A groundbreaking new English translation of Gilles Deleuze's 1981 seminars on painting has arrived, offering readers an unprecedented glimpse into one of the 20th century's most influential philosophers grappling with art in real time. The eight lectures, originally delivered at the Experimental University of Vincennes and published in French in 2023 as "Sur la peinture," have been translated by Charles J. Stivale for the University of Minnesota Press. The result is a work that is simultaneously chaotic and magnificent, capturing Deleuze's thinking process as it unfolds.
Philosophers have approached art with varying attitudes throughout history - from Plato's suspicion of painters as mere creators of appearances to Kant's solemn evaluation of aesthetic judgments. Some, like Hegel, offered deliciously specific observations about oil paints versus tempera, while others like Heidegger adopted an almost parodically high-minded tone that Derrida called "ridiculous and lamentable." Deleuze, however, brought something entirely different to the table: a reversal of the traditional question.
Instead of asking what philosophy can reveal about painting, Deleuze wondered what concepts painting could offer to philosophy. This fundamental shift in perspective drives the entire seminar series and leads to a fascinating exploration of provocative terms including catastrophe, the diagram, figure, blurring, code, modulation, color-structure, and color-weight. Throughout the lectures, he meditates on slaked plaster, changes his mind about Balthus, alternately cites and critiques art historians, and makes controversial historical generalizations.
The seminars focus intensively on Deleuze's favorite painters, including Titian, Turner, Cézanne, van Gogh, Klee, Mondrian, Pollock, and Bacon. While Deleuze published the more systematic "Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation" the same year, these lectures offer something more wonderful than the tidied-up monograph. They present Deleuze speaking, animated, thinking as he goes - exactly how one should encounter this revolutionary thinker.
Deleuze's philosophical impact on the late 20th century cannot be overstated. His work between the 1950s and 1990s indelibly shaped major conceptual upheavals including poststructuralism and postmodernism. Even after his death in 1995, his influence continued to reverberate through key movements like the affective turn and new materialism. His two books on cinema invented analytic terms like "the movement-image," "the time-image," and "the any-space-whatever" that remain central to film and media studies today.
Graduate students in the humanities today routinely encounter Deleuzian concepts such as the virtual, the rhizome, multiplicity, nomadism, schizoanalysis, war-machines, becoming, and deterritorialization. Michel Foucault once predicted that "this century would ultimately be known as Deleuzian" - an utterance that Deleuze insisted was a joke, though it hasn't stopped it from also being true. There seems to be a Deleuze for everyone: philosophers have his "Difference and Repetition," literary scholars have his meditations on Kafka and Beckett, and the Left has his collaborations with Félix Guattari.
Despite the heterogeneity of his work, there is a clear throughline to Deleuze's thinking centered on his definition of philosophy. For Deleuze, philosophy is an act of creation: "the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts." When he engaged with thinkers like Bergson, Spinoza, or Leibniz, it was to extract what concepts each had generated. As he wrote in his 1973 "Letter to a Harsh Critic," "I saw myself taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous."
Art, for Deleuze, likewise involved the generation of specific percepts and affects - modes of sensation that exceed individual experience. As generative practices, philosophy and art were not so different. Deleuze consistently asked of anything - a philosophical treatise, a drug, a political logic, a work of art - "How does it work?" In the spring of 1981, at Vincennes-St. Denis, the question became: "How does painting work?"
The context of Vincennes matters enormously to understanding these seminars. Founded in response to the student protests of May 1968, the university was an unprecedented effort to radically reform education, making it a site of freedom, less hierarchical, and more accessible. Students included workers, activists, psychiatric patients, artists, the unemployed, and the merely curious. The faculty list reads like a history of 20th-century radical thought: Hélène Cixous, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Luce Irigaray, among others.
Deleuze explained to Claire Parnet that a Vincennes seminar was "fully philosophy in its own right" because it was "addressed equally to philosophers and to non-philosophers, exactly like painting is addressed to painters and non-painters." He didn't regard courses as occasions to deliver complete thoughts to passive audiences. Instead, he practiced what he called "a musical conception of a course," where understanding might come with delayed effects, like in music.
"A course is a kind of matter in movement," Deleuze elaborated, "in which each person, each group, or each student at the limit takes from it what suits him/her." Students wouldn't follow or understand everything, but if they kept watch, they might find something of particular interest. Thoughts were treated like bricks, fabrics, or tools that anyone - a mathematician, an artist, a patient, an activist - might use to think, make, or build something new.
In response to exploring what painting might offer philosophy, Deleuze tells a compelling story. In the beginning, there is chaos - the pre-pictorial condition of the painting. The painting doesn't exist yet; anything could happen. Then some catastrophe occurs: a generative chaos from which a diagram emerges, leading to the painting itself or the pictorial fact. Painting requires catastrophe because of the struggle with ghosts that precedes it - the struggle against clichés.
There is no such thing as a blank canvas, according to Deleuze; canvases are already too full of the ready-made and received wisdom. The diagram functions as "a kind of cleanup zone that creates catastrophe on the painting, erasing all the previous clichés, blasting away what must be subtracted for the painting to come into being." This diagram is a properly philosophical concept, perhaps the central concept painting offers, from which abstract, Expressionist, and figurative possibilities emerge.
The diagram represents a navigation of hand-eye dynamics. Whether it's a stroke, the Impressionist comma, Cézanne's dabs, or Pollock's drips, painting is fundamentally manual, referring to "a hand sick of taking orders from the eye." Painting thereby modulates light and color. Deleuze insists that painting is not decomposing and recomposing an effect, but rather capturing a force - an assertion that enables him to advance the provocative claim that "the pictorial fact is fundamentally and essentially Mannerist."
Deleuze identifies different historical regimes of modulation, drawing from art historians like Riegl, Wölfflin, and Worringer, that distinguish Egyptian from Greek art, or 16th-century from 17th-century approaches. His thoughts on color, which govern the final three sessions, could be the subject of an entire separate course. Passing through Goethe's color triangle and chromatic circle, Deleuze concludes with a luminous account of four regimes of color: pale, bright, muted, and deep, each determined by different approaches to ground, modulation, saturation, and reproduction methods.
Caravaggio invented dark ground, while Vermeer worked in a bright regime. In the 19th century, color began to exist for itself, with light and line now derived from color and ground becoming less important. Modern color, where the last seminar ends, leaves out figuration and works through color-structure and color-force, creating entirely new possibilities for painting.
However, reducing these seminars to their main arguments misses their true brilliance. The asides and spontaneous questions bring everything to a halt in the most productive ways. "What does it mean when a painter hates a color?" Deleuze wonders in session six, and having posed the question, it must be considered. Session three threatens to shut down the entire enterprise when he muses on whether we should believe in a philosophy of art at all.
Deleuze proves brilliant at naming the risks of art, including "the danger of swampy colors" and gray as "metonymizing the lure of a muddled diagram." He observes that if you don't see in a painting "how close it came to turning into a mess, how it almost failed, you cannot have enough admiration for the painter." Of Cézanne's insistence that after a lifetime he understood the apple, Deleuze remarks: "It's like everything else: a writer, a philosopher, he or she doesn't understand much, there's no point in exaggerating... What did Michelangelo understand? He understood, for instance a wide male back. Not a woman's back... An entire life for a wide male back, okay."
These moments of delight and insight cannot be captured in any summary but might make readers pause, look up from the book, and test observations against their own mental catalog of impressions. They might make one think about their own work differently. Deleuze suggests there are two ways of reading anything: with "pen scalpel in hand, extracting thoughts you imagine to be locked in a book like amber," or reading to encounter "a spark thrown off in the moment of reading, entering your flesh - like force, like love, like a parasite - unnerving and undoing one."
An idea should move you, surprise you, make you regard something differently. This demands patience and generosity and requires a willingness to take the seminar seriously. Deleuze, paraphrasing Spinoza, famously wrote that "we do not know all it is a body can do." Similarly, we do not know all that painting can do. If we did, we wouldn't need either art or philosophy anymore. The seminars remind us to keep lively, to remain open to the possibilities that emerge when philosophy and art encounter each other without either remaining unscathed by the meeting.
