For more than half a century, hundreds of drawings by the novelist Franz Kafka sat hidden in a Zurich bank vault. Only a dozen were ever published, and most people knew Kafka for his writing. But that changed in 2019, when the National Library of Israel obtained the drawings and made them public.

On Oct. 6, Deutsches Haus at NYU, a local nonprofit named 1014 and Yale University hosted a public lecture on Kafka’s surprising artistry. Andreas Kilcher, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, presented the lecture at 42 Washington Mews, titled “Kafka’s Drawings: Images of the Grotesque and Arabesque.” Alongside Yale professor Paul North, he examined how the illustrations shed light on the complex relationship between Kafka’s art and his modernist writings.

“If you read his stories again now, you see that there is hardly any story where there is no strong pictorial moment,” Kilcher told WSN. “All that, you would miss if you don’t know that he actually comes from drawing.”

The lecture also detailed how the drawings managed to remain hidden. Kafka’s friend and literary executor Max Brod collected the drawings after his death in 1924 but could not publish them freely because of ownership disputes with Kafka’s secretary. Israel’s Supreme Court ended the eight-year legal battle in 2016 by moving the estate from Zurich to Jerusalem. Kafka himself might not have welcomed the attention, though — Brod wrote in 1948 that he was often more critical of his drawings than his literary work.

When asked which drawing he would show to a first-time viewer, Kilcher chose his personal favorite and the largest in the collection, “Exuberance of Richness.” The 1905 sketch depicts fluid, fantastical figures at a dinner party, accompanied by an orchestra of animalistic characters.

“It’s so playful,” Kilcher said. “The title is also a celebration of drawing. You just draw and draw and celebrate your drawing and being bold.”

The heart of the evening was Kilcher and North’s discussion of how Kafka’s drawings relate to his literature. They described recurring figures that lean, tilt and float with exaggerated limbs and minimal faces. Kilcher connected Kafka’s airy artistic style to a 1909 diary entry in which he compares his writing struggles to Japanese acrobats balancing on ladders that never touch the ground.

Long overshadowed by his writing, Kafka’s drawings reveal a playful visual artist whose work deserves appreciation beyond his literary legacy. Kilcher pushed back against the idea that the drawings matter only because of Kafka’s fame as an author.

“They are not illustrations,” Kilcher said. “They can be seen as independent works of art.”

Kilcher added that most of the drawings date from around 1901 to 1907. As Kafka became a more prolific writer, he gradually stopped drawing, though he still included small sketches in letters and notebooks.

For a writer so often associated with anxiety and bureaucratic dread, the image of Kafka reveling in lively drawings is surprising. With the collection now digitally publicized, Kafka’s works suggest that the novelist thought in pictures long before he committed to words.

Contact Elizabeth Longo-Leonard at [email protected].