Images of Beckett - Index of

65 Billie Whitelaw, Billie Whitelaw . . . Who He? (London:
Hodder & Stoughton, 1995), p. 144.
66 Michael Haerdter’s rehearsal diary in Dougald McMillan
and Martha Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre (London:
John Calder; and New York: Riverrun Press, 1988),
p. 211.
67 Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape and Embers (London:
Faber & Faber, 1959), pp. 16, 18.
68 SB, letter to Tom MacGreevy, 20 February [1935].
69 R. H. Wilenski, An Introduction to Dutch Art (London:
Faber & Faber, 1929). The discussion of spotlight
painting appears in the pages on the paintings of
Elsheimer and Honthorst. Beckett’s thirty-five pages of
notes on Wilenski are preserved in Trinity College
Library and the archive of the Beckett International
Foundation at the University of Reading.
70 SB, letter to Tom MacGreevy, 20 February [1935].
71 Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays, p. 239.
72 Beckett’s German Diaries, vol. 3, 5 January 1937.
73 Wilenski, Introduction to Dutch Art, facing p. 261.
74 See Damian Love, ‘Beckett and the Romantik. The Art of
Caspar David Friedrich’, Journal of Beckett Studies 9, no. 2,
spring 2000, pp. 91–6.
75 Whitelaw, Billie Whitelaw . . . Who He?, p. 145.
76 [Samuel Beckett], ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, in Cohn (ed.),
Disjecta, p. 70.
77 SB, letter to Tom MacGreevy, 8 September 1934.
78 ibid.
79 ibid.
80 Beckett used this term in his article ‘Recent Irish Poetry’
in Cohn (ed.), Disjecta, p. 70 and again in this passage of
his German Diaries: ‘Interesting notes in Marc [Franz
Marc, the German Expressionist painter] re subject,
predicate, object relations in painting. He says: paint the
predicate of the living, Picasso has that of the inanimate.
By that he appears to mean not the relation between
subject & object, but the alienation (my nomansland).
The object particularizes, banalizes the “thought” which
fires me: Musik ist Satz ohne Objekt.’ SB, German Diaries,
vol. 2, 19 November 1936.
81 SB, letter to Tom MacGreevy, 14 August 1937. The
painting to which Beckett refers here is Jack B. Yeats’ The
Storm, painted in 1936.
82 SB, letter to Georges Duthuit, 2 March 1954.
83 Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit,
p. 66.
84 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber &
Faber, 1985), p. 61.
85 Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays, p. 241.
86 ‘I have a queer lot of pictures here now. A German
surrealist called Paalen gave me some kind of
“automatic” affair that amuses me, and I have started
paying for a picture by a Polish Jew called Adler that I like
very much.’ SB, letter to Tom MacGreevy, 18 April 1939.
87 ‘I went to Otto Freundlich’s exhibition at Jeanne
Bucher’s. A subscription list has been opened to buy a
picture and present it to the Jeu de Paume . . . The
picture in question is a very fine one, far and away the
best in the show. There is also a very beautiful sculpture
in the little garden in front of the gallery. I met him once
a couple of months ago and found him very
sympathetic.’ SB to Tom MacGreevy, 15 June 1938.
88 Joan Mitchell (1926–92), an abstract expressionist
painter, born in Chicago, who lived in France from 1959,
first in Paris and then in Vétheil. For many years she was
the partner of the Canadian abstract painter, Jean-Paul
Riopelle. See Jane Livingston, The Paintings of Joan
Mitchell, with essays by Linda Nochlin and Yvette Lee
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).
Riopelle (b. 1923) was influenced by Kandinsky, Miró
and Pollock. For Riopelle’s life, see Hélène de Billy,
Riopelle (Montreal: Editions Art Global, 1996), and for
his painting see Pierre Schneider, Riopelle signes mêlés
(Paris: Maeght Editeur, 1972).
89 ‘Begin to get slightly tired of S.R.’s [Schmidt-Rottluff’s]
determination to see big, there is a programmatic
monumentalism that does not justify its simplifications.
But a lovely coloured drawing of a woman looking at a
picture. I find Kirchner a purer artist, incredible line and
sureness of taste and fineness of colour.’ SB, German
Diaries, vol. 3, 19 December 1936.
90 SB, German Diaries, vol. 2, 23 January 1937.
91 He saw, for instance, Munch’s painting Einsamkeit
(Loneliness), still hanging on the walls of the
Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin, as ‘lovely, woman in red
doublet up on blue stool, rainbow coloured heap on left
(bathing tent?), and pale unlimited motionless
emptiness of sea’. But his sometime problems with
Munch remained: he wrote of this particular painting,
‘But even here the feeling inclined to be overstated into
the sentimental . . . The Krankes Mädchen drawing also
only just over the pretty line. What is it in this
uncompromising Norderin [?] (Nolde & Hamsun also –
Albrecht [with whom Beckett was friendly in Hamburg]
was an admirer of Hamsun) – that always threatens to
upset the whole apple-cart. It is in the German Gothic
also, more than in the English.’ SB, German Diaries,
vol. 4, 20 January 1937.
92 Daniel Albright, ‘Beckett as Marsyas’ in Lois
Oppenheim (ed.), Samuel Beckett and the Arts. Music, Visual
Art and Non-Print Media (New York and London: Garland,
1999), pp. 25–49.
93 SB, German Diaries, vol. 2, 23 January 1937.
94 Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays, p. 228.
95 ibid., p. 216.
96 See Enoch Brater, Why Beckett (London: Thames &
Hudson, 1989), pp. 29 and 100.
97 SB, German Diaries, vol. 1, 4 November 1936.
98 Michaël Glasmeier and Gaby Hartel, ‘Three Grey Disks,
Comédie’ in Marin Karmitz, Samuel Beckett, Comédie,
pp. 33–4 (in French), p. 82 (in English).
99 Samuel Beckett, ‘MacGreevy on Yeats’ in Cohn (ed.),
Disjecta, p. 97.
NOTES TO PAGES 77–92 151