Biographical information on Alois Kolb is scarce. Born in Vienna in 1875, the son of a German decorative painter and a Viennese mother, he spent part of his adolescence (probably between the years 1886 and 1892) in Graz, Austria.

From 1896 onward he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, following Karl Raupp’s painting course. During those years he was a pupil of Friedrich Fehr, Ludwig Schmid-Reutte, and Ludwig von Löfftz. Always drawn to the art of engraving, he devoted himself to it as an autodidact.

Between 1901 and 1904 Kolb and Ebersberg are found in the vicinity of Munich, and in the biennium 1904–1905 in Murnau. During this period he worked as an advertising graphic artist and as an illustrator for Zeitschrift Jugend (“Youth Magazine”). Already in those years he produced engravings of technical mastery. As a graphic artist he was influenced by the celebrated Ferdinand Schmutzer.

From 1905 to 1907 Kolb served as instructor of nude and figure drawing at the Art Lyceum of Magdeburg. In 1907 he was appointed professor of engraving at the Königliche Akademie für graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe in Leipzig, where he remained until his death in 1942, in the midst of the Second World War.

Kolb’s artistic significance lies—aside from his vast graphic output, which includes several paintings, still lifes, nudes, portraits, and lithographic cycles such as the Iliad and Odyssey of 1921 and 1922—exclusively in the field of engraving, an art in which he was an absolute master. His teaching at the Königliche Akademie für graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe in Leipzig proved a fertile cradle for many renowned artists.

Kolb’s poetics begins with a popular subject matter and transforms it into works of profound philosophical symbolism, thanks to a language that is utterly peculiar and personal.