Robert Motherwell
KAFKA'S VISUAL RECOIL: A NOTE
A general reader cannot help but be aware of the numer–
ous authorities on the life and works of Franz Kafka, let alone the
horde of major novelists , poets, playwrights, critics, psychologists,
and intellectuals who have commented on him, briefly or at length,
from broad generalities to detailed and sometimes arcane analyses.
As a mere painter, I will not venture where angels fear to tread.
What I can contribute to this occasion- or any other, for that matter
-is personal experience, for whatever it is worth, as one human be–
ing to others, each with our own uniqueness that in some way over–
laps, or we could not speak to each other at all. . .. Besides, painters
sometimes see things that word-purveyors do not.
I first encountered the work of Kafka while a student , aged
twenty-two , at the Graduate School of Philo1lophy at Harvard Uni–
versity during the academic year of
1937-38.
I liked my brilliant pro–
fessors (more brilliant then than now) and my school work, but found
myself depressingly lonely- it was my first year on the Atlantic Coast
after being on the Pacific Coast, where I grew up. My chief avoca–
tion became browsing in the secondhand bookstores around Harvard
Square . In those days before paperbacks, scholarly and other esoteric
books were rarely reprinted. It was a modest little triumph to find a
longed-for, out-of-print book, say, the two volumes of the nine–
teenth-century Wilhelm Windelband's
History of Philosophy
in trans–
lation. Just off the Square was a rather small, highly selective
bookstore whose name I forget, which dealt in new and often elitist
books. It was there, as a recognized browser, that I was persuaded to
buy
The Metamorphosis,
that shatteringly poignant story. If I re–
member correctly, the book was printed unusually nicely and, of all
places, in Dublin. I used to wonder how and why.... At any rate,
after moving on to Paris, and at the onset of the Second World War,
to New York, I had my first show at Peggy Guggenheim's, in which
one of the watercolors was entitled
Kafka's Room.
I did not have such
an idea in mind. The picture simply demanded that title when it was
Editor's Note: This essay was first presented as a speech at the "Kafka Unorthodox"
Commemoration at the Cooper Union, New York City, in March 1983.
