Beckett samuel

1972 · 51869 — Paris: Les Editions de Minuit 1972. Fine. Les Editions de Minuit Paris 1972 14.50 x 19.50 cm broché First edition of the author's French translation one of 50 numbered copies on vélin d'Arches paper an hors commerce copy the only large paper copies with 292 other vélin d'Arches paper. Precious copy inscribed and dated December 1972 by Samuel Beckett to his friend the painter Geer Van Velde and his wife Lise. Spine and back cover slightly discolored. What to say of the sliding planes the shimmering contours the cut-out figures in the fog the balance that any little thing can break breaking and re-forming themselves under our very eyes How to talk about the colors that breathe and pant Of the swarming stasis Of this world without weight without force without shadow Here everything moves swims fells comes back falls apart re-forms. Everything stops non-stop. One would say it's the revolt of the internal molecules of a stone a split second before its disintegration. That is literature” The van Veldes' Art or the World and the Trousers in Cahiers d'Art n° 11-12 Paris 1945. Beckett here is not talking – despite how it may appear – about his literary oeuvre but about the paintings of Geer Van Velde going on to add a few lines later “Bram Van Velde paints distance. Geer Van Velde paints succession.” This elegy published on the occasion of the double exhibition of the Van Veldes Geer at Maeght's and Bram at the Galerie Mai is the first important text on these painters more or less unknown to the public at the time: “We've only just started spouting nonsense about the Van Velde brothers and I'm the first. It's an honor.” This is also the first critical text written directly in French by a young Irish writer who had not as yet published anything in France. Thus the first and most important of Beckett's writings on art composed at the dawn of his literary career establishes – right from the start – a fundamental relationship between his developing work and his friends' art: “Thus this text has often been read in a hollow or in the mirror as one of the rare designations of Beckett's poetry to come by the man himself a sort of anamorphic program of writing” Un pantalon cousu de fil blanc : Beckett et l'épreuve critique by Pierre Vilar. A real statement of dramaturgical intent this fundamental text whose introspective value Beckett lays out from the introduction on “one does nothing but tell stories with words” ushers in the writer's most fruitful creative period. In essence like Apollinaire and Cendrars Beckett draws from the artistic problems of his contemporaries the catalyst of his own future writing through “the deepest questioning of narrative figurative or poetical presuppositions” Pascale Casanova in Beckett l'Abstracteur. The major influence of modern painting on the narrative structure – or destructuring – of Beckett's drama and novels would be pointed out and examined by a number of thinkers among them Gilles Deleuze Julia Kristeva and Maurice Blanchot. It was in fact with the art of the Van Veldes first Geer then Bram that Beckett began to formalize this desire to translate the pictorial question into dramaturgical terms. Thus it was that he rejected Nicolas de Staël's set design for Godot since: “the set must come out of the text without adding anything to it. As for the visual comfort of the audience you can imagine how much I care. Do you really think you can listen with the backdrop of Bram's set or see anything other than him” Letter to Georges Duthuit 1952. When he met Geer in 1937 “Beckett was going through a major existential crisis and had just been reworking his first novel Murphy which had been rejected by a great many publishers. He was lost in alcohol leaving Ireland and moving once and for all to Paris” Le Pictural dans l'œuvre de Beckett Lassaad Jamoussi. He returned from a long artistic journey in Germany where he was marked by classical works as well as contemporary ar Les Editions de Minuit unknown