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THE THEATRICALIZATION OF ENDGAME AS THE
PAINTERLY WORLD OF BRAM AND GEER VAN VELDE:
CHANGING PERSPECTIVES IN THE POETICS OF CUBISM
AND SARTRE’S PHENOMENOLOGY
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LAURENS DE Vos
ABSTRACT
Beckett was strongly engaged in contemporary art, and had a few painters
among his best friends in Paris, including the brothers Bram and Geer van
Velde. Partly to support them and present their work to a wider audience,
he wrote a few essays about their oeuvre. However, not only do these essays
tell us how Beckett perceived their work aesthetically, they also shed light on
the playwright’s own poetics, which accounts for his huge admiration for both
brothers’ work. While Bram van Velde’s paintings show his inner world, Geer’s
work, with an inclination towards cubism, is directed outwards. The claim
of this essay will be that Endgame can be read as a commentary on both
painters’ work. Moreover, the essay will discuss how the play is informed by
Sartre’s phenomenology that is in itself indebted to a cubist aesthetics.
Endgame is very much a play about theatre, without many extra-theatrical
or extra-textual references. The theatrical environment in the here and now
seems to be the only existing reality. Some decades earlier, Beckett wrote two
essays on the poetics of the paintings of the Dutch brothers Geer and Bram
van Velde. His letters from that period reveal how reluctant and insecure he
was in writing these pieces of art criticism, but his motivation to help his
good friends gain somewhat more recognition in art circles prevailed over his
sincere self-doubts as an art critic. Interestingly, the joke about God and the
tailor bridges the first essay with Endgame, and the link with the van Velde
brothers is confirmed in Charles Juliet’s account of his conversations with
Bram, who “tells us that while reading Fin de Partie he has sometimes thought
he recognized the tone and odd fragments of their [i.e. Bram van Velde and
Beckett’s] conversations.”’ Unfortunately, beyond this passing comment
Juliet did not expand on the nature of possible echoes or resemblances. This
essay will therefore make an attempt to trace how Endgame may be read as
! Charles Juliet: Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, Leiden, Academic
Press Leiden, 1995, 47-48.
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