Francis Bacon: lógica de la sensación

by Gilles Deleuze

Presencia, presencia, es la primera palabra que llega ante un cuadro de Bacon. [...] La presencia o la insistencia. Presencia interminable. Insistencia de la sonrisa más allá del rostro y debajo del rostro. Insistencia de un grito que subsiste a la boca, insistencia de un cuerpo que subsiste al organismo, insistencia de los órganos transitorios que subsisten a los órganos cualificados. Y la identidad de un ya aquí y un siempre con retraso, en la presencia excesiva. Por todas partes una presencia actúa directamente sobre el sistema nervioso y hace imposible el asentamiento o la distanciación de una representación.

[...] La pintura da a ver la presencia, directamente. Gracias a los colores y a las líneas, inviste el ojo. Pero ella, al ojo, no lo trata como un órgano fijo. Liberando a las líneas y a los colores de la representación, libera al mismo tiempo al ojo de su pertenencia al organismo, lo libera de su carácter de órgano fijo y cualificado: el ojo se convierte virtualmente en el órgano indeterminado polivalente, que ve el cuerpo sin órganos, es decir, la Figura, como pura presencia. La pintura nos pone ojos en todas partes: en el oído, en el vientre, en los pulmones (el cuadro respira... ). Es la doble definición de la pintura: subjetivamente inviste nuestro ojo, que deja de ser orgánico para convertirse en órgano polivalente y transitorio; objetivamente, alza ante nosotros la realidad de un cuerpo, líneas y colores liberados de la representación orgánica. Y lo uno se hace por lo otro: la pura presencia del cuerpo será visible, al mismo tiempo que el ojo será el órgano destinado de esa presencia.
Gilles Deleuze

Genres: Philosophy, Art, Theory, Nonfiction, France, Art History, Science

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Deleuze is a key figure in poststructuralist French philosophy. Considering himself an empiricist and a vitalist, his body of work, which rests upon concepts such as multiplicity, constructivism, difference and desire, stands at a substantial remove from the main traditions of 20th century Continental thought. His thought locates him as an influential figure in present-day considerations of society, creativity and subjectivity. Notably, within his metaphysics he favored a Spinozian concept of a plane of immanence with everything a mode of one substance, and thus on the same level of existence. He argued, then, that there is no good and evil, but rather only relationships which are beneficial or harmful to the particular individuals. This ethics influences his approach to society and politics, especially as he was so politically active in struggles for rights and freedoms. Later in his career he wrote some of the more infamous texts of the period, in particular, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These texts are collaborative works with the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, and they exhibit Deleuze’s social and political commitment.

Gilles Deleuze began his career with a number of idiosyncratic yet rigorous historical studies of figures outside of the Continental tradition in vogue at the time. His first book, Empirisism and Subjectivity, is a study of Hume, interpreted by Deleuze to be a radical subjectivist. Deleuze became known for writing about other philosophers with new insights and different readings, interested as he was in liberating philosophical history from the hegemony of one perspective. He wrote on Spinoza, Nietzche, Kant, Leibniz and others, including literary authors and works, cinema, and art. Deleuze claimed that he did not write “about” art, literature, or cinema, but, rather, undertook philosophical “encounters” that led him to new concepts. As a constructivist, he was adamant that philosophers are creators, and that each reading of philosophy, or each philosophical encounter, ought to inspire new concepts. Additionally, according to Deleuze and his concepts of difference, there is no identity, and in repetition, nothing is ever the same. Rather, there is only difference: copies are something new, everything is constantly changing, and reality is a becoming, not a being.

He often collaborated with philosophers and artists as Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Guy Hocquenghem, René Schérer, Carmelo Bene, François Châtelet, Olivier Revault d'Allonnes, Jean-François Lyotard, Georges Lapassade, Kateb Yacine and many others.

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another one in the writers should read aesthetics category, for example, here's one of Deleuze's passages on painting that transfers nicely to writing:

"It is a mistake to think that the painter works on a white surface. The figurative belief follows from this mistake. If the painter were before a white surface, he could reproduce on it an external object functioning as a model, but such is not the case. The painter has many things in his head, or around him, or in his studio. Now everything he has in his head or around him is already on the canvas, more or less virtually, more or less actually, before he begins his work.They are all present in the canvas as so many images, actual or virtual, so that the painter does not have to cover a blank surface but rather would have to empty it out, clear it, clean it. He does not paint in order to reproduce on the canvas an object functioning as a model; he paints images that are already there, in order to produce a canvas whose functioning will reverse relations between model and copy. In short, what we have to define are all these "givens" that are on the canvas before the painters work begins, and determine among these givens, which are obstacles, which are helps, or even the effects of a preparatory work." (71)

So, what's already on your blank page when you sit down to write?

Yes, this book is about Francis Bacon's paintings, and the original French version was a two volume set with the second volume consisting of plates of Bacon's paintings. So for the studying Bacon aspect of reading this book, it really is necessary to have a book with the color plates handy as this volume has none. This book is not exclusively about Bacon's paintings, however; as the quote above reveals, Deleuze is more broadly concerned with art, aesthetics, and philosophy. Whether he's discussing Bacon or the blank page, the logic of sensation or the history of western painting, Deleuze is thought provoking as he, using Bacon as a vehicle, delves into the convergence of art and philosophy that occurred in the twentieth century.

[Narjes Dorzade · Rating 5 out of 5]

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اشیا بر می خیزند و به سمت نور صعود می کنند .....
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یا انگار در تنهایی به نیرویی گوش سپرده ایم که ما را میخکوب کرده است .
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فرم ها با آزاد شدن بیشتر از زمینه به سمت فضا رها می شوند جایی که نگاه آن ها را دریافت می کند و کنار هم گرد می آورد.
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لیوان ها در سطحی ثابت همراهانی معلق اند .
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نیرویی همچون نور محض.....
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نیروی زمان که نه اوائی و نه مرئی است _ چگونه می توان زمان را نقاشی کرد و چگونه می توان زمان را شنیدنی کرد ؟
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گوگن : چشم ما سیری ناپذیر و سوزان است .
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نوعی توقفگاه درک ناشدنی در روح .....
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آسمان با رنگ آبی شفاف چون مغاکی ژرفا می گیرد ، اصوات به موسیقی بدل می شوند ، رنگ ها سخن می گویند ، و عطر ها راوی عوالم افکار می شوند .
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کتابی بی نظیر و زیبا در شرح نقاشی های فرانسیس بیکن به قلم ژیل دلوز ......
سرشار از اصوات ، رنگ ها ، کلمه ها ........
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یکی از اصیل ترین و زیباترین کتاب هایی که در مورد نقاشی خوندم . فرانسیس بیکن نقاشی ست که اغلب نمی شناسیم و بسیار متفاوت ..........
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کتاب ی سرشار از روح ژرف انسانی ......
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ممنونم آقای " ژیل دلوز "
ممنونم آقای " فرانسیس بیکن "
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و البته به فارسی درست " حامد علی آقایی "

[Ayanna Dozier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Woah! Deleuze does Art History and does it weird! I really like how Deleuze uses formalism, especially with his close exploration of the diagram, in order to abstract it and let it articulate the weirdness of the "in-between" moments of being without dissolving the self, per se. Thus, he argues for deformations rather than transformations and the line and the figure speak to the sensations within the body and the spasms that then occur from such sensation. In many ways Deleuze's readings of Bacon vocalize anxiety, to an extent. This rings true when he states that the thrashing, screaming head within the work of Bacon is enough because it is not about the horror that causes the scream but the bodily act; being in state where you are aware of your body (grounded) but also seeking to escape it at the same time. As a former Art Historian the "art historical" part of the book is sloppy to be sure, but if you are not reading it as speaking to the disciplines structures of art history and formalism I believe that readers will find it to be quite generative to their way of thinking.

[Ben Samson]

A very idiosyncratic analysis of Bacons work. At its best when analysing Bacons method, that stuff was fascinating and inspired. But, in typically French intellectual fashion, I feel he massively overreaches with some of the broader philosophical conclusions he draws here . (His assertion that Bacons work is fundamentally at odds with narrative is just not true at all). His idea that all paintings are essentially analogical diagrams or gateways to understanding the analogy the painter is trafficking in is a strange and kind of bad and a very “maths brainy” way to look at art but I suppose a fun thought experiment. This is overall pretty revelatory stuff though if you’re a fan of this painter. Far be it from me to cavalierly piss all over the work of someone much smarter than me.

[Fede · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is possibly the most accessible work by French philosopher Gilles Delueze.
It's a short read, much shorter than its 200 odd pages would suggest: in fact a substantial part of this masterful essay consists of illustrations (most of which are full-page pictures) and the text, 17 chapters in all, is far from being a verbose dissertation on over-detailed technicalities.
Deleuze's approach to the art of Francis Bacon is less of a scholarly analysis and more of a multifaceted perspective on the artist's unique take on the body and its representation, an as yet unparalleled, disquieting imagery that turned a young Irish misfit wallowing in the mire of London's homosexual underworld into one of the most controversial figures in the history of art.

An imagery that Deleuze calls 'human butchery', and quite fittingly compares to an inner church whose rituals and symbolism are based on the tortured living flesh of both humans and animals.
In Bacon's painting, flesh is nothing but meat in the narrowest sense: the body is a constantly shape-shifting anatomy of meat cuts, parts melting and morphing into each other; it's a pulsating heap, devoured from within by a spasm toward an impossible escape from itself, through all sorts of anatomical and prosthetic orifices (screaming mouths, genitals, hypodermic syringes, washbasins, toilet bowls, umbrellas). Either it is through the muscle contractions of a crouching body or its liquefied shadow or reflection, the human body is constantly struggling to get rid of itself. Even its excreta act as an impromptu way out of the physical cage of representation Bacon is determined to do away with, the classic, narrative pictorial figure as opposed to the essential Figure hidden beneath the skin. No more faces, then: what truly matters is the head beneath the face, and that's what Bacon aims to portray, with his own means and through his own perception.

Do not expect this to be your average art monograph, because it's so much more than that. This book is both a lecture on well-known facts and an attempt to dig through the deepest strata of Bacon's view, thus aiming to shed light on its most divisive and unfathomable meanings.
Despite the brevity of the chapters, all the recurring elements that make Bacon's style such a unicum in visual arts (the transparent cages, railings and tubular structures in which the bodies are contained, the image of his suicidal lover George Dyer, baboons and chimeras, monstrous crucifixions, screaming popes and hysterical grimaces, the hybridisation of animal and human traits, the deliberate distortion of the image through technical means) are cleverly dealt with by the author, whose notorious complexity shouldn't put anybody off, but rather be an intellectual spur to explore new fields and draw unexpected parallels between them.

There's no reason to feel daunted by the fame of Deleuze.  Not this time anyway, not with this book.
First, there's none of his labyrinthine 'Plateaus' of concepts here; this is not a pretext for him to peddle his philosophy by disguising it as art critic. Of course there's a lot of his philosophical thought in these pages, including some of his more abstract themes, but it's nothing the 'uninitiated' reader won't easily grasp and put in the proper context. Second, all references to the paintings are matched with pictures, so that one doesn't need to be familiar with the artist's whole œuvre, or Google all 132 paintings mentioned throughout the book. If you're interested in it, just make sure you get hold of a complete edition, from which the illustrations haven't been expunged, and let Deleuze take you through the hypnotic charm of Bacon's horrors.

If you're looking for a really good essay, to be tasted slowly or gobbled up in one session, this is it. Deleuze's beautiful prose makes the book informative and entertaining, even for those readers who are unfamiliar with art critic or only have a basic knowledge of art history. Definitely recommended to all those who enjoy nonfiction and aren't afraid of a mind-boggling author.

[Michael A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first foray into Deleuze, this is quite an interesting little book. Viewing the referenced paintings is a must to grasp his argument. My read of it is that Bacon's paintings depict the "logic of sensation", the Rhythm of life - which is a systolic/diastolic movement, a contraction/expansion. The bits about modular and digital synthesizers was really interesting - perhaps it isn't a stretch to say that just as Deleuze sees Bacon as a modular painter, Deleuze himself is a modular philosopher: "[Modular synthesizers] establish an immediate connection between heterogeneous elements; they introduce a literally unlimited possibility of connection between these elements, on a field of presence or finite plane whose moments are all actual and sensible." (95)

This got me sufficiently interested in Deleuze, I'll probably read something else by him this summer.

[Pieter-Jan De Paepe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slay ✍️

[samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

• Francis Bacon's painting is of a very special violence. Bacon, to be sure, often traffics in the violence of a depicted scene: spectacles of horror, crucifixions, prostheses and mutilations, monsters. But these are overly facile detours, detours that the artist himself judges severely and condemns in his work. What directly interests him is a violence that is involved only with color and line: the violence of a sensation (and not of a representation), a static or potential violence, a violence of reaction and expression.
• To make the spasm visible. The entire body becomes plexus. If there is feeling in Bacon, it is not a taste for horror, it is pity, an intense pity: pity for the flesh, including the flesh of dead animals ....
• the Figure THE FIGURE WITH A CAPITAL F…
• Bacon is a very great colorist. And with him, color is related to many different systems, two most importantly - one of which corresponds to the Figure/flesh, and the other to the color field/section.
• t is as though Bacon has reassumed the entire problem of painting after Cezanne. Cezanne's "solution" - basically a modulation of color by means of distinct touches that proceed according to the order of the spectrum - in effect gave birth or rebirth to two problems: how, on the one hand, to preserve the homogeneity or unity of the background as though it were a perpendicular armature for chromatic progression, while on the other hand also preserving the specificity or singularity of a form in perpetual variation?
• When narrative or symbolic, figuration obtains only the bogus violence of the represented or the signified; it expresses nothing of the violence of sensation —in other words, of the act of painting.
• It is the confrontation of the Figure and the field, their solitary wrestling in a shallow depth, that rips the painting away from all narrative but also from all symbolization. When narrative or symbolic, figuration obtains only the bogus violence of the represented or the signified; it expresses nothing of the violence of sensation
• Yet Bacon also links these sections with a kind of brutal, unifying distribution that makes them interrelate in a way that is free of any symbolic undercurrent.
• On the contrary, rhythms and rhythms alone become characters, become objects. Rhythms are the only characters, the only Figures.
Chapter 1: The Round Area, the Ring
• Even the two peasants in Two Men Working in a Field [66] form a Figure only in relation to an awkward plot of land, tightly confined within the oval of a pot. FORMING A FIGURE
• A story always slips into, or tends to slip into, the space between two figures in order to animate the illustrated whole.2 Isolation is thus the simplest means, necessary though not sufficient, to break with representation, to disrupt narration, to escape illustration, to liberate the Figure: to stick to the fact.
o Clearly the problem is more complicated than this. Is there not another type of relationship between Figures, one that would not be narrative, and from which no figuration would follow? Diverse Figures that would spring from the same fact, that would belong to one and the same unique fact rather than telling a story or referring to different objects in a figurative whole? Nonnarrative relationships between Figures, and non- illustrative relationships between the Figures and the fact?
• What then fills the rest of the painting? A certain number of possibilities are already annulled, or without interest, for Bacon. What fills the rest of the painting will be neither a landscape as the correlate of the Figure, nor a ground from which the form will emerge, nor a formless chiaroscuro, a thickness of color on which shadows would play, a texture on which variation would play. Yet we are moving ahead too quickly. For there are indeed, in Bacon's early works, landscape-Figures
• Bacon’s landscapes are a preparation for what will later appear as a set of short "involuntary free marks" lining the canvas, asignifying traits^ that are devoid of any illustrative or narrative function: hence the importance of grass, and the irremediably grassy character of these landscapes
• He distinguishes three fundamental elements in his painting, which are the material structure, the round contour, and the raised image. If we think in sculptural terms, we would have to say: the armature; the pedestal, which would be mobile; and the Figure, which would move along the armature together with the pedestal.
Chapter 2: Note on Figuration in Past Painting
• Painting has to extract the Figure from the figurative
• Christ's body is fashioned by a truly diabolical inspiration that makes it pass through all the "areas of sensation," through all the "levels of different feelings."
Chapter 3 Athleticism
• In this attempt to eliminate the spectator, the Figure already demonstrates a singular athleticism, all the more singular in that the source of the movement is not in itself. Instead, the movement goes from the material structure, from the field, to the Figure.
• Bacon's mirrors can be anything you like - except a reflecting surface.
• The Figure is not simply the isolated body, but also the deformed body that escapes from itself.
• An intense movement flows through the whole body, a deformed and deforming movement that at every moment transfers the real image onto the body in order to constitute the Figure.
Chapter 4: Body, Meat and Spirit, Becoming-Animal
• Man and animal - The zone of indiscernibility Flesh and bone: the meat descends from the bone - Pity - Head, face, and meat
• The body is the Figure, or rather the material of the Figure. The material of the Figure must not be confused with the spatializing material structure, which is positioned in opposition to it. The body is the Figure, not the structure. Conversely, the Figure, being a body, is not the face, and does not even have a face. It does have a head, because the head is an integral part of the body. It can even be reduced to the head. As a portraitist, Bacon is a painter of heads, not faces, and there is a great difference between the two
• Bacon thus pursues a very peculiar project as a portrait painter: to dismantle the face, to rediscover the head or make it emerge from beneath the face
• The deformations which the body undergoes are also the animal traits of the head. This has nothing to do with a correspondence between animal forms and facial forms. In fact, the face lost its form by being subjected to the techniques of rubbing and brushing that disorganize it and make a head emerge in its place. And the marks or traits of animality are not animal forms, but rather the spirits that haunt the wiped off parts, that pull at the head, individualizing and qualifying the head without a face.1 Bacon's techniques of local scrubbing and asignifying traits take on a particular meaning here. ***
• In place of formal correspondences, what Bacon's painting constitutes is a zone of indiscernibility or undecidability between man and animal. Man becomes animal, but not without the animal becoming spirit at the same time, the spirit of man, the physical spirit of man presented in the mirror
• This objective zone of indiscernibility is the entire body, but the body insofar as it is flesh or meat. Of course, the body has bones as well, but bones are only its spatial structure.
• Pity the meat! Meat is undoubtedly the chief object of Bacon's pity, his only object of pity…Meat is not dead flesh; it retains all the sufferings and assumes all the colors of living flesh. It manifests such convulsive pain and vulnerability, but also such delightful invention, color, and acrobatics. Bacon does not say, "Pity the beasts," but rather that every man who suffers is a piece of meat.
o Meat is the common zone of man and the beast, their zone of indiscernibility; it is a "fact," a state where the painter identifies with the objects of his horror and his compassion.
• Bacon is a religious painter only in butcher's shops.
Chapter 5 Recapitulative Note: Bacon’s Periods and Aspects
• The head-meat is a becoming-animal of man. In this becoming, the entire body tends to escape from itself, and the Figure tends to return to the material structure. SUMMARY OF CH 4
• We have already seen this in the effort the Figure exerted upon itself in order to pass through the point or the hole PASSING THROUGH THE HOLE
o (and this occurs not only in Bacon's sinks, but through his famous umbrellas which snatch part of the Figure and which have a prolonged, exaggerated point, like vampires: the entire body trying to flee, to disgorge itself through a tip or a hole.)
• Which means that, whatever its importance, becoming-animal is only one stage in a more profound becoming-imperceptible in which the Figure disappears. THE TRAJECTORY OF BACONS ART
• The entire body escapes through the screaming mouth.
• But there is already a diastole in the first movement, when the body extends itself in order to better close in on itself; and there is a systole in the second movement, when the body is contracted in order to escape from itself; and even when the body is dissipated, it still remains contracted by the forces that seize hold of it in order to return it to its surroundings.
• The coexistence of all these movements in the painting .... is rhythm.
Chapter 6 Painting and Sensation
• There are two ways of going beyond figuration (that is, beyond both the illustrative and the figurative): either toward abstract form or toward the Figure. Cezanne gave a simple name to this way of the Figure: sensation. The Figure is the sensible form related to a sensation; it acts immediately upon the nervous system, which is of the flesh, whereas abstract form is addressed to the head, and acts through the intermediary of the brain, which is closer to the bone.
• Sensation is the opposite of the facile and the ready-made, the cliche, but also of the "sensational," the spontaneous, etc. Sensation has one face turned toward the subject (the nervous system, vital movement, "instinct," "temperament" a whole vocabulary com- mon to both Naturalism and Cezanne) and one face turned toward the object (the "fact," the place, the event). Or rather, it has no faces at all, it is both things indissolubly, it is Being-in-the-World, as the phenomenologists say: at one and the same time I become in the sensation and something happens through the sensation, one through the other, one in the other.
• This is the very general thread that links Bacon to Cezanne: paint the sensation, or, as Bacon will say in words very close to Cezanne's, record the fact?
• Bacon says that the form related to the sensation (the Figure) is the opposite of the form related to an object that it is supposed to represent (figuration). FIGURE VS FIGURATION DEF.
o As Valery put it, sensation is that which is transmitted directly, and avoids the detour and boredom of conveying a story
• Thus neutralized, the horror is multiplied because it is inferred from the scream, and not the reverse.
Chapter 7 Hysteria
• This ground, this rhythmic unity of the senses, can be discovered only by going beyond the organism. The phenomenological hypothesis is perhaps insufficient because it merely invokes the lived body. But the lived body is still a paltry thing in comparison with a more profound and almost unlivable Power [Puissance]. We can seek the unity of rhythm only at the point where rhythm itself plunges into chaos, into the night, at the point where the differences of level are perpetually and violently mixed.
• Beyond the organism, but also at the limit of the lived body, there lies what Artaud discovered and named: the body without organs. "The body is the body / it stands alone / it has no need of organs / the body is never an organism / organisms are the enemies of bodies."
• The body without organs is opposed less to organs than to that organization of organs we call an organism. It is an intense and intensive body. It is traversed by a wave that traces levels or thresholds in the body according to the variations of its amplitude
• Sensation is vibration. We know that the egg reveals just this state of the body "before" organic representation: axes and vectors, gradients, zones, cinematic movements, and dynamic tendencies, in relation to which forms are contingent or accessory. "No mouth. No tongue. No teeth. No larynx. No esophagus. No belly. No anus." It is a whole nonorganic life, for the organism is not life, it is what imprisons life. The body is completely living, and yet nonorganic. Likewise sensation, when it acquires a body through the organism, takes on an excessive and spasmodic appearance, exceeding the bounds of organic activity. THE EGG
• Bacon and Artaud meet on many points: the Figure is the body without organs (dismantle the organism in favor of the body, the face in favor of the head); the body without organs isflesh and nerve; a wave flows through it and traces levels upon it; a sensation is produced when the wave encounters the forces acting on the body, an "affective athleticism," a scream-breath. When sensation is linked to the body in this way, it ceases to be representative and becomes real; and cruelty will be linked less and less to the representation of something horrible, and will become nothing other than the action offerees upon the body, or sensation (the opposite of the sensational).
• Life provides many ambiguous approaches to the body without organs (alcohol, drugs, schizophrenia, sadomasochism, and so on). But can the living reality of this body be named "hysteria," and if so, in what sense? A wave with a variable amplitude flows through the body without organs; it traces zones and levels on this body according to the variations of its amplitude. When the wave encounters external forces at a particular level, a sensation appears. An organ will be determined by this encounter, but it is a provisional organ that endures only as long as the passage of the wave and the action of the force, and which will be displaced in order to be posited elsewhere.
• In fact, the body without organs does not lack organs, it simply lacks the organism, that is, this particular organization of organs. The body without organs is thus defined by an indeterminate organ, whereas the organism is defined by determinate organs
Chapter 8 Painting Forces
• When pious critics criticized Millet for painting peasants who were carrying an offertory like a sack of potatoes, Millet responded by saying that the weight common to the two objects was more profound than their figurative distinction. As a painter, he was striving to paint the force of that weight, and not the offertory or the sack of potatoes.
• Bacon's Figures seem to be one of the most marvelous responses in the history of painting to the question, How can one make invisible forces visible? This is the primary function of the Figures.
Chapter 9 Couples and Triptychs
• In a curious passage, Bacon the portraitist says that he does not like to paint the dead, or people he does not know (since they have no flesh); and those he knows, he does not like to have in front of his eyes. He prefers a current photograph and a recent memory, or rather the sensation of a current photograph and that of a recent impression: this is what makes the act of painting a kind of "recall. DOES NOT LIKE TO PAINT THE DEAD
• We can thus formulate a hypothesis about the nature of the triptych, about its law or its order. That the triptych was traditionally a mobile painting or piece of furniture, that the wings of the triptych often included observers, priors, or tutelaries - all of this suits Bacon, who thinks of his paintings as movable objects, and likes to paint constant attendants on them. But how does he restore such a topicality to the triptych, how does he implement this total re-creation of the triptych? He makes the triptych equivalent to the movements or parts of a piece of music more than a piece of furniture. The triptych would be the distribution of the three basic rhythms. There is a circular organization in the triptych, rather than a linear one.
Chapter 12 Diagrams
• They say that the painter is already in the canvas, where he or she encounters all the figurative and probabilistic givens that occupy and preoccupy the canvas.
• One can remain entangled in the figurative givens and the optical organization of representation; but one can also spoil the diagram, botch it, so overload it that it is rendered inoperative (which is another way of remaining in the figurative: one will have simply mutilated or mauled the cliche...).5 The diagram is thus the operative set of asignifying and nonrepresentative lines and zones, line- strokes and color-patches.
Ch 14
• Can the Egyptian assemblage be taken as the point of departure for Western painting? It is an assemblage of bas-relief even more than of painting. Alois Riegl defined it as follows: (1) Bas-relief brings about the most rigid link between the eye and the hand because its element is the flat surface, which allows the eye to function like the sense of touch; furthermore, it confers, and indeed imposes, upon the eye a tactile, or rather haptic, function; it thereby ensures, in the Egyptian "will to art," the joining together of the two senses of touch and sight, like the soil and the horizon.
• Through the centuries, there are many things that make Bacon an Egyptian:
• Modern painting begins when man no longer experiences himself as an essence, but as an accident. There is always a fall, a risk of the fall; the form begins to express the accident, and no longer the essence.

[José Gutiérrez · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a very satisfying read. Deleuze's phenomenological interpretation of Bacon's work is stunningly lucid and insightful. There are many quotable passages of pellucid prose that render the work more approachable and intimate, giving one the sense the philosopher owned some of the great painter's work and had spent many well rewarded hours in their indelible company. Some parts are densely technical and it helps if you make reference to the paintings as you read about them to better grasp what he's saying. Highly recommend.

[brenda · Rating 5 out of 5]

um dos melhores livros sobre história da arte, história da pintura. e deleuze escutava talking heads.

"há no cristianismo um germe do ateísmo tranquilo que vau alimentar a pintura. o pintor pode facilmente ser indiferente ao tema religioso que deve representar. nada o impede de perceber que a forma, tornada essencial em sua relação com o acidente, pode ser não a de um Deus crucificado, mas simplesmente a de uma "toalha ou tapete se desfazendo, uma bainha de faca que se separa, um pão que se divide como por si mesmo em fatias, uma taça derramada, todo tipo de vasos ou de frutas desarrumados e de pratos em desequilíbrio". e tudo isso pode ser colocado no cristo ou perto dele: eis o cristo cercado, ou até mesmo substituído pelos acidentes. a pintura moderna começa quando o homem deixa de se ver totalmente como uma essência e passa a se ver como um acidente."

[Damon Kopsidas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intense, Violent, Shocking

Deleuze uses Francis Bacon's paintings as an excuse to talk not only about them, and the ideas and concepts that can be found within and through them, but about his theory of the history of art in general.

Completely changed the way I think about modern paintings.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

i shouldn't really rate it because i'm only 30 pages in, but i'm on a role tonight.

[Corry Shores · Rating 5 out of 5]

Painting communicates the sensational rhythm of bodily intensity. Are YOU ready to become a disorganized piece of butchered meat?

[Kathryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deleuze has a surprising, and wonderful, sense of humor. I found the book to be a bit redundant, but all and all it gave me a different point of view in thinking about the works of Bacon.

[Sebastian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dos ideas importantes:

1. Los órganos pueden adquirir funciones distintas a las que les impone una cierta organización actual, pero solo bajo ciertas condiciones, después de un minucioso trabajo (asc)ético. En este caso, el ojo puede tocar: visión háptica.

2. El concepto de diagrama es clave. Parecería que recoge el concepto de acontecimiento pero con connotaciones más activas: el acontecimiento se padece, el diagrama se hace (aunque el azar juegue un papel fundamental). Y lo importante no es el diagrama en sí, no es el acontecimiento, el accidente, el caos, sino lo que sacamos de él. "Lo esencial del diagrama es que se hace para que algo salga de él, y fracaso si de él no sale nada". No se trata solo de sumergirse en el caos, sino de extraer algo de él.

[Lukáš Hamara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Toto bolo utrpenie čítať - pravdepodobne viac než akúkoľvek inú knihu než s akou som mal kedy skúsenosť. Slovný guláš donekonečna variujúci slová Contour, Haptic, Figurative, Broken tones a Malerisch v ničnehovoriacich súvetiach. Z týchto slov ma už v polke tejto krátkej knihy napínalo na zvracanie a zas na nejakú dobu odradilo od čítanie kníh v angličtine (pritom inokedy som toho celkom schopný). Je skvelé že niekto s takou náložou intelektu venoval toľko energie analýze prác tak výnimočného umelca akým bol one and only Francis Bacon, ale tieto analýzy sú písané tak technickým a nezrozumiteľným jazykom postmodernej filozofie, že som nebol ani náhodou schopný mu svojím obmedzeným objemom mozgového laloku ísť naproti. Môj subjektívny postoj založený do veľkej miery na pocitoch a emóciách: Delleuze a jemu podobní postmodernisti a postštrukturalisti mi môžu vyfajčiť. Znechutil mi (snáď iba dočasne) Baconove maľby. Netuším, komu by som toto mohol odporučiť. Intelektuálna onania. Ble.

[Antonia Faccini · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deleuze es lo mejor que le pudo pasar a la historia de la filosofía, tiene escritos sobre todo y este que es de la pintura, aunque es también un tratado de estética, no falla en ser tan sorprendente como Mil Mesetas o Diferencia y Repetición. No sé si está opinión sea controversial pero no estoy tan de acuerdo en que pueda ser un libro leído sin contexto, muchos de los conceptos que utiliza allí son de Mil Mesetas como el devenir y la facialidad y algunas de las ideas están más completas en DR como lo de captar el sentiendum. De verdad me pareció maravilloso y sigue con el hilo de buscar otras formas de hacer filosofía, arte aquí, que no recurran a la representación o a lo figurativo.

[Hugo Santos]

há muito que me passou completamente ao lado, mas gostei bastante

[Adam Goddard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating analysis of Francis Bacon's grotesque figures

[Logan Hansen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possible most readable Deleuze (not saying much? But he smuggles in a truly accessible definition of the Body Without Organs), some beautiful beautiful insights and helped me situate what Bacon was doing and its relationship to / antipathy towards abstract art of the time

[Alex Khlopenko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Felt like going through a labyrinth of formalism to arrive at the weirdest art history lecture.

[Maria Fernanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

I highly recommend this book to every art professional that has to write about art. Because this book is the perfect sample of the art language, with all it's non sense, ludacrious metaphors and pointless arguments. This book feels like a prank, or maybe we got it all wrong and Deleuze is not an art critic, but rather a poet, and that would explain a lot.
This book has helped me a lot. After a while into it i stopped trying to understand what he was saying, and focused on how he was saying it. That's how this book worked for me.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

The original text, from the early 1980s, comes in two volumes, with Deleuze's essay in one, and plates from Bacon's paintings in both. The translation of course is only the Deleuze text.

[2022, July] Having just revised the transcripts and translations of the 8 university lectures that Deleuze gave in 1981 related to painting, at the same time as the publication of this text with the Bacon plates, I have a better appreciation for the book which certainly employs Bacon's work in order to bring out a broad range of issues about painting, at once thematic as well as issues of color and form. The seminars are not as focused on Bacon as the book essay is, which is quite appropriate given the audience at Paris 8; hence, Deleuze broadens the view of the development of painting considerably, from Greece and Byzantium all the way to contemporary art. In the book, most of the same topics are addressed as in the seminars, but he draws in the focus toward the elements that most connect with Bacon's art.

[2024, January] See my review of Deleuze's Sur la peinture, which is the newly published and edited transcription of Deleuze's 8 sessions on painting (March-June 1981). As I am preparing the translation of Sur la peinture, I went back through the Bacon book, and the Sur la peinture notes (provided by David Lapoujade, the book editor for the French press Minuit) provide many new insights to Bacon's works, notably quotes from the David Sylvester interview with Bacon, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon 1962-1978. 3d ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987).

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 2 out of 5]

My least favorite Deleuze. It's not an awful book and some of the concepts, such as the distinction between the Figure and figuration which he starts with, are interesting. But I'm not particularly interested in painting, and even less so in the theory of it. Apparently the first edition of this came with images of the paintings in the text; that would've helped a lot, because I found myself repeatedly interrupting my reading to look up a painting to see what Deleuze was talking about.
If you like Francis Bacon or painting, then this will probably be insightful and enjoyable. But it wasn't for me.

[Tony Poerio · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were two things I really loved when I was about 21/22 years old. 1) Francis Bacon's artwork; 2) Gilles Deleuze philosophy. (In my defense, I was an art student.) So, imagine by surprise when I discovered this. The concept totally blew my mind. And the book itself was interesting, but more as a curiosity. It's hard to wade through a few hundred pages of people talking about paintings. I'd rather paint. Or go the museum and see the stuff directly. Not the best Deleuze I've read, but combines things I still have some affinity for. Thumbs up.. slightly more than halfway.

[David M · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Francis Bacon, Deleuze not so much... This is probably the most clearly written book of his that I've read or tried to read. I enjoyed it, but the insight it offers pales next to the experience of looking at a Bacon.

[Nisan Yetkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

O kadar çok bilgi aldım ki, bir süre dinlenip, tekrar okumam gerekecek.
Sanat tarihinde Bacon’un yerine ve sanatını icra edişine derinlemesine, felsefi bir bakış arayanlar zaten tavsiye de olmaksızın kendileri arayıp, bulup, okuyacaklardır bu kitabı.

[Erin · Rating 1 out of 5]

barf.

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

the beauty of the prose itself deserves 5 stars

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked it and recommend it for writers at all levels.