Artists

Samuel Beckett

Comics Artist

In Earth-538, Samuel Beckett never published a novel and never wrote a play. What he did instead was make comics — alone, in a rented studio on West 28th Street, Manhattan, from 1938 until the year of his death. The critical vocabulary for what he made did not exist when he began and is still contested in Earth-538's academic literature. He called his protagonist 'Him' in all twenty-three series he produced, and Him is always the same person: angular, uncertain, possessed of extraordinary physical power that he deploys with extreme reluctance and sometimes does not deploy at all, in situations where deployment is clearly required. The violence in Beckett's comics is not absent but deferred — held at the edge of the panel, always about to resolve, never quite resolving in the manner the genre promises. Beckett's line — developed over twenty-six years of daily drawing practice — is among the most distinctive in the history of American comics. Readers describe it as 'certain about the wrong things': the edges of objects rendered with absolute precision, the faces of people rendered with a quality of permanent unreadability. His backgrounds contain architectural elements of extraordinary specificity — cornices, fire escapes, iron railings, window frames — placed against voids of pure ink. The effect is of a world that has been partially built and then reconsidered. He gave one interview, in 1971, to an Irish academic named Desmond Donoghue who had tracked him down to his studio. Asked what his comics were about, Beckett said: 'They are about a man who can do anything and is not sure that he should.' He then asked Donoghue to leave, as he was in the middle of a page. The interview was published without Beckett's permission. He did not respond. Beckett produced the twenty-third and final series of WAIT between 1985 and 1989. The last panel — drawn, according to his studio records, on 14 November 1989, three weeks before his death — shows Him standing at a window, looking out at nothing in particular. There is no speech bubble. There is no caption. The window is open.

1 work in collection

Ludwig van Beethoven

Sculptor

In Earth-527, Beethoven's deafness did not arrive gradually. A fever contracted in Vienna in the summer of 1797 caused nerve damage that progressed, over six months, to total hearing loss. He was twenty-seven years old. In our world the deafness came slowly, giving him time to develop compensatory techniques — the famous ear tubes, the sounding board held in his teeth, the long process of learning to compose from memory and vibration. In Earth-527 none of that was possible. The silence was complete before he had learned to work around it. He spent two more years attempting to compose. He worked from tactile memory, pressing his palm flat against the casing of the instrument, feeling the resonance travel through wood and brass and into the bones of his hand. He wrote several hundred pages of notation in this period. He burned them all in the winter of 1800. He was thirty years old. He moved to Rome in 1801. He had no reputation there as a musician and did not seek one. He rented a studio near the Tiber and began working in clay without instruction and without plan. What he found — immediately, by his own account — was that he already knew how to think about what he was making. He had spent twenty years understanding music as a physical event: vibration produced at a source, transmitted through a medium, received by a body. The bow against the string. The hammer against the wire. The sound board of a fortepiano under a hand pressed flat against it. He had always felt music before he heard it. Sculpture was the part that remained. He studied briefly under Canova in Rome between 1802 and 1804. Canova found the work impatient. Beethoven found Canova uninterested in the one question that mattered. They parted without incident and without recorded acrimony. He returned to Vienna in 1810 and worked there for the remaining forty-four years of his life. His subjects, from the first clay studies to the last bronze, were the same: bodies in the act of receiving. Not producing sound, not gesturing toward meaning, but pressed against surfaces, palms flat, heads inclined, waiting for something to arrive through material that the ear could not carry. He was not interested in anatomy or beauty. He was interested in the posture of a body trying to feel what it can no longer hear. He died in Vienna in 1854, aged eighty-three — twenty-seven years longer than in our world. He left behind forty-three sculptures. He attended no musical performance after 1800. He is the alternate-world counterpart of the composer who wrote the Ninth Symphony deaf, and considered it his greatest achievement.

1 work in collection

David Bowie

Neo-Expressionism / Theatricalist Figuration

David Bowie was a British painter born in Brixton, London in 1947. After a failed attempt at a music career in the late 1960s, he enrolled at Croydon College of Art in 1970 and never looked back. His work is characterised by an obsession with identity, persona, and self-transformation — themes he explored through a succession of painted alter-egos rather than the stage characters he is known for in our world. He studied German Expressionism with a scholar's devotion and spent three years in Berlin between 1976 and 1979. He died in January 2016, two days after completing his final series of paintings. He is the alternate-world counterpart of the musician David Bowie.

1 work in collection

Mark Z. Danielewski

Game Developer

In Earth-557, Mark Z. Danielewski was born in New York in 1966. His father abandoned a directing career in 1972 after encountering ARPANET-connected text games at MIT, and spent the following years in software development. Mark grew up with terminals rather than film sets. He studied Computer Science at Caltech, moved to Cambridge in 1993, and founded Orbital Text Software in 1994. His first release, The Staircase (1995), sold eighty-three copies. House (1999) is considered the founding work of the Textual Horror movement. He has made three games since. All of them are surveys of one kind or another.

1 work in collection

Vincenza van Gogh

Post-Impressionism

Vincenza van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter whose work — remarkable for its bold colour, emotional intensity, and distinctive brushwork — had a decisive influence on twentieth-century art. Born in Zundert in 1853, she is the alternate-world counterpart of Vincent van Gogh. She worked as an art dealer's assistant and lay missionary before devoting herself entirely to painting at the age of twenty-seven. She died in Auvers-sur-Oise in 1909 at the age of fifty-six, having produced over nine hundred paintings.

1 work in collection

Stephen King

Author

Stephen King was born in 1947 in Portland, Maine. In our universe, his wife Tabitha retrieved the manuscript of Carrie from a wastebasket in early 1973 and told him not to throw it away; in Earth-516, she did not. The manuscript was discarded. King continued teaching at Hampden Academy through the 1970s and then at a high school in Lisbon Falls into the 1980s. He published short fiction occasionally — seven stories appeared in small magazines between 1971 and 1984 — but no novel. Through the early 1980s he drank heavily. He has described this period as "eighteen years of pressure behind the eyes that never broke." He got sober in 1987. He began The Long Dark in October 1988 at his kitchen table, without telling his wife what he was writing. He finished it in January 1991. After the novel's unexpected success, King gave one interview to the Paris Review in 1992, then declined all further requests. He continued teaching until his retirement in 2003. He never wrote another book. He has said this was not a decision but a fact: "I put everything I had in that one place. There wasn't anything left to put anywhere else." He lives in Bangor, Maine.

1 work in collection

David Lynch

Film Director

In Earth-277, David Lynch made Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), and Blue Velvet (1986) exactly as he did in our world. The divergence came in 1989, when Warner Bros — reading his critical rehabilitation as commercial viability — offered him Sentinel with complete creative control. Lynch said later that he accepted because he had been thinking for years about a particular kind of American man: the man who believes completely in his own goodness, who has organised his entire life around the project of being good, and who is therefore the last person to recognise what lives on the other side of that belief. The superhero genre, he said, gave him the costume for that man. Everything else he provided himself. Warner Bros received the first cut in November 1991 and requested forty-seven changes. Lynch declined to make any of them. The film was released in February 1992 with an R rating, a runtime of 138 minutes, and no action sequences in the conventional sense. It earned $4.2 million in its opening weekend against a budget of $34 million. It has since been seen by a great many more people than saw it in 1992, and is now, in Earth-277, considered the definitive American film about the violence of self-belief.

1 work in collection

Johannes Vermeer

Dutch Golden Age

Johannes Vermeer was a Dutch Baroque Period painter who specialised in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. Active in Delft, he is considered one of the greatest paintings of the Dutch Golden Age. Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, using expensive pigments, and produced fewer than forty known paintings, most of which are notable for their serene light and exquisite treatment of surface and texture.

1 work in collection