Francis Bacon

In this landmark text by one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Gilles Deleuze takes the paintings of Francis Bacon as his object of his study. The book presents a deep engagement with Bacon's work and the nature of art. Deleuze analyzes the distinctive innovations that came to mark Bacon's style: the isolation of the figure, the violation and deformations of the flesh, the complex use of color, the method of chance, and the use of the triptych form. Here Deleuze creates a number of his well-known concepts, such as the 'body without organs' and contrasts his own approach to painting with that of both the phenomenological and the art historical traditions. Deleuze links Bacon's work to Cezanne's notion of a 'logic' of sensation and, investigating this logic, explores Bacon's crucial relation to past painters such as Cezanne, Velasquez, and Soutine.

Gilles Deleuze was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII.

Translator's Preface, by Daniel W. Smith Preface to the French Edition, by Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin Author's Foreword Author's Preface to the English Edition 1. The Round Area, the Ring The round area and its analogues - Distinction between the Figure and the figurative - The fact - The question of "matters of fact" - The three elements of painting: structure, Figure, and contour - Role of the fields 2. Note on Figuration in Past Painting Painting, religion, and photography - On two misconceptions 3. Athleticism First movement: from the structure to the Figure - Isolation - Athleticism - Second movement: from the Figure to the structure - The body escapes from itself: abjection - Contraction, dissipation: washbasins, umbrellas, and mirrors 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 5. Recapitulative Note: Bacon's Periods and Aspects From the scream to the smile: dissipation - Bacon's three successive periods - The coexistence of all the movements - The functions of the contour 6. Painting and Sensation Cezanne and sensation - The levels of sensation - Figuration and violence - The movement of translation, the stroll - The phenomenological unity of the senses: sensation and rhythm 7. Hysteria The body without organs: Artaud - Worringer's Gothic line - What the "difference of level" in sensation means - Vibration - Hysteria and presence - Bacon's doubt - Hysteria, painting, and the eye 8. Painting Forces Rendering the invisible: the problem of painting - Deformation: neither transformation nor decomposition - The scream - Bacon's love of life - Enumeration of forces 9. Couples and Triptychs Coupled Figures - The battle and the coupling of sensation - Resonance - Rhythmic Figures - Amplitude and the three rhythms - Two types of "matters of fact" 10. Note: What Is a Triptych? The attendant - The active and the passive - The fall: the active reality of the difference in level - Light, union and separation 11. The Painting before Painting .. . Cezanne and the fight against the cliche - Bacon and photographs - Bacon and probabilities - Theory of chance: accidental marks - The visual and the manual - The status of the figurative 12. The Diagram The diagram in Bacon (traits and color-patches) - Its manual character - Painting and the experience of catastrophe - Abstract painting, code, and optical space - Action Painting, diagram, and manual space - What Bacon dislikes about both these ways 13. Analogy Cezanne: the motif as diagram - The analogical and the digital - Painting and analogy - The paradoxical status of abstract painting - The analogical language of Cezanne and of Bacon: plane, color, and mass - Modulation - Resemblance recovered 14. Every Painter Recapitulates the History of Painting in His or Her Own Way .. . Egypt and haptic presentation - Essence and accident - Organic representation and the tactileoptical world - Byzantine art: a pure optical world? - Gothic art and the manual - Light and color, the optic and the haptic 15. Bacon's Path The haptic world and its avatars - Colorism - A new modulation - From Van Gogh and Gauguin to Bacon - The two aspects of color: bright tone and broken tone, field and Figure, shores and flows .. . 16. Note on Color Color and the three elements of painting - Color-structure: the fields and their divisions - The role of black Color-force: Figures, flows, and broken tones Heads and shadows - Color-contour - Painting and taste: good and bad taste 17. The Eye and the Hand Digital, tactile, manual, and haptic - The practice of the diagram - On "completely different" relations - Michelangelo: the pictorial fact Index of Paintings Notes Index