From playwriting to curatorship : an investigation into the status of Beckett’s stage objects

Samuel Beckett’s intimate knowledge of art and personal friendship with artists, obscure and famous (Hayden and Giacometti, for instance) is now part of the critical lore. Very little attention, on another hand, has been paid to the Irish writer’s museum fever, a lifelong passion born in the National Galleries in Dublin and London, pursued, during the extremely uneasy thirties, from Dresden to Erfurt, Berlin, Hamburg and Munich, and reiterated in the United States, New York especially. In the light of the above mentioned collections, and concentrating on the chair image/object, the essay explores the extraordinary dichotomy between Beckett’s increasing verbal silence on one hand and the complex system of artistic references which mutely invade stage, text and meaning on the other. Beckett’s chairs, however uncomfortable, common or dilapidated, hark back, paradoxically, to the Raffaellos and Velasquez, the Van Goghs and Francis Bacons of his beloved galleries.