In the published manuscript of the painting, Kafka painted "a long-legged clown walking silly" and "a man in a bowler hat like Chaplin". According to Andreas Kilcher, the book editor of Kafka's picture books, the paintings show Kafka's "superb understanding of the visual arts." According to reports, when Kafka studied law at the University of Prague from 1901 to 1906, he was already interested in painting, often drawing some illustrations for his classmates.
Kafka
Kircher said Kafka had asked his friend Max Brod to burn the manuscripts, including the paintings, after his death, but apparently Brod did not. After Kafka's death in 1924, his novels and diaries were published under the planning of Broad and were widely acclaimed. In 1939, when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, Brod went into exile in Palestine with Kafka's works and paintings. Before his death in 1968, he gave the manuscripts to his secretary, hoping that they would be forwarded to "the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv City Library, or other organizations in Israel or abroad."
Manuscript of Kafka's paintings, source: The Guardian/Ardon Bar-Hama
However, the secretary also went against Broad's wishes. The manuscripts were eventually sealed in bank safes in Israel and Switzerland. It wasn't until the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that the manuscripts should be the property of the National Library of Israel. These documents are now publicly accessible through the website of the National Library of Israel.
"Kafka's paintings are often far from realistic depictions," Kircher says. Kafka's work is adept at expressing the existential dilemma of man through absurd and bizarre situations and images, and these characteristics are often reflected in his paintings, which "usually have abstract elements". Many people think that Kafka was hostile to the figurative art of painting, and he once objected to publishers drawing a woodcut for his short story "Stoke". In 1915, he even wrote a letter exhorting that, in his most famous work, Metamorphosis, "Insects should not be drawn."
However, the paintings released this time seem to present a different Kafka, and his attitude towards visual art seems to be far more complicated than people know. In Kircher's view, if people often read Kafka's novels with the feeling of "falling into an ice cave", then the content of these paintings will make people feel "sunny".
Reference Links:
rgb(65,119,193)https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/29/franz-kafka-drawings-reveal-sunny-side-to-bleak-bohemian-novelist
Reporter | Liu Yaguang
Edit | Xu Yuedong
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