In the years leading up to the recent centennial of Franz Kafka’s death, perhaps the most significant revelation to emerge about the paragon of twentieth-century literature is that he had a strong interest in drawing. Over one hundred pages of drawings by Kafka, most of them previously unknown, were made public in 2021 by the National Library of Israel in an online repository, and they have opened the door to new consideration of the place of visual production in Kafka’s life and work. An extensive illustrated catalog with reproductions of all of Kafka’s known renderings, Franz Kafka: The Drawings, was published later that same year by Andreas Kilcher, and both the images and the book have inspired extensive commentary and reflection. This includes two recent editions published on the centennial: a special issue on the drawings of The Germanic Review edited by Carsten Strathausen, and Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language, the monograph edited by Marie Rakušanová and myself, which focuses on Kafka’s connection to the art and visual culture of his home city of Prague, and how it is reflected in his writing and the drawings now at the National Library. The discovery of these new drawings, as Kilcher writes in his catalog, presents an opportunity to reconsider the conventional understanding of Kafka “as a storyteller to the exclusion of all else,” and to appraise more closely his relationship to visuality. This topic has been previously studied mainly in relation to photography and cinema, and mostly from the perspective of Kafka as a spectator and consumer, not an active participant in the act of visual representation itself. Earlier scholarship on previously identified drawings by Kafka was limited and often treated them as if they were mere pictorial extensions of the thematic content of his literary fiction. Kilcher argues against this, and he posits that drawing for Kafka held a more important role, as an alternative medium that Kafka deployed in moments where writing proved out of reach or inadequate to expressing what he wished to convey. As Kilcher explains it, Kafka turns to drawing “at the point where writing has reached its limits” (Kilcher, “Drawing and Writing,” 260). Judith Butler, who contributes to the catalog, makes this same assertion. It has been repeated so widely in reviews and responses to the book that it has been accepted as a commonplace.

Despite its speaker’s early resolution to “go slowly,” Hope Mirrlees’s Paris (1919), an exuberantly frenetic work, rarely lets up. [2] There is one moment, however, just after Mirrlees evokes the Russian Revolution in the dreamt specter of “giant sinister mujik,” when this noisy poem draws to a temporary calm and reflects, or so it seems, on the limits of art (Mirrlees, Paris, 15):

Herr [Gustav] Klimt indoctrinates Frau [Serena] Lederer into the art of Secessionist painting. This rapprochement between modern art and nouveau-riche Jews, this progress in the art of design, capable of transforming ghettos into affluent quarters, warrants the loveliest of hopes. —Karl Kraus, Die Fackel (November 1900)

There is no gentle way into the later twentieth-century work of the painter Prunella Clough. It is, as this paper will argue, a difficult kind of realism, embedded in an obdurate poetry of form. But for the viewer of Clough’s visual work or the reader of her extensive notes and diaries, it is also a brutal appraisal of the world at mid-century through an uncompromising reassessment of the process of paintings. “Considerations. Pickaxe etc. Multiple object forms repetitive, why? Cf human forms in assembly” wrote Clough in 1958 at the beginning of a typed page of claims and questions that interrogate her evolving process and subject matter. Written in a characteristic manner, at once telegraphic and peculiarly poetic, Clough is preoccupied here with the machinic and the depiction of mechanical form. She intertwines questions of paint: “warm red (madder) browns & clear Indians [yellows]. With green?” with concerns about composition and scale that also indicate anxieties about dealing with the logic of the machine and the processes under scrutiny. It is “almost meaningless without man or man-scale e.g. bicycle,” she speculates: unless rendered if possible without ascertainable scale as equivalent of traditional landscape (evocative horizon etc) or aesthetic detail (factory objects of mere scrap-abs), or mere lime waste water eg where pipes which had made connection had to be killed (?this). What basic landscape forms remain to be used? What others . . . can be made significant? For “interior” [landscapes] e.g. yards question of man/object grouping & space organising. (Clough, note)

In 1961, the Venezuelan artist Elsa Gramcko (1925–94) completed Sin título (Untitled; fig. 1). In the work, cratered sheets of corroded metal are caught in a permanent stasis of decomposition. Ochre and burnt sienna spread from the tarnished and oxidized surfaces of the irregularly shaped pieces of metal, creating a chromatic palette both earthen and industrial. Facture engenders form, as each metal piece assumes its character from the haptic quality produced from its own process of corrosion. According to an apocryphal story, the fragments of metal Gramcko affixed to the surface of this work were harvested from the side panels of a jeep she discovered abandoned at the coast. To control the found metal’s degradation, Gramcko further exposed these sheets to the elements as well as acidic solutions and other chemical baths. The roughly textured surface of Sin título—as well as those of her other works produced throughout the 1960s—marked a dramatic shift away from the smooth painted surfaces of Gramcko’s abstract compositions of the previous decade. In spite of Gramcko’s early success both in Venezuela and abroad, her career faded from the anglophone canon of Latin American modernism. Only recently has her work come to receive renewed critical attention, most notably through the exhibition, Contesting Modernity, held in 2019 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Contesting Modernity presented the largest number of works by Gramcko assembled in the United States in over half a century, providing a rare survey of her career. In her catalog essay on Gramcko for the exhibition, Mari Carmen Ramírez mused on the marginal position Gramcko’s oeuvre has held until recently. She pointed, in part, to the artist’s reserved nature and her desire to publicly eschew any affiliation with contemporaneous artistic movements, particularly informalism in the 1960s. This was compounded, Ramírez suggested, by a “hermetic discourse,” partially rooted in Carl Jung’s ideas on the collective unconscious, which “she and a handful of her critics carefully knit around both her introspective personality and her unconventional oeuvre.” Within the limited historiography on Gramcko’s career many writers have adopted this discursive framework when engaging her material experimentations. These authors frequently employed such terms as “alchemy” to describe her creative process, while focusing almost exclusively on the apolitical and material aspects of her works. Yet, Gramcko was not disconnected from the milieu which she inhabited. Rather, her oeuvre was far more porous to the dynamic events of postwar Venezuela than previously acknowledged in the existing literature.

In 1969, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth wrote to her ex-husband, Ben Nicholson, “so much depends, in sculpture, on what one wants to see through a hole!" What emerges in a sustained encounter with Hepworth’s work is her philosophy that sculpture is not simply a form carved or constructed out of specific material, but an intervention in a physical space, comprising the sculpture itself, the viewer, and the space surrounding it.

In October 2019, The Getty Center in Los Angeles opened its “Manet and Modern Beauty” exhibit, a major reappraisal of Manet’s late work. The directors believed these canvases would reveal how “Manet’s growing fascination with contemporary fashion and femininity coincided with a steep decline in his health and mobility, a confrontation with his own human frailty.” [1] If the emphasis of the exhibition fell on his less familiar works, the narrative of the modern artist as a suffering genius sounds...

Modernity seems very much to be with us still. Yet that explosive moment on either side of 1900 is long over, and what has come after is either a pale shadow of its former self or actively contests it. It is precisely that gap that Johanna Drucker explores in Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist, in terms of the book artist Iliazd (1894-1975) and of Drucker herself, who began her project as a graduate student in 1985 and returned to it in 2019 as the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies and Distinguished Professor of Information Studies at UCLA.

The condition of Paris as the main artistic capital from the end of the 19 th to the mid-20 th century caused it to attract an expressive contingent of foreign artists, and among those, dozens of Brazilian artists who were attracted by what was seen as the world capital of arts. They encountered, however, an extremely competitive universe, in which national origins were important components to recognition. As mentioned by Michele Greet, the participation of Latin-Americans in the Salons de Paris was significant, totaling more than 60 names, but few managed to be awarded. During the decade of 1920, at least 25 Brazilian artists trained in Paris receiving different degrees of recognition. The presence of foreigners and their integration in the French art scene was a delicate matter. For example, in 1921 the Musée du Luxembourg decided to separate its collection in two parts. On the one hand, a museum was built to be dedicated to the “Foreign Schools”, and it was henceforth called Musée du Jeu de Paume; and on the other hand, the Musée du Luxembourg’s function would become that of exhibiting only the work of those born in France, with the goal of making the French contribution to the development of modern art more discernible. This division by nationality came into practice in the 1923 edition of the Salons des Indépendants, leading to the dismissal of many of its members.

© 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press Sam Rose’s compelling new book Art and Form begins with the observation that modernist formalism has suffered severe blows to its reputation since its heyday in Clement Greenberg’s aesthetics, but argues that many of its critics have been attacking straw men. The supposed doxa of formalist aesthetics—that there is an autonomous realm of aesthetic experience, that this realm is radically separated from the world and available only to the sophisticated, and...