Samuel Beckett was deeply engaged with the visual arts and individual painters, including Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde, and Avigdor Arikha. The book explores what Beckett saw in their paintings that would come to shape his own dramas as visual artworks. It explains what visual resources Beckett found in these particular painters rather than in the surrealism of Masson or the abstraction of Kandinsky or Mondrian. The analysis of Beckett’s visual imagination is based on his quite extensive art criticism and on close analysis of the paintings that he would actually have viewed. Lloyd shows how B ... More

Samuel Beckett was deeply engaged with the visual arts and individual painters, including Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde, and Avigdor Arikha. The book explores what Beckett saw in their paintings that would come to shape his own dramas as visual artworks. It explains what visual resources Beckett found in these particular painters rather than in the surrealism of Masson or the abstraction of Kandinsky or Mondrian. The analysis of Beckett’s visual imagination is based on his quite extensive art criticism and on close analysis of the paintings that he would actually have viewed. Lloyd shows how Beckett’s fascination with these painters illuminates the ‘painterly’ qualities of his theatre and the philosophical, political and aesthetic implications of Beckett’s highly visual dramatic work. These implications center on his interrogation of the philosophical, political and aesthetic limits of representation in the wake of decolonization, fascism and world war. The book argues that in place of the subject-object relation that underpins modern concepts of representation, Beckett seeks to present the human as a thing in a world reduced to thingliness.