Review of the exhibition “Franz Kafka and the Art of the 20th Century” at the Jewish Museum

The exhibition “The Process. Franz Kafka and the art of the 20th century”, looking for artistic parallels to the literary work of the great writer. It would have gained a lot if it had been called “Kafka and the Art of the USSR,” he believes Alexey Mokrousov.

Kafka is our everything. The point is not only in the textbook aphorism of the artist Vagrich Bakhchanyan “We were born to make Kafka come true,” which plays on the famous song of the Soviet era. Kafka is a symbol of the 60s, when his collection was first published in the USSR, and at the same time of the 90s: Alexei Balabanov’s film “The Castle” (1994) did not become the banner of new times, but it made a splash.

Among other things, Viktor Sukhorukov starred in the film. Now it is in his reading that Kafka’s prose is heard at the exhibition “The Process. Franz Kafka and the art of the twentieth century” in the Jewish Museum in Moscow.

From the title it is clear, however, that the exhibition is not literary. Although there are many quotations here, one of the eight sections is called “Metamorphosis”, like the writer’s famous short story, the other is “In the vicinity of the castle”: a clear reference to the novel. But the focus is on the image. A hundred works, mostly from the 1920s and the era of stagnation, were selected from museums and private collections, including Malevich, Boris Golopolosov, Vladimir Yankilevsky, Lev Rubinstein and Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov. The foreign part is loud with the names: Egon Schiele, Georg Gross, Max Beckmann, Chaim Soutine, Giorgio Morandi. But in reality there are few foreigners, the works were selected on the principle of “what is more accessible” – the reality of sanctions still affects exhibitions.

Connecting such different names is a difficult task. Does the title character cement them? Exhibition curator Maria Gadas expresses herself evasively (and this evasiveness is perhaps forced): “The relevance of Franz Kafka’s works lies not in the fact that he describes political systems or processes, but in the fact that in his works he reveals human nature. Reflection on human nature is one of the important motives of the entire exhibition, which leads to an understanding of the parallels between Kafka’s work and the works presented.”

The result is a metaphorical exhibition: there are no illustrations for the works, although even in Soviet times there were many of them, but everything creates a Kafkaesque atmosphere – the choice of works, the twilight, and the cramped passages.

After all, for many, Kafka’s apotheosis of the absurd was indeed a direct relative of socialist absurdity. A subtle and precise metaphor for kinship has become the “Red Door” by Mikhail Roginsky (Tretyakov Gallery), which leads to nowhere; it cannot be opened or closed, but the handle calls: at least touch it!

Roginsky’s door is the only exhibit that all spectators will probably see, because theoretically not everyone will see the same thing. The organizers offer two routes, left and right from the first hall, each with its own mini-guide. Not all halls fall into both routes. It’s better to go left, into the wallpapered room, where both an old radio and “Billiards” by Leonid Zusman (1927, collection of Stella and Vadim Aminov) talk about “The Metamorphosis.” The exhibition is full of beautiful rarities: graphics by Vasily Chekrygin from the Russian Museum, gouaches from the 1970s by Georgy Shchetinin from the collection of Alexander Balashov, the militaristically perky “Red Army” by Konstantin Chebotarev from the Kazan Pushkin Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan. An exhibition by Chebotarev himself is now open in the Moscow Galeev Gallery, from where many rarities were taken for Kafka, in particular, “Fear” by Viktor Zamirailo and “Beggar Children” from the series “Psychiatric Hospital” by Vasily Ushakov. But many authors, like Boris Sveshnikov, Hulo Sooster, Garif Basyrov or Igor Makarevich, were in fact already shown in a similar context much earlier, back in 2015, at the excellent Kafkaesque exhibition of the “Ark” gallery at the Pushkin Museum on Arbat.

The result is a detailed visual reflection – not always directly about Kafka, but always about loneliness, absurdity and nightmare, and mostly still based on Soviet material (I would like to rename the project “Kafka and the Art of the USSR”). Although the message of the “Office” section, where the walls are covered with black and white stationery folders “Case No.,” is more modern than ever: Kabakov, Pivovarov and others remind of the nightmare of office life, where a person disappears without a trace. There is also a theater – in the video, actors from Brusnikin’s workshop succinctly fight the myths about Kafka at the beginning of each hour. The juxtaposition of works seems to be meaningful, the echoes are clear – for example, two large semicircles hide the section “Architecture of Dreams” with works by the classics of paper architecture Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, and on the outer wall are Boris Iofan’s sketches for the project of the Palace of the Soviets.

These semicircles are, literally, the narrowest point of the exhibition. The trouble is serious: the halls are cramped, the texts are poorly lit and difficult to read, there are also excursions… “Kafka” – a rare thing – has neither a designer nor an exhibition architect. The Jewish Museum is planned strangely from the very beginning: the space allocated to “temporary buildings” complicates the life of the curator so much that you feel sorry for him as soon as you find out about the next opening day. Now the museum has three exhibitions at once – in addition to the elegantly conceived but claustrophobically executed Kafka, these are photographs of Lev Borodulin squeezed into a pencil case and the exhibition “Andy Warhol and Russian Art”, which has spread into two spaces.

Oddly enough, they turn out to be more social and political than Kafka. The writer himself did not remain long in the pre-perestroika USSR, albeit belatedly, but a recognized genius. Back in the late 50s, Marquez, visiting Moscow as a journalist, noticed that Kafka was not published, considering him “the apostle of pernicious metaphysics.” And when the Central Committee of the CPSU decided that the Prague Spring of 1968 began with a conference on Kafka’s work, the writer was considered the spiritual father of the revisionists; As a critic of capitalist alienation, he still passed through the history of literature, but the repeatedly translated novel “The Castle” was not published in our country for decades.

Today, many of the translations clearly need updating. As philologist Sergei Romashko noted, “[советские] The translators also had a rather poor understanding of what they were translating—that was their problem, not their fault. People found themselves thrown out of the cultural process of the twentieth century, and everything that at least somehow hinted at something was specially stored.”

Kafka is always relevant for us, this is how non-conformists perceived him, and this is how he remains to this day. In the Jewish Museum there are only two works of our days, by Ani Acorn and Semyon Agroskin, but on these same days the exhibition “Visiting Kafka” by Alexei Sergeev is on display in the Moscow gallery “It’s not here.” Those who wish can get the modern context outside the museum walls. It is enough to turn on the TV or radio; the report does not have to be from the exhibition and even in Russian, an interpreter is not required, and the translation does not have to be improved.