Abstract :
[en] Spring, 1981. At the University of Paris-Vincennes, Gilles Deleuze is giving a series of lectures on painting. Almost entirely without illustrations (he very seldom shows an image), he gives form to the philosophical problems that engross him, guiding his listeners through the world of painting and introducing ideas from his book on Francis Bacon, Logique de la sensation (1981). How to speak about what painting brings to life, of its very invention ? Hypothesis : the great painters, Deleuze maintains, have a very particular relationship to catastrophe. How can he prove this? Using the obsessive motif of catastrophe, investigated throughout the 1981 lectures, the philosopher establishes a connection among several great painters : Turner, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Klee, Bacon. These painters doubtless had compelling experiences with the Fall (another name for catastrophe), and understood that “painting, in a certain way, has always involved painting local imbalances.” What is Deleuze talking about, concretely ? Perhaps counterintuitively, catastrophe in painting should not be confined automatically to the thematic sphere, a subject to be depicted. Of course, Turner did paint avalanches, fires, and storms. Yet Deleuze wants to cap ture something else, to describe an experience at once more intimate and more profound, one with which Cézanne and others were familiar, even as they contemplated the most seemingly peaceful landscape: the catastrophe that befell the act of painting itself. The practice of painting came spectacularly undone once it was no longer restricted to the simple rep resentation of the world as it appears. Untamed, it veered off course and remade itself practically in its own name, reclaiming its own power, not mimetic but material, first and foremost. The catastrophe of painting, then, refers to its radical insubordination—which must be perpetually renewed—to the mechanics of representation, and its clean break away from the representative language that we typically reach for first when interpreting a painting. For Deleuze, the catastrophe of painting is indistinguishable from the birth of color.
