GENESIS, CHILD'S PLAY, AND THE GAZE OF SILENCE: Samuel Beckett and Paul Klee

Samuel Beckett situated Paul Klee among "the great of [his] time." I explore the reasons for Beckett's recognition of an artist whose distillations suggest that he is to painting what Beckett is to the written word and stage. Beckett and Klee were among the modernist writers and artists who were fascinated with genesis and child's play in opting for a willed impoverishment of unseeing and unknowing. I will investigate this shared trajectory by drawing in particular on the work of Rudolf Arnheim on visual perception and the nonrepresentational translations children make of an intersecting inner and outer world.