Beckett and Painting - Sunday Times

The entire article by Michael Ross can be found here

Visitors to Samuel Beckett’s flat in Montparnasse, Paris, remarked on three images prominently displayed there. In the hallway was a poster of a shock-haired Albert Einstein, his tongue stuck out. On the mantelpiece stood photographs of two Irishmen, the writer Francis Stuart and the former Irish rugby international Ollie Campbell.

Beckett had known Stuart in Dublin and Paris before the second world war, but the two took opposite sides: Beckett working with the resistance, Stuart writing scripts for Lord Haw-Haw. They did not meet again until 1987 and it was, by Stuart’s account, an initially chilly encounter.

Campbell was someone Beckett described to acquaintances as “a genius”.

Conspicuous by their absence in Beckett’s flat were the two images perhaps closest to his heart: A Morning and Regatta Evening, two small oils by Jack B Yeats he bought from the painter. The first he prized so highly that he took it with him when on the run in Roussillon during the war, but subsequently gave away to Jack McGowran after the actor expressed a liking for it; the second painting he gave to his nephew Edward.

As his biographer James Knowlson has pointed out, Beckett did not need to hold on to paintings to retain an appreciation of them. With his intense scrutiny and his prodigious memory, Beckett was able to recall in vivid detail paintings he had seen perhaps decades earlier. His own collection was remarkably small and mostly bought from artist friends such as Yeats, Henri Hayden, Avigdor Arikha and the brothers Geer and Bram van Velde.

The two Yeats oils, on public display with the rest of Beckett’s collection for the first time, are the most exciting pieces in the National Gallery’s small but fascinating exhibition Samuel Beckett: A Passion for Paintings. Along with 10 works owned by him, it includes two dozen pieces that were significant in his appreciation of art.

These range from works he came across in the gallery as a young man, such as Perugino’s The Lamentation over the Dead Christ, to others that he encountered elsewhere, such as Munch’s Two Women on the Beach.

The most interesting such work, Two Men Contemplating the Moon, by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, is not yet in the exhibition, but is due from the Gemaldegalerie in Dresden in the middle of August. In 1975, rehearsing Waiting for Godot in Berlin, Beckett told the scholar Ruby Cohn that the play’s imagery had been inspired by Friedrich’s Man and Woman Observing the Moon, but subsequently, speaking to Knowlson on two occasions, he cited Two Men Contemplating the Moon as the source.

The exhibition points to themes that emerged in Beckett’s writing, but sensibly stops short of suggesting a causal relationship between visual art and Beckett’s writing. It also gives a sense of how his interest in visual art developed to fever pitch as a young man — he even applied to work in the National Gallery in London, citing Yeats as a referee.

It also illuminates how in Yeats and in German expressionism Beckett found, as Knowlson put it, what he wanted to find there.

In visual art as in literature, Beckett was obsessed by an aesthetic double bind, what he characterised in a dialogue with his friend George Duthuit as “the expression that there is nothing to express . . . together with the obligation to express”.

Beckett responded to painting and writing in peculiarly philosophical terms, seeing them in terms of the relationship between being and expression characterised for him by impossibility, necessity and inevitable failure. As he conceded in a letter to Duthuit in the 1950s, when he wrote about art he was writing about his obsessions. He expressed these in a most concentrated form in Beckett’s review, published in 1945, of an essay on Yeats by their friend, Thomas McGreevy, who introduced them.

“He is with the great of our time,” wrote Beckett about Yeats, “Kandinsky and Klee, Ballmer and Bram van Velde, Rouault and Braque, because he brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predicament of existence, reduces the dark where there might have been, mathematically at least, a door.”

The essay was a key statement by Beckett about the resistance of artists to influence, rejecting McGreevy’s argument that Yeats was the first great Irish painter. “The artist who stakes his being comes from nowhere,” as Beckett put it, somewhat melodramatically.

As it happened, Beckett came from a specific place. Born into a prosperous Protestant family in Foxrock in 1906, the son of a quantity surveyor, he moved in privileged bohemian circles. Slotted into a temporary lecturing job in 1928 in the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris by his mentor, Professor Thomas Rudmose-Brown, in preparation for a career at Trinity, Beckett met McGreevy and struck up a friendship. When they returned to Dublin, McGreevy introduced Beckett to Yeats.