Re:Francis Bacon

Responding to the message of Wed, 3 Sep 1997 17:39:42 +0100
from Dr Jamie Brassett <jamie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

> Following the notice submitted by Charles J. Stivale regarding a
> net-available translation of Deleuze's 'The Logic of Sensation', I am 
> moved
> to reply.
> 
> If you have trouble finding such a translation (& it seems as though you
> may, given what Charles says), you should know that I my copy of this 
> essay
> was from "Flash Art" (May 1983) part 112, pp.8-16.  I was able to get a
> copy of this essay via the British Library while a postgrad. student at
> Warwick University in 1990.  If your institution does not provide this
> facility I would be happy to snail-mail you a copy of my version 
> (complete
> with my scribble all over it!).

Here are the details for that (very brief) selection from the book _Logique 
de la sensation_ along with several other partial translations that have 
been published. Since I cannot now post the full translation I am posting 
the list "Books" by Deleuze which is a kind of synopsis of the book. Those 
who have requested the translation will have already received this from me 
so I apologize for the duplication. Timothy Murphy in the Deleuze Web 
bibliography writes that this is the introduction to the English 
translation. When that will published nobody knows.

Available extracts translated into English:
* "Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation" in _Flash Art_ 112 (May 1983), 
pp.8-16.[extracts from chapters 1,3,4 and 6] 
*"Interpretations of the Body: A New Power of Laughter for the Living" in 
_Art International_ 8 (autumn 1989), pp.34-40. 
*_Figurabili Francis Bacon_ [Catalog of the Venice Biennale] (Milano: 
Electa, 1993), pp.105-112.[chapters 4 and 6] 
*_The Deleuze Reader_, ed.Constantin V. Boundas,(New York: Columbia 
University Press, 1993).pp.187-200,[Chapters 6 and 12] 





Gille Deleuze,ÒBooksÓ
Translated by Lisa Liebmann
Source: _Artforum_, (January, 1984), pp. 68-69 .
[start page 68]

        This painting is of a very special violence.  Bacon, to be sure, 
often traffics in the violence of a depicted scene: spectacles of horror, 
crucifixions, prostheses and mutilations, monsters.  But these are overly 
facile detours, detours that the artist himself judges severely and 
condemns in his work.  What directly interests him is a violence that is 
only involved with color and feature: the violence of a sensation (and not 
a representation), a static or potential violence, a violence of reaction 
and expression.  For example, a cry rent from us by a foreboding of 
invisible forces: Òto paint the cry rather than the horror....Ó  In the 
long run BaconÕs Figures arenÕt wracked bodies at all, but ordinary bodies 
in ordinary situations of constraint and discomfort. A man ordered to sit 
still for hours on a narrow stool is bound to assume a contorted postures. 
The violence of a hiccup, of a need to vomit, but also of a hysterical, 
involuntary smile ... BaconÕs bodies, heads, Figures are of flesh, and what 
fascinates him are the invisible forces that model flesh and shake it.  
This is not the relationship of form and matter, but of materials and 
forces; to make those forces visible through their effects on flesh.  There 
is, before anything else, a force of inertia that is of the flesh itself: 
with Bacon flesh, however firm, descends from bones; it falls or tends to 
fall, descends from bones; it falls or tends to fall away from them (hence 
those flattened sleepers who keep one arm raised, or thighs lifted from 
which flesh seems to cascade).  What fascinates Bacon is not movement, but 
its effect on an immobile body: heads whipped by wind, deformed by a shock, 
distended by an aspiration Ñ but also all the interior forces that climb 
through flesh.  To make spasm visible. The entire body becomes plexus.  If 
there is feeling in bacon, it is not a taste for horror, it is a pity, an 
intense pity: pity for flesh, including the flesh of dead animals...

        There is another element in BaconÕs painting: those large fields of 
color on which the Figure detaches itself, fields without depth or with 
only the kind of shallow depth(1) that characterizes post-Cubism.  These 
large beaches are themselves divided into in sections, or else crossed by 
tubes or very thin rails, or else sliced by a band or largish stripe.  
These form an armature, a bone structure. Sometimes they are like a shipÕs 
rigging, suspended in the sky of the field of color, upon which the Figure 
executes its taunting acrobatics.

        These two pictorial elements do not remain indifferent to one 
another, but instead draw a line from one another.  It often seems that the 
flat fields of color curl around the figure, together constituting a 
shallow depth, forming a hollow volume, determining a curve, an isolating 
track or rink at the core of which the Figure enacts its small feats 
(vomiting in a sink, shutting a door with the tip of its foot, twisting 
itself on a stool). This kind of situation only finds its equivalent 
theater, or in a Beckett novel such as Le D?peupleur (published in English 
as The Lost Ones) Ñ Òinside a flattened cylinder ... light ... his yellowÓ 
Ñ or else it is found in visions of bodies plunging in a black tunnel.  But 
if these fields of color press towards the Figure, the Figure in turn 
presses outward trying to pass and dissolve through the Fields.  Already 
we have here the role of the spasm, or of the cry: the entire body trying 
to escape, to flow out of itself.  And this occurs not only BaconÕs sinks, 
but through his famous umbrellas which snatch part of the Figure and which 
have a prolonged, exaggerated point, like the vampires: the entire body 
trying to flee, to disgorge itself through a tip or a hole.  Or else, on 
the contrary, it will flatten itself and stretch itself into a thick 
mirror, lodging its entirety into a this width until it separates and 
dissipates like a lump of fat in a bowl of soup.  The Figures themselves 
always present clean zones and foggy ones which attest to this dissipation.  
As of 1978-79 we can speak of a few paintings still rare with Bacon wherein 
the Figure has in effect disappeared, leaving a trace or a geyser, a jet of 
water, of vapor, of sand, of dust or of grass.  This new period, which 
seems so rich to us in possibilities for the future, is an abstraction that 
is purely BaconÕs.  It consummates the double motion, of fields of color 
toward the Figure, and of the Figure towards the fields.

        Bacon is a very great colorist.  And color with him relates to many 
different systems, two most importantly Ñ one of which corresponds to the 
Figure/flesh, and the other to the color field/section. It is as though 
Bacon has reassumed the entire problem of painting after C?zanne. C?zanneÕs 
ÒsolutionÓ Ñ basically a modulation of color by means of distinct touches 
that proceed according to the order of the spectrum Ñ in effect gave birth 
or rebirth to two problems: how, on the one hand, to preserve the 
homogeneity or unity of ground as though it were a perpendicular armature 
for chromatic progression, while on the other also to preserve the 
specificity or singularity of a form in perpetual variation?  It was the 
new problem for Van Gogh as much as for Gauguin.  A problem with two 
pressing dangers, since the ground could not be allowed to remain inert, 
nor could the form become murky or dissolve into grisaille.  Van Gogh and 
Gauguin rediscovered the art of portrait, Òthe portrait through color,Ó by 
restoring to the ground vast monochrome fields that carry toward infinity, 
and by inventing new colors Ñ Òfar from natureÓ Ñ for flesh, colors which 
seem to have been baked in a kiln and which rival ceramics. The first 
aspect has not yet ceased to inspire experiments in modern painting: those 
great, brilliant monochrome fields that take life not in variations of hue, 
but in very subtle shifts of intensity or saturation determined by zones of 
proximity. this would be BaconÕs path: where these zones of proximity are 
induced either by sections of fields of color, or by virtue of a white 
stretched band or larger stripe which crosses the field (in Barnett Newman 
one finds an analogous field-stripe structure). The other aspect, the 
colors for flesh, was to be resolved by Bacon along lines that Gauguin 
presaged: by producing Òtons rompusÓ (tonal chasms [2] ), as though baked 
in a furnace and flayed by fire. BaconÕs genius as a colorist exists in 
both these ideas at once, while most modern painters have concentrated on 
the first.  These two aspects are strict correlates in Bacon: brilliant, 
pure tone for the large fields, coupled with a procedure of rupturing or 
Òfire-blasting,Ó a critical mixture of complementaries.  It is as though 
painting were able to conquer time in two ways, through color: as an 
eternity and light in the 
___________________________
[page 69]
infinity of a field, when bodies fall or go through their paces; and in 
another way as passage, as metabolic variability in the enactment or these 
bodies, in their flesh and on their skin (thus three large male backs with 
varying chasms in value). It is a ÒChronochromie,Ó in the spirit in which 
the composer Olivier Messiaen named one of his works.

        The abandonment of simple figuration is the general fact of Modern 
painting and, still more, of painting altogether, of all time.  But what is 
interesting is the way in which Bacon, for his part, breaks with 
figuration: it is not impressionism, not expressionism, not symbolism, not 
cubism, not abstraction....  Never (except perhaps in the case of 
Michelangelo) has anyone broken with figuration by elevating the Figure to 
such prominence.  It is the confrontation of figure and field, their 
solitary wrestling in shallow depth, that rips the painting away from all 
narrative but also from all symbolization.  When narrative or symbolic, 
figuration only attains the bogus violence of the represented or signified, 
but it expresses nothing of the violence of sensation Ñ in other words of 
the act of painting.  It was natural, even necessary, that Bacon should 
revive the triptych: in this format  he finds the conditions for painting 
and for color exactly as he conceives them to be.  The triptych has 
thoroughly separate sections, truly distinct, which in advance negate any 
narrative that would establish itself among them.  Yet Bacon also links 
these sections with a kind of brutal, unifying distribution that makes them 
interrelate free of any symbolic undercurrent.  It is in the triptychs that 
colors become light, and that light divides itself into colors.  In them, 
one discovers rhythm as the essence of painting.  For it is never a matter 
of this or that personage, this or that object possessing rhythm.  On the 
contrary, rhythms and rhythms alone become personages, become objects.  
Rhythms are the only personages, the only Figures.  The triptychÕs function 
is precisely to this point Ñ to make evident that which might risk 
remaining hidden.  What a triptychÕs three panels in various ways 
distribute is analogous to three basic rhythms Ñ one steady or ÒwitnessÓ 
rhythm, and the two other rhythms, one of crescendo or simplification 
(climbing, expanding, diastolic, adding value), and the other of diminuendo 
or elimination (descending, contracting, systolic, removing value).  Let us 
consider every Bacon triptych: in any given case, where is the 
witness-Figure, where is the adjunctive or the reductive Figure?  A 1972 
Triptych shows a Figure whose back is Òdiminished,Ó but whose leg is 
already complete, and another Figure whose torso has been completed, but 
who is missing one leg and whose other leg runs.  These  are monsters from 
the point of view of figuration.  But from the point of view of the Figures 
themselves, these are rhythms and nothing else, rhythms as in a piece of 
music, as in the music of Messiaen which makes you hear Òrhythmic 
personages.Ó  If one keeps the development of this triptych in mind, of 
this way Bacon has of effecting relationships between painting and music, 
then one can return to the simple paintings.  No doubt one would see that 
each of them is organized as though a triptych, that each already 
encompasses a triptych: each distributes rhythms, at least three, as though 
so many Figures resonating in the field, and that the field separates and 
joins them, superposes them, of a piece.

________________
Notes
1.  The English expression Òshallow depthÓ was used in the original French. 
According to author it has no precise French equivalent, though it is an 
oceanograpgic term used to describe what in France are known as hauts 
fonds.  Clement Greenberg used it in relation to painting.
2.   A French technical term, common in the 19th century and possibly 
earlier.  TranslatorÕs note: other possible translations for this phrase 
are Òchasms in value,Ó Òtonal faults,Ó or Òtonal breaks.Ó