On Painting

Available for the first time in English: the complete and annotated transcripts of Deleuze’s 1981 seminars on painting

From 1970 until 1987, Gilles Deleuze held a weekly seminar at the Experimental University of Vincennes and, starting in 1980, at Saint-Denis. In the spring of 1981, he began a series of eight seminars on painting and its intersections with philosophy. The recorded sessions, newly transcribed and translated into English, are now available in their entirety for the first time. Extensively annotated by philosopher David Lapoujade, On Painting illuminates Deleuze’s thinking on artistic creation, significantly extending the lines of thought in his book Francis Bacon.

Through paintings and writing by Rembrandt, Delacroix, Turner, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Klee, Pollock, and Bacon, Deleuze explores the creative process, from chaos to the pictorial fact. The introduction and use of color feature prominently as Deleuze elaborates on artistic and philosophical concepts such as the diagram, modulation, code, and the digital and the analogical. Through this scrutiny, he raises a series of profound and stimulating questions for his students: How does a painter ward off grayness and attain color? What is a line without contour? Why paint at all?

Written and thought in a rhizomatic manner that is thoroughly Deleuzian—strange, powerful, and novel—On Painting traverses both the conception of art history and the possibility of color as a philosophical concept.

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Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) was professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, Vincennes–St. Denis. He coauthored Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (Minnesota, 1987) with Félix Guattari. He is author of many books, including Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation; Cinema 1: The Movement-Image; Cinema 2: The Time-Image; The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque; and Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, all published in English by the University of Minnesota Press.

David Lapoujade is professor of philosophy at Université Paris 1–Sorbonne. His books include Powers of Time: Versions of Bergson; The Lesser Existences: Étienne Souriau, an Aesthetics for the Virtual (both from Minnesota); and Aberrant Movements: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

Charles J. Stivale is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Wayne State University. He is translator of Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and translator of Gilles Deleuze, From A to Z.