'J'ai eu l'image': Samuel Beckett and Gastone Novelli

The Italian painter Gastone Novelli (1925–1968) met Samuel Beckett in Paris in 1960. The encounter was the culmination of Novelli’s long-lasting interest in Beckett’s work. The two artists established a collaboration that had a significant impact on their works. Novelli realized a series of lithographs designed to accompany L’image (1959), Beckett’s pre-publication excerpt from Comment c’est (1961). This partnership (the two met on several occasions, exchanged letters and commented on each other’s work) had important consequences on both Beckett’s and Novelli’s artistic journeys, well beyond the idea (which was never put into print) of L’image as a ‘livre d’artiste’. On the one hand, it entered – and probably changed – the genetic history of Comment c’est. On the other, it reoriented Novelli’s idea of painting as language towards the more radical concept of a painting made of – and not accompanied by – words. While retrieving the aural, Joycean quality of Beckett’s prose, Novelli established an interesting connection between Beckett’s prose, French Nouveau Roman and Italian Neoavanguardia.