Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts: The Embarrassment of Allegory

Summary

Samuel Beckett is a man acutely aware of the visual arts and actively involved with them. One of his earliest fictional characters, Belacqua, is familiar enough with the National Gallery of Ireland to complain of how its paintings are displayed; he also knows the Dublin Municipal Gallery, formerly located in Charlemont House, and he is quite conscious of the architectural similarities between Dublin's Pearse Street and Florence. After Beckett left Dublin, he remained close friends with the Irish painter Jack Yeats—whose paintings he reviewed, admired, and hung in his apartment. Thomas McGreevy, the poet, art critic, and director of the National Gallery of Ireland, also remained a close contact in Dublin.

Beckett's travels during the extended Wanderjahre 1930–37 seem often to have been dominated by his interest in art. To Lawrence Harvey he described his path through Germany in 1936 as “from museum to museum.” The three notebooks of this trip are primarily records of paintings and music that impressed him. He recalls the kindness of Willi Grohmann, a director of the Zwinger Gallery, and he recalls the Nazi destruction of works of “decadent” art.