poor, caved-in head, literally clinging to a parental figure who is, essentially, a shell, looking as though it has been stripped to its bones, and the red poppies, the sole drops of vibrancy in the otherwise muted painting, were taken from a postcard that Cobain says just happened to be lying on his floor, perhaps mere glimpses of hope, strewn across the ground.
It served as the perfect personification of Incesticide’s broader message: a blatant irreverence and disregard of social and authoritative expectations, and an assertion of what was to come on In Utero. Incesticide may have been a mere compilation (as its initial title of Cash Cow would suggest), but it was also a display of Nirvana reclaiming their work and image, in a world that wished to conflate their reality with divisive fiction. Cobain’s painting, then, was an ideal vision that would disturb the masses – as intended.
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