Visual Arts Reviewed: Samuel Beckett: a passion for paintings, National Gallery of Ireland Millennium Wing, until Sept 17 01-6615133

In outlining the logic of Samuel Beckett: a passion for paintings, Fionnuala Croke of the National Gallery describes it as largely an account of three important relationships in the writer's life: with the National Gallery, with poet, critic and for a time National Gallery director James MacGreevy, and with the painter Jack B Yeats. The net is also cast more widely, to encompass Beckett's experience of the great collections in London and Europe, work by contemporary artists whom he befriended and artists' books involving his own work in one way or another. One of the best things about the show is its attempt to reconstitute Beckett's own collection of art.

There were, Croke writes in the accompanying, richly informative publication, constraints, temporal and otherwise, which meant that the show is not as large or as thorough as it might be. But better to offer possibilities and suggestions than to give the impression that the subject is amenable to being neatly packed and parcelled. Time and again the various contributors remind us, quite rightly, of the indirect, provisional nature of the enterprise.

The title perhaps gives a misleading impression of Beckett's relation to and interest in visual art. While he was a careful, canny observer and was fascinated by many paintings, on a certain level he was quite ruthless (as are most artists) and his passion was much more for his own work than for the paintings he looked at. The passion had to do with what he took from them, with the way what he looked at informed his own evolving vision as a writer and dramatist. That is as it should be.

In Ireland, he was a regular and attentive visitor to the National Gallery. Various strands of evidence suggest that he liked precision and clarity in painting and was very definite in his views. He disapproved of covering oil paintings with glass, for example, very reasonably. His exceptionally harsh response to one director, George Furlong's, Italian acquisitions is entirely subjective, and may have been coloured by the fact that his friend MacGreevy was a potential candidate for the job - a job he was eventually appointed to 15 years later.

In terms of direct textual references, Croke plausibly points to an early Renaissance painting, The Assumption of St Mary Magdalene. It's a striking work. Magdalene's body is sheathed in ankle-length wavy blonde hair, an image uncannily echoed in John Haynes's photograph of Billie Whitelaw in a production of Footfalls in 1976. The visual link is very, very convincing, though Beckett himself did not allude to it in any documented way.

Such instances of direct correspondences are rare. The most famous is certainly the most directly acknowledged: the writer's citing Casper David Friedrich's Two Men Contemplating the Moon as an inspiration for the mise en scene of Godot. On a circumstantial basis, Knowlson has also proposed Yeats's Two Travellers and The Graveyard Wall as possible influences on the same play - plausibly enough, given that Beckett probably saw them during visits to the artist's studio, and Yeats's way of visualising figures in landscape is in keeping with Beckett's theatrical vision.

One might wonder, does it matter? It depends on the level of analysis that interests you. A scholar may find it fascinating in itself, but in a more general context Knowlson and the historian Riann Coulter (who did a great deal of work toward realising the show) are aware of the limitations of such an exercise, especially if there is a temptation to feel that the sources and inspirations in some way solve the riddle of the work. Witness the tendency to view paintings as narratives: explain the story and move on to the next one.

It could well be that Beckett's predisposition to do something like that with paintings was abruptly forestalled when he encountered Cezanne's work in London. It's clear that the painter's analytical treatment of the structure of landscape, beautifully tentative and uncertain, came as something of a shock to him, one that he soon recognised as an antidote to the "anthropomorphised" landscapes he had previously admired, and one senses that the real shock related to his way of reading the paintings rather than the paintings themselves. Cezanne enabled him to see painting in a way that he had not before.

In any case, it was something of a liberation for him, allowing him to view the problems of painting in the same terms as the problems that absorbed him in writing. How or indeed why, for example, to convincingly articulate a presence, if such a thing could or should be done? Something that he wrestled with on a daily basis, this is a problem that is central to a great deal of European painting.

One can see why Beckett could never warm to Sean Keating's bold certainty and why the perpetual state of flux in Yeats would appeal to him. Intriguingly, what he liked in later Yeats, the concentration on marginal, isolated figures forever, like the landscapes which make up their uneasy contexts, on the point of dissolution, went against the grain of popular interpretation. That is, a view of Yeats as exemplifying an emergent, decidedly communal Irish identity. Beckett was projecting his own interests onto the paintings, but in the long run his analysis has proved to be perfectly sound.

Knowlson, who goes through the material with forensic thoroughness, points out that our best approach to Beckett's links with visual art is to look not for direct references but to recognise "affinities and resemblances". On that basis, Alberto Giacometti, whom Beckett knew well, was surely a close fit. In his paintings, drawings and sculptures, Giacometti's figures are always under pressure, barely there, but at the same time stubbornly there, their presence continually renegotiated. Giacometti famously provided the original tree for Godot. It's long since gone, but Gerard Byrne made a facsimile for his installation combining landmark theatrical props In Repertory, and it was a good idea to introduce it toward the conclusion of the exhibition, complete with theatrical lighting.

A passion for paintings may not be what you expect, but in its indirection it is consistently absorbing, stimulating and informative. As Coulter concludes with engaging honesty: "It is difficult to formulate the impact that visual art had on Beckett's work", but, she elaborates, it's still an area worth exploring.