Painting was a huge influence on the great playwright - and his vision was in turn a factor in the work of painters such as Nauman and Guston, writes Aidan Dunne
It's commonplace for visual artists, when they are running through a list of influences on their work, to add something like: ". . . and of course, Beckett". More than any other 20th- century writer, Samuel Beckett seems to strike a chord. On the face of it, this is a little odd, given that in place of the generous word-feasts offered by Joyce or Proust, their crowded universes of description which, one would imagine, could provide limitless scope for artistic plunder, Beckett is positively parsimonious with words and images, paring things down, editing them out, as if determined to leave us with as little as possible.
Impoverishment, substraction and "lack of knowledge" were the principles underlying his approach, as he characterised it in his famous testament of stylistic epiphany.
Perhaps for that very reason, there used to be a popular misconception that Beckett was not particularly interested in the visual arts. This view has been comprehensively overhauled, not least thanks to the efforts of his biographers, Anthony Cronin and James Knowlson, both of whom have documented the significant role that his knowledge and experience of paintings played in shaping his imaginative vision.
Add to that a number of important friendships, with Thomas MacGreevy (a former director of the National Gallery of Ireland), for example, and with painters Avigdor Arikha (who made fine portrait studies of Beckett) and Henri Hayden, among others, and, rather than indifference, you have what amounts to a close, lifelong engagement with the visual arts. This engagement will be explored in the National Gallery's exhibition A Passion for Paintings, which opens in June.
Artists have certainly repaid the compliment. Most obviously, perhaps, even in his own lifetime Beckett became an icon. Virtually every ambitious photographer wanted to notch him up as a subject, and many of them did, even though he quite reasonably did not like being photographed. Generally, the large number of portrait images extant derive from incredibly short, concentrated bursts of snapping, with Beckett as reluctant prey.
That's not to say that he didn't get on with some of the photographers, including John Minihan, whose sympathetic portraits form an exhibition, Centenary Shadows, at the National Photographic Archive.
Beckett's sober demeanour, his distinct sense of style and his lined, craggy face made him instantly recognisable to the extent that his image is synonymous with a certain kind of artistic rigour and seriousness.
As such, he was an ideal candidate as a subject for one of Louis le Brocquy's series of exploratory portrait images, his bold attempts at parting the veil of surface likeness and revealing something of the density and texture of thought and feelings that constitute the inner world of a human being. There is something quintessentially Beckettian in le Brocquy's "archaeology of the spirit", partly because the project is in large part about the impossibility of arriving at a single, definitive image. There are only approaches to something implied, something grasped for. Le Brocquy's subjects refuse to be pinned down, or perhaps we should say that he refuses to pin them down. Instead, we glimpse something elusive and abidingly mysterious.
There is a link between the archetypal image of Beckett the man and the image of forlorn, isolated and more than slightly ridiculous consciousness that emerges in his writing. This view of consciousness is clearly embodied in the art of Alberto Giacometti. In both his sculptures and his paintings, the surrounding spaces are exceptionally active, containing and attenuating the fragile central human presences.
IF GIACOMETTI'S WORK can, at this remove, come across as being, in its earnestness, almost parodically emblematic of the 1950s Left Bank existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, the same might be said of Beckett - except for the fact that, as a writer, he had the luxury of humour as a strategic resource, and he used it brilliantly.
In relation to the depiction of both Beckett and his dramatic mise en scènes, the problem of earnestness and parody inevitably arises. Artists are irresistibly drawn to his seriousness but can miss out on the humour, and the results can be worthy but can entail a vastly diminished, po-faced vision. In this regard it is worth noting that, in his paintings, the late Gerald Davis had a lightness of touch that was remarkably true to aspects of Beckett's absurdist humour.
As it happens, Beckett's pared-down dramatic frameworks, including his avowedly styleless interrogation of language itself, has been enormously influential on contemporary artists in ways that have to do with much more than depiction per se. The Royal Hibernian Academy's Gallagher Gallery exhibition, I Not I celebrates the work of two of the most important of these artists, Americans Philip Guston and Bruce Nauman. Guston, who died in 1980, was a painter who alienated a large proportion of his public when, around 1970, he turned his back on painterly abstraction and embarked on a series of big, deliberately crude, cartoon-like narrative paintings.
In an emphatic graphic style that owed something to Robert Crumb, he employed a very limited iconography, including a bare lightbulb, fragmented body parts, Ku Klux Klansmen, enormous hobnail boots, cigarettes and rubbish, all shot through with a sense of futility and despair. In its grotesque tragicomedy, it is a very Beckettian world. In fact, Guston provides a good answer to the question: how do you do Beckett in paint? Surely Beckett himself had answered the question: how do you do Beckett in performance?
Yet in a sense Nauman has come up with his own answer. Born in 1940, he is a pioneer figure in contemporary art, working innovatively with conceptual art, performance, video and language. It is virtually impossible to consider his work without reaching for the adjective "Beckettian", and it is hard to imagine that Nauman would have done what he did without the example of Beckett.
Nauman immediately latched onto fledgling video recording technology to make pieces that are essentially records of performance. He could be described as an aggressive artist because of his deliberately provocative, interrogative relationship with his material. There is a relentless quality to the way he isolates and ritualises ordinary gestures and actions, using repetition and variation, and he takes the same approach to language, plugging away at words and phrases until their meaning is reversed or disintegrates entirely, and they become nonsensical. Perhaps more than anything he's done, Clown Torture, which features in the Gallagher Gallery show, underlines the Beckettian nature of his vision.
ANOTHER AMERICAN, JENNY Holzer, features as part of the festival. She devises aphoristic statements and mottos that are displayed in public spaces, often infiltrating the domain of advertising with subversive messages about consumerism and political control. Although her work is predominantly linguistic, its relationship to Beckett is more tenuous, something emphasised by the fact that she will be choosing quotations directly from Beckett for Dublin (they will be projected at venues throughout the city centre in the evenings, from now until Monday).
The connection between Beckett and the sculpture of Kathy Prendergast, who features in the Douglas Hyde Gallery's contribution to the festival, is also tenuous, though more in the sense of being in sympathy but parallel. The centrepiece of the show (from April 21st) is the recreation of a memorable sculpture from 1989, A Dream of Discipline, a work that apparently no longer exists and that could almost be a piece of Beckett set design. It consisted of a narrow mattress lying on top of a heap of chalk boulders and, while there is a literary reference, it doesn't relate to Beckett. Yet that doesn't seem to matter: one can see that it is consistent and appropriate in the context.
When the Japanese painter Makiko Nakamura came to Ireland several years ago it was because of her enthusiasm for Beckett's writing, specifically his prose works. Later this year a solo show of her work in the gallery at Farmleigh will offer a chance to ponder the links between her austere abstracts and the rhythms of Beckett's prose. With Nakamura, as with other artists, the empathy with Beckett may not be immediately obvious, but once pointed out, it offers an enhanced degree of access, another enriching layer of meaning.
Visual art in the Beckett Centenary Festival includes: Kathy Prendergast and Mark McLoughlin's work at the Douglas Hyde Gallery; Jenny Holzer's projections around Dublin this weekend; John Minihan's photographs at the National Photographic Archive; Cian McLoughlin's portraits of actors in Beckett at the Office of Public Works; I Not I: Nauman, Guston, Beckett and sculptor Michael Warren's A Homage to Beckett at the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery; and Samuel Beckett: A Passion for Paintings, which opens at the National Gallery of Ireland in June. www.ireland.com/focus/beckett or www.beckettcentenaryfestival.ie