Kafka’s Drawings and the Social History of Art

Abstract

This article discusses several of Franz Kafka’s recently published drawings in the estate of Max Brod from the materialist perspective of the social art history of art, reflecting on their ideological possibilities and effective limits. It relates the form and iconography of these drawings to long-standing traditions of political representation and social critique in art history and visual culture, in particular the nineteenth-century image of the barricade and the culture of satirical caricature that flourished in Central Europe at the fin-de-siècle. It situates them within the framework or field of avant-garde practice in Prague, in which Brod was an important figure. It sees in them largely private evidence of Kafka’s interests and ambitions as a largely auto-didactic, idiosyncratic amateur visual artist—a body of work that excited Brod, but failed to resonate in Prague’s modernist artistic culture. While distinguishing these drawings quantitatively, qualitatively, and functionally from the work of contemporaneous professional modern artists, the article nonetheless concludes that Kafka’s drawings can be fruitfully studied as visual expressions of Kafka’s complex class and ethnic background, ideological sympathies and political diffidence, and all-too-hegemonic conception of sex, gender, and artistic creativity.