Franz Kafka 1980

This is Andy Warhol’s screenprint of Franz Kafka. Kafka's face is split in two, and bathed in these otherworldly blue hues, like he’s been beamed in from another dimension. Warhol's choice of color feels like a deliberate act of re-imagining. It's as if he's taking Kafka's deeply psychological, often dark, writing and filtering it through his own lens of pop sensibility. Notice that slash of vibrant yellow bisecting the composition? It's an abstract gesture, almost violent in its interruption, and yet it also serves to unify the two halves. It's strange, this portrait, both respectful and irreverent, a meditation on the nature of identity, memory, and the ways in which we come to know, or think we know, the figures of history. Warhol's Kafka reminds us that art is always a conversation. Think of Francis Bacon's screaming popes, portraits that, like this, distort and amplify the human form, pushing us to confront the raw, often unsettling, realities of existence.