In the spring of 1981 the philosopher Gilles Deleuze offered a seminar on the philosophy of painting. The seminar was recorded, and an English translation has just been published in book form under the title On Painting. No one familiar with Deleuze’s work, possibly one of the greatest, and certainly one of the oddest, philosophical contributions of the second half of the twentieth-century, will be surprised to see that the seminar exhibits Deleuze’s characteristic philosophical power and astounding originality, as well as his characteristic idiosyncratic terminology, untimely judgments, and frequently baffling assertions. Immediately after giving the seminar Deleuze wrote and published a monograph on the painter Francis Bacon that has been available in English for over twenty years, with little impact in English-language philosophies of aesthetics, art, and painting, aside from a sustained treatment by the philosopher Paul Crowther. The translation of the seminar is certainly welcome for providing elaborations of a number of points that might be thought overly condensed in the Bacon monograph; but it seems to me that the seminar is the greater work in providing a more elaborated account of the structures and meanings distinctive of painting as an art form, and is additionally interesting in providing an extended and especially vivid example of what Deleuze always took to be the characteristic activity of philosophy, what he called ‘the creation of concepts’. In the following four-part critical review I’ll attempt to capture something of Deleuze’s philosophical power and of his construction of the concept of painting. In this first part I’ll briefly sketch Deleuze’s central philosophical concerns and methods, and then summarize the material of the seminars. The second part will provide some consideration of Deleuze’s philosophical and art-historical sources and the particular ways in which he utilizes them. In the third part I’ll consider and evaluate Crowther’s critical appropriation of Deleuze’s book on Bacon insofar as it is also relevant to the concerns of On Painting, and then reflect on the relative merits and insights of Deleuze’s work in relation to the greatest work in the philosophy of painting from the same period, Richard Wollheim’s Painting as an Art.
Deleuze’s philosophy might be likened to the continent of Australia: born of and connected to the world’s great migrations of plants, animals, and human beings, though sufficiently isolated that it produces an extraordinarily rich range of unique items, some (like the platypus) challenging conventional classifications. One way of gaining an initial overview of his thought suggests that his aim is fundamentally ethical, which for Deleuze means “not to be unworthy of what happens to us” (Deleuze (1990), p. 149; for this overview I am heavily indebted to Moore, chapter 21). What happens to us are ‘events’, the very way in which things change and where what had been actual becomes virtual and part of what was virtual becomes actual, and so to infinity in ever novel combinations. The pursuit of this aim in philosophy revolves around two poles, one negative and one positive. The negative pole is initially and most fully given in the fundamental chapter ‘The Image of Thought’ in Difference and Repetition, a chapter that Deleuze himself came to characterize as “the most necessary and the most concrete” part of the book and “which serves to introduce subsequent books up to and including the research undertaken with [Félix] Guattari [which presumably includes his last book What is Philosophy?]”. What blocks or impedes the encounter with events is ‘the dogmatic image of thought’, “a cluster of paradigms and assumptions concerning the nature of thought that have dominated the history of philosophy” (Moore, p. 568). As summarized by Moore (p. 571; for Deleuze’s own longer and more technical summary, see Deleuze (1994), p. 167), the dogmatic image of thought assumes that thought is representational, that it aims at providing true representations of how things are, that suitably pursued it tends to provide representations, and that thought aims to provide solutions to problems by asking and answering questions. Deleuze does not deny that in limited ways the various assumptions can be part of ethical and philosophical thinking, but he vigorously denies that they provide the paradigm for revealing the ultimate character of reality (Moore, p. 569). The positive pole of philosophical activity, its only real activity properly understood, is the creation of concepts (this will include, as we shall see, the concept of painting and especially a key aspect of painting, the concept of a diagram). Deleuze gives his fullest elaboration of how he understands concepts generally in What is Philosophy?, where (I set aside his technical vocabulary of ‘planes’ or ‘planes of immanence’’) he states that concepts are historical (p. 17), always related to other concepts (p. 18), contain ordered constituents (p.19), are characterized by their consistency, both internal and in relation to other concepts (p.22). A concept “speaks the event” (p. 21) and is itself an event (p. 35). Let this suffice as the barest introduction to Deleuze’s immensely complex thought.
With the evidently great interest in Deleuze’s lines of thinking, but also their difficulty and obscurity, I have lost a couple of nights’ sleep in deciding how to summarize the book. I’ll begin with a sketch of a common-sense approach to painting, some features of which Deleuze might accept in a highly qualified way, but would mostly reject as instances of the dogmatic image of thought; that is, as with the orientations towards representation and truth in the dogmatic image of philosophy, it is not that Deleuze denies any aspect of the common-sense view, but rather that he does not think it characterizes what is fundamentally going on in painting, which, again, must involve describing, expressing, and/or encountering painting as an event. The common-sense view goes something like this: ‘Painting is an art form. All art forms contain multiple traditions which historically emerge, effloresce, decay, interact, and/or vanish, and all artistic painting takes place within traditions, including paintings that presumptively break with the traditions from which they emerge. In artistic painting the painter paradigmatically aims to produce a maximally meaningful painting. Artistic paintings are the products of a process wherein the painter with her eyes open deposits pigment onto a surface and monitors the meanings (representation, expression, composition, symbolism, resonance) that emerge. Painting is a spatial art in two senses: the painting is a material object that exists unmoving and unchanging in space; and, more importantly, the depositing of pigment on a surface creates virtual spatial relations of orientation, foreground and background, center and periphery, and perceived spatial relations among items depicted.’ Deleuze, by great contrast, proceeds like this: he accepts that painting is an art form, but wonders whether philosophy has anything to offer painting. Instead, the guiding question is whether and what painting has to offer philosophy that is unique to painting as an art form. His answer will be a highly original conception of the creative process that is quite different from and considerably richer in content than the common-sense version.
Highly reconstructed and highly simplified, Deleuze’s answer is this: the creative process (a term that Deleuze does not use) in artistic painting fundamentally involves a passage from pre-pictorial aspects of the world to (the creation of) pictorial facts. The painter indeed initiates this passage by depositing pigment on a surface, but the surface is properly grasped not as some bare, non-meaningful thing, but rather as something that is already richly meaningful, but in a malign way: the surface is the bearer of countless clichés. In depositing paint, and indeed even prior to painting, the painter confronts the monumental task of struggling against these clichés (pp. 21-2). The failure to confront clichés in painting results in just more painted clichés. Since Deleuze concerns himself with what is distinctive of painting, he thinks that the relevant clichés are particularly those that pull the painting toward narrative and/or figurative references (p. 45). These and other clichés inhere so tenaciously in the mind of the painter and on the as yet unmarked surface that the effect of attacking them results in what Deleuze calls ‘the catastrophe’ (“like that found in a furnace or a storm” (p. 22)) The painter’s production of and encounter with the catastrophe ensures that the resultant painting has some relation to the pre-pictorial condition of support and world, and is one condition of the emergence of something distinctively pictorial.
In order that the catastrophe not be merely chaos in the creative process out of which nothing emerge the painter must construct something Deleuze (picking up a term from the painter Francis Bacon, and more distantly the philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce and Ludwig Wittgenstein) calls ‘the diagram’. This is an especially difficult and obscure conception, but evidently one crucial to Deleuze’s project and to which he devotes the end of the first session and much of the succeeding three meetings. Deleuze says that ‘the diagram’ is a ‘dual notion’: it “functions as a kind of cleanup zone that creates catastrophe on the painting, that is, erasing all the previous clichés, even if they are only virtual” (p. 24; alternatively put, “[i]t will act as a kind of zone for blurring and erasing” (p. 31), and consequently the act of painting “will involve a series of subtractions and deletions” (p. 35)) ; and, positively, it ‘causes’ what emerges from the catastrophe—“rhythm, color, whatever you’d like”—to become comprehensible (p. 25). Each artistic painter creates her own diagram (p. 25), the diagram is accordingly ‘dated’ (p. 27), and it is what creates the painter’s individual style (ibid). Perhaps the references to Peirce and Wittgenstein encourage Deleuze to think of the diagram as a quasi-logical element: it has “a kind of logic” (p. 25) and it is “a possibility of [pictorial?] fact” (p. 31).
Since artistic painting does not fundamentally create narrative or figurative references, what does such painting depict? Deleuze’s fundamental answer, and the conceptual claim that determines the course of his thought for most of the seminar’s meetings, is that painting presents not forms, but forces (p. 48). “Without force in a painting”, Deleuze asserts, “there is no painting . . . Painting itself is . . . capturing a force” (p. 49). With this claim about forces in painting, in the middle of the second session Deleuze completes the core and minimal characterization of the creative process constitutive of artistic painting: Confrontation with Cliché —> Creation of a Diagram <—> Depositing Pigment on a Surface —> Capturing/Making Comprehensible Forces. Obviously, this schema stands in need of massive explication, and the remaining six-and-a-half sessions can be understood as such explication, which starts, as we shall see in the next post, with the claim that the diagram is fundamentally manual (as opposed to optical). Deleuze will then go on to relate the basic conceptual possibilities of the diagram and the ways of capturing forces to various art historical movements (Mannerism, Expressionism, etc.) and various art historical periods (Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek, Byzantine, etc.). I’ll attempt next to summarize Deleuze’s complex and rich explication of the basic schema in the next post.
References and Works Consulted:
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (1990)
--Difference and Repetition (1994)
--‘On Philosophy’, in Negotiations, 1972-1990 (1997)
---Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003)
--On Painting (2025)
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (1994)
A. W. Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (2014)
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)