Franz Kafka presented by the Morgan Library & Museum
on view November 22, 2024, through April 13, 2025
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 experience 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 nourished 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, part of his 1980 series Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, and Vladimir Nabokov’s copy of The Metamorphosis.
Franz Kafka, is on view until April 13, 2025 The Morgan Library & Museum located at 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street in New York City.
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