Doings at the Morgan - Franz Kafka Exhibition
The Morgan Library & Museum presents Franz Kafka, on view November 22, 2024, through April 13, 2025, marking the 100th anniversary of the author’s death. The exhibition celebrates Kafka’s achievements, creativity, and continued influence on new literary, theatrical, and artistic creations around the world. Franz Kafka is presented in collaboration with the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford, whose extraordinary Kafka holdings will appear in the United States for the first time. The items on view include literary manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, and photographs, including the original manuscript of his novella The Metamorphosis.
When Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis at the age of forty, in 1924, few could have predicted the influence his relatively small body of work would have on every realm of thought and creative endeavor over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Kafka’s novels and short stories have had an immense influence on literature, art, and culture in the United States in particular, and visitors to the Morgan will be able to examine important items from the Bodleian’s Kafka archive in the place where his work has made an outsize impact. The exhibition not only sets Kafka in the context of his times but also shows how his own experiences fueled his imagination, taking visitors on a journey through his life and influences—from his relationship with his family and the people closest to him to the places where he lived and worked, through to his last years of illness and his death.
Sal Robinson, Lucy Ricciardi Assistant Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts, said, “This exhibition, the first of its kind on Franz Kafka in the United States, will not only provide a unique opportunity to celebrate Kafka’s work and learn about his life, but will also engage with rarely emphasized aspects of both, from women like Ottla Kafka and Milena Jesenská, who played key roles in his life, to the very much ongoing afterlife of his works as they are translated into other languages and media.”
Highlights from the exhibition include the manuscripts of Kafka’s novels Amerika and The Castle; manuscripts of his major stories A
Hunger Artist and Josephine the Singer, letters and postcards addressed to his favorite sister, Ottla; his personal diaries, in which he also composed fiction, including his literary breakthrough, the 1912 story The Judgment; and unique items such as his drawings, the notebooks he used when studying Hebrew, and family photographs. Drawing on institutional holdings and private collections in the United States and Europe, the Morgan will show a selection of key works, among them Andy Warhol’s portrait of Kafka and Vladimir Nabokov’s copy of The Metamorphosis.
Items including literary notebooks, drawings, diaries, letters, postcards, architectural models, film clips, and photographs identify the people, events, and places that shaped the author, while giving insight into his personality. In a postcard to his brother-in-law, for instance, Kafka jokes about his exceptional skiing skills despite being severely ill at the time. His Hebrew notebook and his letter (in Hebrew) to his teacher demonstrate his dedication to learning the language that connected him to his family roots, but we also find snippets of Czech, French, and Chinese, a reminder of Kafka’s keen multilingualism and interest in languages beyond German and Hebrew. Kafka’s best-known work, The Metamorphosis, is a central focus of the exhibition. Alongside the original manuscript of the novella, the exhibition includes entomological illustrations that explore the possibilities of what the creature that used to be Gregor Samsa might have looked like, as well as modern reinterpretations of the story.
The exhibition also examines how the afterlives of Kafka’s work have continued to reach across the world, and their particularly deep resonance in the United States. The exhibition demonstrates how the author’s work were translated into numerous languages and in a variety of formats, with a particular focus on Asia and the modern-day interest in Kafka in Korea and Japan. To complete the picture of Kafka’s world, the exhibition dives into the author’s travels, both real and imaginary. We see in his notebooks and journals how his travels in Western Europe enabled him to practice descriptive writing, while his readings of travel narratives and poetry in translation strengthened his fascination with remote spaces and informed his subtle fictional critiques of European colonialism.
The Morgan Library & Museum is located at 225 Madison Avenue in New York City. For more information call (212) 685-0008 or visit www.themorgan.org.
