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# The Jewish Museum invites visitors to look at art through the prism of Kafka's work
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/evreiskii-muzei-predlagaet-posmotret-na-iskusstvo-cherez-prizmu-tvorchestva-kafki/
- Published: 2023-10-14T12:59:32.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:35:35.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Art, Books, Museums, Observations

The Jewish Museum invites visitors to look at art through the prism of Kafka's work. At the entrance they hand out booklets, one red and one brown. The two routes, we are told, are built on the story "The Metamorphosis" and the novel "The Trial". In several of the halls one can make out an apartment with the German Expressionists Max Pechstein, Egon Schiele and George Grosz, where Gregor Samsa suffers, and a stylised office with Ilya Kabakov, Viktor Pivovarov and Dmitry Prigov, where the hero of "The Trial" might work, or Kafka himself.

On the whole, the link between the canvases and Kafka's texts is merely a form, a principle of hanging. The same canvases could just as well have been rehung in the manner of Ilyenkov, of Andrei Platonov, or even of Pelevin.

How many people have actually read Kafka? Who has grasped his method? And remembers anything beyond the commonplaces? Gloomy corridors, frightened people, all-consuming bureaucracy, evil wrapped in the daily newspapers, and hopelessness.

What does make an impression is the parallel between recognisable artistic phenomena of the twentieth century and such sad, cruel, disconcerting facts of reality as the ever-growing impossibility of resisting fundamental injustice, the increasing might of the instruments for governing impersonal masses, the loneliness of those unwilling to become a cog in the mechanism, and the absurdity that pervades every system of society against a backdrop of skyscrapers, unanimity and jaunty marches.

If you decide to choose your own route, without recourse to the brochures with their detached quotations, then among a hundred or so paintings from the Hermitage, the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Pushkin Museum and other collections, you cannot fail to feel that the horror has not crept up from nowhere: it has long been ruling the world, and with great success.

As for the particular works that caught my eye, these are "Quality Inspectors. Bottling Narzan" by Elena Bebutova (1932), "Three Kilos of Potatoes" by Pivovarov (1990s), "Head of a Peasant" by Malevich (1930s), "Man with a Beard" by Eduard Spandikov (1910s), "Man at the Window" by Artur Lyandsberg (1928), "The Concierge" by Boris Grigoriev (1913), the materials of the Palace of the Soviets project, and "Palaces of Communism" by Yakov Chernikhov

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