Brod died in 1968, and the Kafka papers he brought with him from Prague have been the subject of legal wrangling ever since. In late May, the National Library of Israel made over 130 pages of Kafka’s drawings available in an online database, as part of its effort to catalog and digitize Brod’s estate. This is all the world has known until now of Kafka’s art - scarcely 40 or so drawings and sketches from what was once a far larger corpus, much of it lost or destroyed, and the rest mostly invisible to the public until this year. Others appeared in Kafka’s diaries, today at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which Brod edited for publication in 1948. He published a small selection of the pictures in his biographical writings on Kafka and sold two of them to the Albertina in Vienna. When Kafka died in 1924, Brod famously disregarded the author’s instructions that everything was “to be burned, completely and unread.” He spent the rest of his life publishing and promoting Kafka’s work, and when he fled the Nazi occupation of Prague in 1939 for Palestine, he took Kafka’s papers and drawings with him. Brod, Kafka’s closest friend and literary executor, held on to as many of the drawings as he could. The author of some of the most acclaimed works of the modern literary canon, including The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), and The Metamorphosis (1915), was drawing and sketching extensively before he published a single word. Feigl later recalled that they “evoked the memory of early Paul Klee or Kubin.” He was surprised to find that the reserved schoolboy of his youth was now making pictures. One of the artists, Friedrich Feigl, had been to secondary school with Kafka. He brought out a selection of drawings by Kafka for them to look at. “I CAN TELL YOU the name of a very great artist - Franz Kafka,” said Max Brod to a circle of renegade artist friends in Prague in 1907.

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