Fin de partie suivi de Acte sans paroles

first edition on the current paper.
Binding the half bradel turquoise box, golden tail date paper plates decorated, guards and contreplats of plain paper, wrappers and back preserved and bound in, gilded head, signed binding Goy & Vilaine.
Precious autograph dated February 1957 and signed by Samuel Beckett to his friend the painter Geer (Van Velde) and his wife Lisa.
Copy perfectly established.
"What about the plans that slide, these contours that vibrate, such as body cut into the mist, these balances that nothing should break, which break and re-form as we look? How about those colors that breathe, panting? this teeming stasis? this world without weight, without force, without shade? Here everything moves, swims, flies, returns, discards, remakes. All the time, constantly. Looks insurgency molecules, within a stone a millisecond before it disintegrates. That's literature. "(The painting of van Velde or the world and pants, in Cahiers d'Art No. 11-12, Paris 1945)
Beckett not talking, despite appearances, his literary work but the paint Geer van Velde, adding a few lines later: "[Bram] van Velde painted extent. G [eer] van Velde painted the estate. ". This praise of painting van Velde brothers, published on the occasion of the double exposure van Velde, Bram and Geer Maeght gallery in May, is the first major text on these painters then almost unknown to the public "We only start messing about van Velde brothers. I open the series. It is an honor. "It is also the first critical text written directly in French by a young Irish writer who has never published in France.
So the first and most important written on the art of Beckett, made on the eve of his literary career, establishes from the outset, a fundamental relationship between his work in the making and painting of his friends: "As a -t we often read the text in hollow, or mirrored, as one of the few descriptions of poetic (to come) by Beckett himself, a kind of writing anamorphic program "(a sewn pants with white thread Beckett and critical test by Pierre Vilar).
True declaration of intention of the playwright, this fundamental text - which Beckett confesses in the introduction introspective value "with the words we only telling" - inaugurates the most fruitful creative contemporary of the writer. Indeed, like Apollinaire and Cendrars, Beckett draws the artistic problems of his contemporaries the ferment of his writing to come by "setting the deeper cause presuppositions of narrative, figurative or poetic. "(Pascale Casanova Beckett in the abstractor).
The major influence of modern painting on the structure - or deconstruction - narrative theater and Beckett's novels will be revealed and analyzed by many thinkers, including Gilles Deleuze, Kristeva or Maurice Blanchot. It is precisely from painting Velde van de Geer and Bram, Beckett formalize this will translate into dramatic pictorial matter. So he refuses Nicolas de Staël sets for Waiting for Godot because: "We need the kind decor text, without adding to it. As for the visual comfort of the viewer, I put it where you think. Do you really think you could listen to a setting of Bram, or see anything but him? "(Letter to George Duthuit, 1952).

When Geer meeting in 1937, "Beckett through a major life crisis, he just remodel her first novel Murphy, rejected by many publishers, he sinks into alcoholism, left Ireland and settled permanently in Paris "(the pictorial in Beckett's work, Lassaad Jamoussi). He returns from a long artistic journey to Germany where he was steeped in classical works and contemporary art - it was during this trip that he discovered the Two Men Contemplating the Moon Caspar David Friedrich, to origin of waiting for Godot.
The art is then the heart of his creative thinking and friendship that will link with the Geer and later with Bram and their sister Jacoba (with which he spoke perhaps a more than friendly relationship) will profoundly influence his life and his writing. His first writing about art is a short notice on Geer van Velde he needed works to her new lover Peggy Guggenheim during the creation of his London gallery. Despite the relative failure of the exhibition (which follows that of Kandinsky), he obtained a scholarship Peggy a year to his friend. James Knowlson even argues that "if Beckett has long maintained close ties with Peggy, this is first and foremost because it was likely to give a significant boost to his artist friends, starting with Geer van Velde . "(In Beckett p. 474). Enigmatic, the small note that Beckett then wrote at the request of Peggy already contains the germ of the thought of the playwright: "Believes painting shoulds mind it on business, ie colors. ie no more than say Picasso Fabritius, Vermeer. Or inversely. "(" Think painting should mind his own business, that is to say the color, that is to say no more than that of Picasso Fabritus or Vermeer. And vice versa. ")
Slower to grow, his friendship with Bram and his interest in his painting gradually alter the look of Beckett on the paint Geer and when, ten years after his first meeting with the brothers, he wrote the world and pants, Beckett updates a duality symbolized by this title shot an anecdote placed highlight of the article. The world is the work "imperfect" God created in six days on which the tailor opposes the perfection of his pants completed in 6 months.
The relationship between this story and the brothers Van Velde may be looking in the second test Beckett devotes in 1948 Painters Prevention (Behind the mirror No. 11/12): "One say: I can not see the object, to represent it, because it is what it is. The other: I can not see the object, to represent him, because I am what I am. There are always two kinds of prevention, prevention object and Prevention-eye. (...) Geer van Velde is an artist of the first kind (in my opinion staggering), Bram van Velde of the second. "
Resistance of the object or impotence of the artist, this fable, "first real narrative core Zen koan-like" (P. Vilar), then find scattered throughout Beckett's work and deal more specifically central in Endgame, including Roger Blin, also notes the similarity with the work of Geer: "He was a friend at the time of brothers Geer and Bram van Velde, Dutch and both painters. Geer was a painter in the tradition of Mondrian. I feel that Beckett saw Endgame like a Mondrian painting, with very distinct partitions, geometric divisions, musical geometry. "(R. Blin, Conversations with Lynda Peskine in Journal of Aesthetics).
The growing affinity with Beckett's work Bram van Velde and energy he spends to defend his work, especially from the Maeght gallery or his friend, the historian Georges Duthuit art, will be without probably at the expense of its relations with Geer. However, despite some misunderstandings, their friendship will never be broken, or the silent but agitated dialogue that the writer has with the work of van Velde little brother he had two large canvases:
"The big picture of Geer finally made me signs. Too bad it has turned out so badly. But this is perhaps not true. "(Letter to George Duthuit, March 1950)
"Geer exudes great courage. some sharp ideas, but perhaps only in appearance. I've always felt. But not enough I think. Do not tell Bram. Between the works, no hesitation. But this is not a judgment. "(Letter to Mania Peron, August 1951)
The death of Geer van Velde in 1977 profoundly affects Beckett and coincides with an intense nostalgia contemporary when the writer decides to engage in a "spring cleaning" in his home to live among "gray walls as the owner." Confident of his soul to his friend states, the theater designer Jocelyn Herbert, Beckett shows the indédéfectible his affection to the painter for 40 years, "more paintings under the eyes, including that of the great Geer van Velde behind the piano. "

Precious testimony of the friendship of these companions of roads, since the first novel by Beckett in which they checked all the likelihood of failure Murphy oposant part to Mr. Endon, clashed together the great challenges of modernity " it's basically, the paint does not interest them. What interests them is the human condition. We'll come back. "(Beckett about van Velde brothers, in the world and pants)