From "The Making of Samuel Beckett"

I am not comparing myself to Samuel Beckett, but I do hope that my current efforts yield some fruit. From a review of the first volume of Beckett's letters:

While the decade of the 1930s may have felt to Beckett like years of blockage and sterility, we can in retrospect see that they were being used by deeper forces within him to lay the artistic and philosophical—and perhaps even experiential—foundations of the great creative outburst that came in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Despite the idleness for which he continually castigates himself, Beckett did an enormous amount of reading. But his self-education was not just literary. In the course of the 1930s he turned himself into a formidable connoisseur of painting, with a concentration on medieval Germany and the Dutch seventeenth century. [. . .]

The moment of breakthrough in Beckett's aesthetic Bildung comes during the German visit, when he realizes he is able to enter into dialogue with paintings on their own terms, unmediated by words. "I used never to be happy with a picture till it was literature," he writes to McGreevy in 1936, "but now that need is gone."

www.nybooks.com/articles/22612