Drawing on Beckett: Portraits, Performances, and Cultural Contexts

The opening section of this collection presents for the first time in one volume twenty-four sketches of Samuel Beckett executed by his good friend, the Paris-based Israeli artist Avigdor Arikha.
 

These extraordinary portraits, done from life when Beckett was visiting the Arikha home, range over a period of eighteen years, beginning in 1956.
 

Even after Beckett's death in 1989, Arikha continued to memorialize his friend, often inserting images of the writer in his art.
 

The works are testaments to this special friendship between two creators and to their shared aesthetics.
 

Sections two and three consist of twenty essays by leading international Beckett critics from eleven different countries.
 

The first group focuses on those writers, philosophers, scientists, and artists who have influenced Beckett's writing or whose works have affinities to his and provide illuminating intertextual points of reference.
 

Among those discussed are Diogenes of Sinope, Simone de Beauvoir, Alexandre Kojeve, Juan Luis Vives, Thomas Kuhn, Roger Vitrac, and painter Francis Bacon.
 

Two essays concentrate on Beckett's influence on the national theatres of Japan and Israel.
 

Media and performances are the subjects of section three, with essays on Beckett's television, radio dramas, and the impact of media jumping, especially the recent filming of all nineteen of Beckett's stage plays.
 

The book offers images of Beckett, captured in Arikha's arresting portraits, and illustrates the seemingly endless number of ways critics continue to draw on the Nobel-Prize winning writer and his oeuvre.
 

Linda Ben-Zvi is Professor of Theatre Studies, Tel Aviv University and Professor Emerita in English and Theatre, Colorado State University. Her books on Beckett include Samuel Beckett and Women in Beckett.
 

She is the convener of the international Samuel Beckett Working Group of the International Federation of Theatre Research, in which forum many of the essays in this collection were first presented.