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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 o> 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. +. 33°