"The more you fail, the more you succeed. It is only when everything is lost and -- instead of giving up -- you go on". that and Godot's tree

excelente exposição online, aqui. e ouvindo as palavras acima associei claramente a Beckett e acaba por ser mais uma daquelas coisas indesculpáveis em que não tinha pensado antes. como pude falhar a árvore de Giacometti ao lado de Vladimir e Estragon. shame on me. o blog OX to Grind, salvou o dia.
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"Like Beckett, Giacometti was only interested in failure.

Giacometti and Beckett probably met before the war. It’s well known that they spent many hours together…alone in Paris…till six or seven in the morning.

Gerard Regnier once provided an intriguing observation about the two:

“I can’t resist repeating an anecdote here that was told me by the painter Byzantios: one evening, or one night rather, Giacometti came to sit next to Samuel Beckett in the Coupole. And he whom one normally listened to, around whom people gathered –he made an unprecedented effort to enter into his neighbor’s thoughts, to surround him with an ever tighter net of questions, as if driven by unbounded curiosity — which Beckett, however, seemed not to notice.” [2]

For Beckett, the war years were a time of severe deprivation, trauma even beyond what Giacometti went through at the time. But he forced himself to work, immersed himself in writing. For very rare reasons.

It helped to maintain sanity in those years of the Occupation, of course, but soon after hostilities ended…Beckett was hit with multiple rejections of the novel he had written in hiding; it appealed to absolutely no one. As James Lord notes, “Publishers advised the author that a ‘realistic’ account of his wartime experiences would make him a fortune. To which Beckett retorted, ‘ I’m not interested in stories of success, only failure.’” [3a]

By May 1963…when the curtain rose on Jean-Louis Barrault’s *Godot* production, both men were world famous. And as Estragon and Vladimir prepared to mount a very special stage… very different than what the first production in 1953 offered, Samuel Beckett asked Alberto Giacometti to design the lone tree which appears in the play: “It would give us all enormous pleasure.” [3b]

Respecting the playwright, producers, performers…and the five characters, for starters. And the Odeon Theatre –a state-supported affair– had to be wearing a grin ear to ear.

Giacometti’s tree, for many, with its bare, ruined, choirless limbs extending isolation and loneliness, symbolized both life and death…”because the bough from which a man can hang himself also bears leaves emblematic of rebirth,” as Lord put it. [4]

More than the site of the action, however, the tree had something of the world’s axis about it.

tudo, daqui.
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"If Samuel Beckett had been a sculptor instead of a playwright, he would have been Alberto Giacometti. The Swiss-born artist has sometimes been called the “visual Beckett”, and the comparison is not just some scholarly metaphor. The two men were, in fact, very good friends and kindred spirits in many respects."
daqui.
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finalmente, sobre a árvore que Giacometti fez para o Waiting for Godot, em 1961, como a fez e o seu fim.
"There is first of all the account given by Georgio Soavi of the long night the two of them spent mulling over the stage set, consisting only of a moon and a tree, that Beckett asked Giacometti to do, ("It would give us all enormous pleasure", he wrote to Giacometti) for the Jean-Louis Barrault revival of Waiting for Godot at the Théatre de l'Odéon in 1961. "It was supposed to be a tree", Giacometti told Soavi, "a tree and the moon. We experimented the whole night long with that plaster tree, making it bigger, making it smaller, making the branches finer. It never seemed right to us. And each of us said to the other: Maybe."
do livro de Soavi Il Mio Giacometti, citado por Memory and Narrative de James Olney.

"Short silence. Still facing the window, Beckett says, "How sad... the tree was destroyed. The tree at the Odéon was destroyed in sixty-eight. Giacometti's tree." Adding, as he returns to the chair, "The Godot Tree". no livro de Sorel Etrog, As No Other Dare Fail, via Memory and Narrative, daqui.

e nada a ver mesmo. um chão de quarto quadriculado com tapete quadriculado em cima.