Surreal Beckett by Alan Warren Friedman

Author:Alan Warren Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

4 Beckett and Visual Art

Beckett’s interest in the visual arts (as in the literary and musical ones) was strong and deep from early on, and his aesthetic taste was remarkably eclectic. He was drawn to many artists, including a number of the Surrealists, and he drew upon many of them in his own work and for his aesthetics. Knowlson persuasively demonstrates that “Of all the twentieth century artists writing in English, largely as a result of his excellent command of English, French, Italian and German, Beckett was probably the most fully aware of the entire range of European artistic achievement, that of the ancient literary and artistic past and the radical literary and artistic movements of his own century,” including Surrealism, Cubism, Futurism, and German Expressionism.1 As Mark Nixon puts it, “From the outset of his career, Beckett littered his work with references to painters and their work as well as visual techniques.”2 When the National Gallery of Ireland mounted an exhibition called “Samuel Beckett: A Passion for Paintings” (15 June to 17 September 2006), it brought together more than forty works that featured artists from the fourteenth century to the present: Silvestro dei Gherarducci, Perugino, Albrecht Dürer, Nicolas Poussin, Paul Cézanne, Edvard Munch, Jack B. Yeats, Alberto Giacometti, Bram van Velde, Avigdor Arikha, Henri Hayden, and Stanley William Hayter. The exhibition also included a number of livres d’artistes, or artists’ books, that feature some of the most innovative responses to Beckett’s work. These books – including Giacometti’s Worstward Ho; Hans Martin Erhardt’s Act Without Words I & II, Come and Go, Bing [Ping], and Watt; Louis le Brocquy’s Stirrings Still; Dellas Henke’s Company, Waiting for Godot, and Ill Seen Ill Said; and Charles Klabunde’s The Lost Ones – are collaborations or dialogues between text and image. Visual artists have been drawn to Beckett as much as he to them.3

Much more than the mainly verbally oriented Joyce, Beckett was drawn to an aesthetic of the visual image as well as the linguistic, and the art of Surrealism offered him both. Beginning in the 1930s, Beckett developed friendships with numerous contemporary artists, mostly Surrealists, whose work he admired and sometimes wrote about: Buñuel, Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Wassily Kandinsky, René Magritte, and Francis Picabia – and he made the acquaintance of many more. These connections were complicated and profound, if often aloof and, as Jean-Michel Rabaté puts it, “left a deep imprint on him.”4 As David Lloyd comments, Beckett

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