In the margins of his manuscripts or letters, in his notebooks or on loose sheets, Kafka (1883-1924) drew. His friends knew it. And Max Brod was the first, his great friend and executor, the one thanks to whom most of the texts of the German-speaking Czech writer have come down to us. For him, Kafka was first and foremost a designer, he had the ambition: “I was Kafka’s friend for many years before learning that he was writing. “
Figures bent, bent under the weight of the world, entangled in their clothes as in their anxieties, elongated silhouettes collapsing on a wobbly table. The author of Metamorphosis knew how to draw. A summary universe, but unquestionably grotesque, shows us that he had a style all his own. Unsurprisingly, we find ourselves faced with these drawings as an extension of the literary work of this major writer of the 20th century.e century.
But according to Max Brod, Kafka was even more indifferent “or rather even more hostile towards his drawings than towards his literary works”. We know the story: in his will of 1921, Kafka demanded that everything be destroyed, drawings, letters, newspapers, manuscripts. Each page had to be burnt entirely without being read. A betrayal without which we would never have known The trial, The castle where the Newspaper.
To escape the advance of the Nazis in 1939, Max Brod had left Czechoslovakia for Tel Aviv, Palestine, with all of Kafka’s manuscripts and drawings in a briefcase, selling at most a few drawings here and there. The rest have spent years in the safe deposit box of a Swiss bank. At the end of a long legal saga that ended in 2019, the Supreme Court of Israel assigned the archives and drawings, in the possession since 1961 of Ilse Esther Hoffe, heiress and secretary of Max Brod, to the Library national Israel.
Kafka. The drawings is a superb album, enriched with enlightening contributions, including comments by visual artist Pavel Schmidt and a text by American philosopher Judith Butler, for whom “Kafka’s work, both literary and drawn, asks the following question: is it possible to hit the ground? “.