Review of Gilles Deleuze, On Painting: Courses, March–June 1981

Color chart from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colors (Zur Farbenlehre), 1810.

Reminiscing on his time studying under Gilles Deleuze as a high school student, French urban planner and anthropologist Michel Marie remembers admiring his professor, then “a young man of twenty-four or twenty-five” for his “mental grace and agility.” Marie, who saw the philosopher as a “fantastic inspiration,” credits him for his decision to enroll at the Sorbonne in 1954, explaining to François Dosse that, with Deleuze, “philosophy wasn’t the severe discipline that I feared but an encounter, a fusion between a conceptual apparatus, a culture and its languages … a mental attitude to perceive, to conceive of the simplest, most ordinary and yet most basic elements of existence.”1

Marie was not alone in his esteem for Deleuze as a teacher. In his joint biography of Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Dosse includes anecdotes from many former students who often found themselves competing for seats with locals who audited Deleuze’s classes. Elias Sanbar recalls a “little old lady who came to every seminar” because Deleuze “helps [her] to live.” François Zourabichvili regularly sat next to an employee from a nearby halfway house who told him that “I don’t quite know what it’s about, but I really like it.”2

Despite the reputation that he holds among Anglophone readers for his dense, obtuse language, Deleuze, as an educator and public intellectual, was a far less hermetic thinker, and a far more generous communicator than suggested by the recondite style of his collaborative work with Guattari or his highly technical philosophical monographs. Deleuze was an expert in tailoring his language to his intended audience, ready to slide into a patient, relaxed register when the occasion called for informality. 

Many of Deleuze’s general-interest articles, such as those collected in Desert Islands (2004), and interviews, such as those with Claire Parnet in Dialogues (2007), have long been available in English. Joining these in August 2025 is the first of Deleuze’s teaching materials to see its way to print in English: his seminar course “Painting and the Question of Concepts” (La Peinture et la Question des Concepts), delivered to students at the Experimental University Center at Vincennes-Saint-Denis (EUCV) in the spring semester of 1981. 

The book is an outgrowth of Purdue University’s Deleuze Seminar Project, a collective dedicated to the transcription and (English) translation of taped lectures that Deleuze delivered between 1971 and 1987, headed by Stivale and Purdue professor Daniel W. Smith. The English translation effort draws from an archive of nearly three hundred cassettes containing more than four hundred hours of Deleuze’s coursework, much of which was gathered over ten years at EUCV by former student Hidenobu Suzuki. It builds on two early projects to collect French transcriptions of Deleuze’s teaching: the first was initiated by the rock musician Richard Pinhas, who launched WebDeleuze, an early online database dedicated to Deleuze shortly after his death in 1995; the second is headed by Alain Badiou’s Deleuzian Century Association, which spent fourteen years building a written archive of Suzuki’s recordings, which can be found at the web page La Voix de Gilles Deleuze, hosted by the University of Paris 8.3

Deleuze hoped to make philosophy matter equally to the artists, musicians, and blue-collar workers he taught by meeting them where they were. He sought to provide knowledge that was both experimental and practical, later explaining to Parnet that he strove to reach both philosophers and nonphilosophers without conceding or compromising academic rigor, just as one should not “make Beethoven simpler for non-specialists.”4

All of this is on full display throughout the painting seminar. There is a refreshing degree of slack in the lectures that brings a flexible, conversational fluidity to Deleuze’s challenging (and often quite terse) written language. While he often assumes a high degree of familiarity from readers of his denser, more specialized philosophical texts, here he patiently introduces his points of reference throughout the course, which range from philosophical texts by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and C. S. Peirce, to diaries, letters, and interviews with artists including Bacon, Cézanne, and Klee, to art history and criticism by Alois Riegl, Clement Greenberg, and Xavier de Langlais. The book’s editor, David Lapoujade, maintains a light editorial hand by including relevant digressions such as a long, playful swing through Gregory Bateson’s writing on animal language, as well as genuine detours, such as a brief interruption by a student announcing a forthcoming university general assembly that leads an amusingly annoyed Deleuze to grumble to himself about institutional politics.

Deleuze taught the seminar around the same time as the publication of his 1981 book on Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation. Refreshingly, he looks beyond Bacon, generalizing many of the monograph’s narrowly focused concepts to include close looks at paintings by Klee, Cézanne, and Gaugin (among others). Many of the ideas that appear only in tantalizingly brief chapters in Logic receive a much more thorough working-through during the class sessions transcribed in On Painting. Over the course of eight three-hour talks (which, according to Lapoujade, Deleuze taught extemporaneously from short notes and pages torn from books), Deleuze and his students reinvigorate the toolbox that he debuted in the Bacon book by correcting conceptual blind spots, teasing out its implications for other artists, and situating Deleuze’s aesthetic project within his broader philosophical outlook.

Readers familiar with The Logic of Sensation will likely recognize many of the ideas that Deleuze lays out in the seminar. However, where the monograph is comprised of seventeen short chapters devoted to individual concepts and has little to say on painters other than Bacon, On Painting limits its conceptual breadth and instead dilates upon a small handful of key ideas that Deleuze uses to explore Byzantine mosaics, impressionist/postimpressionist brush strokes, and Klee’s pictorial writing. On Painting is thus not only a valuable companion to The Logic of Sensation that clarifies some of the latter’s most opaque moments, but also serves as a welcome expansion of some of Deleuze’s most compelling aesthetic ideas (key among these are the relation of the painter’s eye to their hand, and Deleuze’s color theory). Deleuze’s patient explication of themes only covered briefly in the Bacon book, coupled with the informality of the lectures’ format, make the book an accessible window into Deleuze’s thought for a nonspecialist audience.

Painting, argues Deleuze, begins from a moment of what he calls “germinal chaos.” This is a primordial, pre-pictorial state that he likens to the fall of atoms before the “clinamen,” as Lucretius wrote. The painter’s canvas is not empty or incomplete before the painting begins, but full; it contains an “infinite world” where all things remain possible. Primordial chaos holds forth the possibility of invention, but it also remains open to an infinity of “bullshit and stupidity” that the painter must remove from the canvas. The creative process, Deleuze suggests, begins with the act of cleaning the canvas of hazards, traps, and hurdles hiding within it in the form of ready-made ideas that spell disaster for the painter. Every “cerebral” idea—every attempt to use the canvas to instantiate a prefabricated concepts—risks a slip into cliché.5

A painter who simply reproduces the given “has nothing to say or express,” and, in turn, “nothing to paint.” Painters must paint “forces,” not “forms”: the central question of painting that drives the lectures hinges on Deleuze’s injunction that the painting of visible things must serve “to capture the invisible.” To overcome the struggle against givens, Deleuze argues that the painter must pass through a moment of “chaos-catastrophe.”6  He develops this idea by examining the level of growing abstraction in J. M. W. Turner’s paintings of catastrophes, which Deleuze believes reached a point of catastrophe in its own right sometime around 1830. Turner eventually began to paint ephemera, such as steam, fire, and wind, with an ephemeral touch that rivaled the objects themselves. The moment a painter confronts this deeper, formal catastrophe that inheres in the act of painting, Deleuze explains, “is inseparable from a kind of birth.” Controlled catastrophe launders the canvas of cliché, opening a clear space for the artist to render sensible the new affects and percepts that distinguish art from other forms of thought.7

Key to breaking with the “reign over vision” that Deleuze believes photography holds over painting is what he calls the “diagram,”8 an idea that he borrows directly from concepts that Bacon put forward in an interview with David Sylvester. Asked by Sylvester about the difficulty he faced in negotiating chance, clarity, and freedom, Bacon stressed the importance of involuntary marks, which he often surveyed as a graph or diagram of pictorial possibility that allowed him to unlock “areas of sensation other than simple illustration of the object.”9

Where the “illustrational,” Bacon explained, “tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about,” the “non-illustrational” “works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact.”10 In practice, the non-illustrational impulse can be seen in Bacon’s visual appeal to the visceral and to embodied physicality in his portraits of a screaming Pope Innocent X. Bacon, who claimed to “paint the scream more than the horror,” appeals to sensation over and above the intellect.11

Because it outpaces cognition, Deleuze sees Bacon’s painting as winning out in the struggle against ready-mades, clichés, and the given. The clarity that Bacon reaches by examining vestiges of the involuntary is precisely the elevated vantage that Deleuze believes should follow the moment of catastrophe. The diagram, he suggests, is not a rigid grid that determines the artist’s subsequent decisions after the catastrophe, but instead an “orderly abyss” that sets the hand free from the eye. The visual, for Deleuze, is far too tethered to cognition. To return to sensation, he argues, painting must give itself over to tactility.12

This means that the moment of the diagram must eliminate, rather than organize, conventional visual coordinates. The diagram, writes Deleuze, “unmakes resemblance for the sake of a deeper resemblance.” Painting—true painting that does not simply replicate the given—eschews representation, “the before-painting,” and eliminates resemblance “to cause the image to emerge.” The diagram gives rise to an image without reference. It fosters the moment of artistic innovation that produces what Deleuze calls “pictorial facts”—new affects and percepts that cannot exist independently of the work of art that calls them forth. Made rather than found, pictorial facts for Deleuze are the strict purview of aesthetics. They are expressions of thought unique to art and art alone and remain not only unrepresentable, but wholly unthinkable, to both science and philosophy.13

Deleuze concludes the course with an extended treatment of the short “Note on Color” chapter from The Logic of Sensation, which he begins to stage in the sixth lecture, including an engaging lesson-in-miniature on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colors. For Goethe, all color sits on a continuum that approaches yellow as the “darkening of white,” blue as the “illumination of black,” and red as either the “intensification of yellow” or the “softening of blue.” Secondary colors in their purest form appear through the illumination, darkening, intensification, and softening of yellow, red, and blue: “pure” green, for example, arises at the moment of “real satisfaction” in the mixture of yellow and blue.14

Deleuze opposes Goethe’s color triangle, which he calls “genetic,” to his chromatic circle, which establishes “structural” relations by plotting harmonious complementary colors at diametrically opposite points. The circle, for Deleuze, is a valuable matrix for color relations, but he argues that it is “lifeless” if one does not keep an eye on the triangle. “Chromatic” color for Deleuze is emergent, not given. A color, he explains, “is only determined in relation to neighboring colors … In this way, color is created.” At issue here is less the structural relationship between ready-made, reified colors than their blossoming forth from their ground of light and darkness. Following the dynamism of Goethe’s triangle, Deleuze argues that color and movement cannot be separated.15

The upshot of diagrammatic movement, for Deleuze, is the space it maps for the painter’s rhythmic modulation of light and dark, and more importantly, for the modulation of color. Early impressionism, according to Deleuze, made strides toward dynamic modulation through the use of a restricted palette that eliminated earth tones and muted colors. Juxtaposing diametrically opposed colors using the comma-shaped brush stroke that Vincent van Gogh later developed into a “point or full stop,” or the refined pointillist system deployed by Georges Seurat, or Paul Cezanne’s colored patches that he claimed worked by opposing warm and cool tones without luminosity—Deleuze sees the work of impressionist and postimpressionist artists as opening an entirely new painterly color space defined by movement and chromatic relation, rather than simply filling figurative linework with prefabricated colors.16

In On Painting, Deleuze does not attempt to speak as an art critic or art historian, but instead asks, “What can philosophy offer painting?” and proceeds to develop a tightly focused set of “concepts that are in direct relation with painting and with painting alone.”17 In doing so, he works to enrich the “rich tissue of correspondences” between art, science, and philosophy in an accessible and far-reaching extension of his thought.18