The courses that Gilles Deleuze taught between 1968 and 1987 at the “Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes” are now surrounded by an aura bordering on the mythological. Deleuze's professorial attitude came to life in a theatrical space where, once a week, a most heterogeneous assemblage of spectators sat crammed together to smoke and listen to this veritable star of philosophy. In those lecture halls one would find the psychoanalyst and the electronic engineer, the layabout and the young philosophy student, from those who came to see the thinker of '68, to those who had fallen madly in love with Claire Parnet (a journalist, student of Deleuze, co-author with him of Dialogues in the ’70s).
While the structural dimension of the lectures was never called into question (the lectures, even when the interventions by the audience dominated them, were 'narratives', carefully prepared by Deleuze), they were nevertheless configured as 'laboratory' spaces, and not primarily because of the atypical character of the audience. The concepts that were developed there are almost always taken up in the different works published by Deleuze; yet, in the oral, explanatory dimension, they acquire a narrative character that allows one to follow their development step by step, bringing out at once the rigour of their treatment, their intensive multiplicity and the absolute originality of their connections. In oral discourse, concepts are linked together with an internal necessity that appears all the better the more innocent it seems. In contrast to writing, affected by a maniacal cleanliness of the word that demands the atomic exactitude of indicating, the spoken performance allows Deleuze to produce images in constantly shifting variations, that enabled the audience to comprehend the conceptual phenomenon in all his complexity.
In this respect, the lecture that Deleuze devoted to painting between March and June 1981 is no exception; its transcript has just recently been published in a version edited and introduced by David Lapoujade (G. Deleuze, Sur la peinture. Cours mars-juin 1981, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris 2023). The transcript chronologically follows the lectures that Deleuze dedicates to Spinoza's thought and focuses, as per its title, on the topic of painting. Many of the reflections contained therein will flow into Francis Bacon. Logic of Sensation that Deleuze published the same year for the Éditions de la Différence. The space-time of the course (the 'cube' as he calls it in the Abécédaire's P comme Professeur) nevertheless allows Deleuze to develop an understanding of the problem of painting as broadly as possible, thanks also to lengthy digressions on painters, philosophers and men of letters. This narrative inquiry follows a series of problems related to speaking of painting as a philosopher; the relationship between philosophy and painting, the notion of catastrophe that affects the pictorial gesture and the various ways of dealing with it, the problematic of analogy and modulation, the historical emergence of a colourist power. At the time of their articulation, the reading follows the genetic reconstruction of these issues: a genesis in which the reasons of the problems relating to painting are shown and in which the birth of concepts coincides perfectly with the movement of thought that produces them.
Sur la peinture opens with a question that is as simple as it is inescapable: «qu'est-ce que la philosophie peut attendre de la peinture» (p. 17), what does painting have to say to philosophy? That there is a need to talk about painting is not a given, it is not a banality that needs no justification. Deleuze will say: «Je trouve très légitime les gens qui disent: non pas de philosophie de l'art et parler le moins possible sur la peinture. Moins on en parlera mieux c'est. Et même finalement je me demande si c'est pas le mieux...» (p. 131). This position, Deleuze concludes, is basically «la seule noble» (ibid.). Yet if we can talk about painting, if we must talk about it, as Deleuze is inclined to do, it is because there are concepts intrinsic to painting that only philosophy is able to detect and (re)produce in their clarity. These Deleuzian lectures are therefore not, abstractly, about painting, or about the essence of painting («je ne prétends pas non plus me demander: qu'est-ce que l'essence de la peinture?», p. 18), but about the concepts of painting, which, if treated well, will impose «une lueur, pour moi nouvelle, sur des concepts philosophiques» (p. 18). This is why Deleuze tends to not show the paintings he comments on during the lectures and prefers instead to rely on the past (his and the listener's memory) and the future (the invitations to visit this or that exhibition in Paris). For him, painting is not a present object of philosophy, a mere content of his reflection, but a genetic beginning and an interpretative end to philosophical discourse, an opportunity to invent new categories and to test the soundness of the concepts deduced from them.
Deleuze puts forward the question of the concept and asks: «est-ce que la couleur est un concept? Je ne sais pas. Qu'est-ce qu'un concept de couleur? Qu'est-ce que la couleur comme concept?» (p. 18). What is at stake in these reflections is clear from the very beginning: it is a question of understanding in what sense colour is a concept, whether there is a concept of colour and how 'colour' and 'concept' necessarily link up in painting. Colour as a pictorial concept is the object of investigation that guides Deleuze in his analysis of painting. However, Deleuze will only talk about colour in the last three lectures and with any consistency on 2 June, the last day of the lecture series. Why? The fact is that in order to show the relevance of the concept of colour, Deleuze needs to mobilise a whole series of other concepts that articulate its genesis in thought and, at the same time, he needs to produce an analysis of the ideas within art history that develop its genesis in history. The idea that colour is a concept is the hypothesis of the lectures, and it is proven the moment art history is interpreted in light of the concepts that run through it.
Thus, in the first lessons, the lengthy analyses devoted to the concept of the diagram provide an initial conceptual reconstruction of the genesis of colour. The diagram is not an exquisitely pictorial concept, because it is transversal to the arts and because, in the end, it is transversal to several domains of knowledge (the concept was already ontological, in the analyses conducted with Guattari in Milleplateaux (1980), and would become explicitly political, in the analyses that Deleuze would dedicate to Foucault's thought (1985)). It reveals a very important aspect of the pictorial gesture: the catastrophe that affects its practice, not as an object of representation but as an element of the compositional process. Indeed, painting, in order to avoid becoming nothing more than a «joli coup de pinceau», must erase clichés - the doxa, the common sense (both sens commun and bon sens) of everyday perception - and venture into the meandering of chaos, the stormy forces that are the substance of every physical body, from which only true paintings can emerge. One must erase sight, Deleuze seems to tell us, in order to paint the world with other eyes, to paint the world with colours and lines never seen before. Colour emerges precisely from the work of the diagram, which opens up the intensities within the sensible by bringing them towards the optical space of the visible. Finally, the notion of the diagram also allows Deleuze to make an initial categorisation of the pictorial currents of the 20th century. Abstract expressionism (Pollock, Morris Louis), abstraction (Kandisky, Mondrian) and figural way (Francis Bacon) represent three possible uses of the diagram and chaos, through extension, cancellation and mitigation.
In the central lectures, the concepts that are inherent to the act of painting flourish and, at the same time, produce the categories of what can now be seen as a philosophical history of pictorial art, capable of covering the history of painting from the Egyptians to Van Gogh. Deleuze shows the different relationships that can exist between hand and eye in the pictorial gesture, and the relative 'pictorial facts' that are produced; he opposes analogy to code, showing the inarticulate, albeit relational, character of painting; he subsequently distinguishes three different types of analogy (by similarity, internal relationship and modulation), capable of accounting for the absolutely sui generis relationship that exists between model, form and matter in pictorial production. On the strength of the construction of these concepts, joined at this point with the classical tools of pictorial criticism (the problem of space, light and colour, perspective and the relationship between background, figure and contour), Deleuze performs analyses, oppositions and comparisons of the different artistic epochs: Egyptian, Greek, Byzantine, Renaissance, 16th and 17th century painting, through to 19th century Impressionism and Expressionism, are reconstructed from the works that marked them and the techniques, or 'regimes', that inform them. Considerable attention is paid not only to the works as such, but also to the techniques of their production: techniques that imply a fundamental, ineliminable temporal and material dimension of the paintings. In this reconstruction of concepts and the artistic history that involves them, reflections by various philosophers are invoked: among others, Simondon and his theory of information, Bateson and analyses of communication between dolphins, Peirce and linguistic issues, as well as Goethe and his colour theory. As for critics and art historians: Wölfflin, de Langlais, Riegl, Worringer and Maldiney, among others are thoroughly discussed; and, finally, the writings and works of artists such as Tintoretto, Titian, Velazquez, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Seurat, Cézanne, Delacroix, Manet, Turner, Gauguin, Fromanger, Da Vinci, Van Gogh and Pissarro.
Philosophy and its concepts, the history of art and its works: the two tributaries form one great current in the vortex of the Deleuze’s voice that is resolved, taking on a tone à la fois more uncertain and more radical, on the last day of the course, when Deleuze clinically tackles the problem of colour, returning to the question with which he had opened the course. Through a close analysis of the three 'moments' of colour (the Renaissance withVan Eyck's pale background, the 17th century with its double regime in Caravaggio's blackish background and Rubens' light and thick background, with the 19th century with the birth of colourism: Signac, Manet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Van Gogh), Deleuze demonstrates that it is possible to produce a pictorial space - a painting - entirely through the use of colour. Modern painting takes a step that radically alters the essence of painting: it detaches itself from light, explores colour, and produces a painting made entirely of colour differences that, by definition, are intensively characterised, especially when the space of the painting is structured through tonal differences and not differences of value, as in the case of broken tones. Painting is now no longer crossed by figures in extension, and subsequently it opens up to its own 20th century development of codes, abstractions and non-figurative figures, from which Deleuze’s analysis started.
The course then illuminates itself retrospectively and emerges perhaps as what it really is: a grand tale of how the abstract, the essence of the concrete, comes to manifest itself in the intensity of a colour. The great lesson of the concept of colour is the starting point of philosophy itself and enables it to become, again and again, 'concrete metaphysics'. In Deleuze’s own words: «[t]he theory of thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of thought without image. » (Difference and Repetition, PUF, Paris 1968, eng. Ed.: trad. Paul Patton, Columbia University Press, 1994).
The Deleuzian course resonates, forty years later, with a unique power: it is still a lucid viaticum for understanding pictorial art and its conceptual history. Since the 1970s, visual studies and theories on the image have multiplied, expanded and become more complex. No other performative rhetorical body of work, however, seems to be able to approach the descriptive power of these lectures, or to be capable of speaking as precisely and clearly to anyone - philosopher, artist, musician, mathematician, historian or scholar - who takes the time to listen to it or read its transcription. With the patience of the thinker and the eye of the artist, Deleuze has left us with some of the most abundant pages that twentieth-century philosophy has produced on painting.