Abstract
My paper explores the ties that bind the sculpture of the renowned Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti with the Dynastic art of Ancient Egypt, bonds seeking Otherness that soldered Giacometti’s friendship with the author of Waiting for Godot, the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. Although the literature on Beckett and Giacometti is extensive, students of these masters of imagery and prose have never observed that Giacometti’s enduring interest in Egyptian art and its other-worldly silences was a prime factor that drew Giacometti and Beckett together. Giacometti’s intense study of Egyptian art began in the early 1920s in the Egyptian wing of the Vatican Museum in Rome and continued well into his career in the 1960s, with numerous drawings after Egyptian steles. The Egyptian quest for immortality resonates with Giacometti’s quest for ethereal transcendence, a quest that informed his understanding of Beckett’s static and enduring characters. Thus, whether kings, scribes or pharaohs or Beckett’s forlorn rags of humanity, they, with Giacometti’s many takes on the Walking Man, seek an otherworldly existence. As the many drawings by Giacometti after Egyptian statuary show, Giacometti found an existential resonance in Egyptian art, one he equated with Beckett’s own theoretical response to the otherworldly. I seek to draw a rapprochement between Beckett and Giacometti—with the latter’s drawings after Egyptian statuary as the cement that bound these two great artists in their probing for Other truths.
Presenters
Albert AlhadeffAssociate Professor, Art History, University of Colorado Boulder, Colorado, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
OTHERNESS, EGYPTIAN ART, TRANSCENDENCE, IMMORTALITY, SILENCE, EXISTENTIAL, OTHERWORLDLY, BECKETT, GIACOMETTI
