Images of Beckett - Index of

Dülberg painted in Expressionist mode and, of the moderns, Beckett was
especially drawn to the work of the artists of the Brücke group and the Blaue
Reiter.
There followed a two-year period in London in 1934–5, when Beckett
was in England for a course of psychotherapy with W. R. Bion at the Tavistock
Clinic. He became a regular visitor to the city’s main public art galleries,
especially the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the
Wallace Collection. 36 At this time some of the great paintings of the English
and Irish national galleries became like old friends to Beckett. It was during
this period (as we shall see in a moment) that he thought most deeply about
art and absorbed the iconography of the Old Masters so thoroughly that he
could draw on it at will.
This was followed by a vital six-month-long visit to the German art
galleries in 1936–7, when, through contacts that he made in Hamburg,
Berlin, Dresden and Munich, he managed to view some important private
collections as well as those of the major public galleries. He also visited some
of the less famous art collections in Brunswick, Halle, Leipzig and Erfurt and
wrote regular accounts of his reactions to individual paintings in hundreds
of pages of personal diaries, which contain some of his most precisely
formulated aesthetic judgments. These diaries continue to bear witness to
his enormous admiration for Old Masters such as Giorgione, Caravaggio,
Rembrandt, Antonello da Messina, van Honthorst, van Goyen and
Wouwerman. But they also reveal how keen he was at the time on the work
of Expressionist painters such as Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner (a personal favourite of Beckett), Lyonel Feininger, Karl
Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel.
Hardly surprisingly, in view of this passionate interest in art, Beckett’s early
essays, poems and prose reveal many allusions to painting, often subtly fused
with literary allusions or elements taken from real life: in the poems, ‘Sanies
I’ (Botticelli), ‘Sanies II’ (Puvis de Chavannes), ‘Serena III’ (Hogarth),
‘Malacoda’ (van Huysum); in More Pricks than Kicks (Cranach – a hidden
reference – Dürer, Paul Henry, Hogarth, Masaccio, Perugino, Pisanello,
IMAGES OF BECKETT 61