This is Chapter One
of Paul Crowther’s
‘The Phenomenology of Modern Art", 2012
The text has been quoted in this color
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Before getting into the book,
We might mention something unusual about the author.
He is a philosopher, not an art historian, and his writing is much better than is common to either. (I.e. - it’s as if he actually wants to be understood). But what’s more remarkable is his activity as a collector of Victorian art. (His collection is shown on Victorianweb.org). It’s mostly sketches and studies,
and characteristic of what a formalist eye would likely abhor.
Note: Mr. Crowther introduces specific works of art only as they relate to his ideas. His discussion of specific paintings is his only text that interests me. So I jump from painting to painting giving my own response to the piece before studying his.
We might also mention the two crucial faults that Crowther has found with Deleuze’s approach to art - here and in later chapters:
1. Essentialism
2. Hierarchical
Crowther does not elaborate much on why those are wrong-headed. To focus on the essential in an artwork is to diminish the the entire experience. This is bad.
But individuals - as well as institutions - must establish priorities in a world of limited space and time. The creation of hierarchies, in art as well as society, is unavoidable.
Francis Bacon, Three Studies of the Male Back, 1970
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The great merit of Deleuze's approach is that it is phenomenological in an important fourfold sense. It attempts to integrate closely, the ontological structures of painting qua painting, perception of these structures, our affective response to them, and the way in which painting focuses these aspects in its historical development.
Elsewhere, Crowther has decried the unquestioning acceptance of the self contradictory discourses of Foucault, Derrida, and the like --- which has - distorted both art practice and the interpretative discourses consequent upon such practice. More specifically it has reversed the order of dependence between these so that art practice is now understood primarily as a vehicle for the reflection of modes of reception and theory rather than as a mode of making
So I was hoping that his kind of phenomenology allowed an artwork to be irreducible - a viewer’s transitory experience with the never grasped, but always sought totality of the viewed. A flickering phenomenon specific to one individual, one moment , one artwork - rather than "our affective response" to "ontological structures" as Deleuze, Crowther, or anyone else might conceive them.
Deleuze’s book about Francis Bacon is an online pdf - so we can read it directly. It appears that Deleuze does stick with the third person - never retreating to "we" or "our". His ontological structures rest entirely on his own authority. He is proclaiming his own experience and knowledge
However --- he did title his book "The Logic of Sensation", not "My Logic of Sensation". There is indeed a logic to narratives in painting. Many conclusions may follow based on what the mind already knows, or can be taught, about whatever can be identified. Reason might even be applied to shapes and colors based on perceptual psychology or art history. But the most important effect of those shapes and colors is not about what we already know, but what we may experience that is new - here and now within the boundaries of the picture frame. Deleuze, to the contrary, makes it clear in his introduction that "a general logic of sensation" is at the center of how he thinks about paintings.
"General logic" only interests me when it is applied to specific paintings - though regrettably , it is difficult to have much of an experience with Bacon’s paintings online. The estate has erected a pay wall. The holding museums do not offer hi-res images - and Google Arts and Culture does not show a single reproduction of any size.
Nevertheless - I’ll attempt to respond to this triptych which Deleuze mentions.
There is an intensity and thrilling claustrophobia about the image. Everything seems to be curving tightly inward - including the horizon line. So we have an entire, if small, world consisting of a single man with a small head and powerful body. He appears to be engaged in nothing important to anyone but himself - shaving his face, reading a newspaper - killing time. (and the triple image does make time an issue)
It reminds me so much of the Ukiyo-e Japanese prints that depict the ordinary daily life of sex workers in the pleasure district - sometimes in triptych - a subject popular with their clients. So it’s appropriate for its known subject: Bacon’s deadbeat boyfriend. The artist has a strong appetite for consuming space and fulsome flesh with tensed, curving lines. I’m glad that he shared it - as I am happy to see any depiction of human figures that is formally strong as well as unfamiliar. I’d rather see humans depicted as smart, capable, compassionate, and alluring. But for understandable biographical reasons, that’s not how Bacon even saw his beloved. I doubt he was just trying to be naughty or provocative (like the Chicago Imagists, for example).
Does Bacon exemplify or advance Modern Art ? I cannot address this question - just as non-Catholics cannot say who should be considered for sainthood. (with its analogues to priesthood, cathedrals, seminaries, canon, and dogma, Modern Art is much like an established religion). .
Crowther does not characterize the emotional, psychological, or spiritual content of Modern Painting - but he does list four stylistic elements which Bacon, as well as many others in the modern canon, appear to have applied:
These four are all value-free aren’t they ? Is it any great, or even minor, achievement to perform any of them? It’s like saying that the necktie is a stylistic element of contemporary formal attire — with no concern for how it looks. Apparently Crowther does not want taste to be an issue.
With Rubens, as shown above, figures show inner peace and outer turbulence. They instinctively know exactly what they need to do and act accordingly. Bacon’s figures are the exact reverse - and they are incapable of great deeds - including any real violence. This is not a bad thing, by the way.
Deleuze capitalizes 'Figure' in relation to Bacon and other major artists, because it is the first key structural feature of painting. It should be emphasized, however, that it involves more than the factors just described. Of equal importance is the Figure's relation to a second pictorial structure, consisting of a ground from which the Figure appears to detach itself.
Giotto, Arena chapel
If "the Figure" is Deleuze’s way of noting a unity of figure and ground, it us hardly unique to Bacon.
It can be found throughout art history
"Giotto" at the Met
Though it’s more likely to be missing.
The above shares many stylistic elements with the work of the man who frescoed the Arena Chapel. But not the most important ones.
Deleuze provides his own example in chapter two:
Consider an extreme example: El Greco's The Burial of theCountofOrgaz (1586-8). A horizontal divides the painting into two parts: upper and lower, celestial and terrestrial. In the lower half, there is indeed a figuration or narration that represents the burial of the count, although all the coefficients of bodily deformation, and notably elongation, are already at work. But in the upper half, where the count is received by Christ, there is a wild liberation, a total emancipation: the Figures are lifted up and elongated, refined without measure, outside all constraint. Despite appearances, there is no longer a story to tell; the Figures are relieved of their representative role, and enter directly into relation with an order of celestial sensations.
You be the judge how the figurative derails at the top differ from those at the bottom of this painting.
I would say that figures at bottom feel more heavy and solid than those at the top. But
both ends have equally recognizable human bodies - and both have the formal dynamics that distinguishes great painting from illustration. (in an interview, Bacon said this distinction was important to him - though he did not characterize it)
Was it the depiction of divinity that induced Deleuze to feel ‘celestial sensations" in the upper register?
Did he have a mystical experience in front of the actual painting in Toledo? Whatever the explanation, I cannot account for it based on the reproductions.
Assuming that not every act of painting expresses the violence of sensation — yes — Deleuze has said what I sometimes feel. Certain paintings can grab and shake me out of a default mentality. This is why I can no longer spend more than sixty minutes in an art museum. It’s too disruptive.
But that need not cancel out the narrative if there is one. It could be amplified and enhanced — as it is in that fresco from the Arena Chapel shown above.
Titian, Bacchanal
Has there ever been a figurative painting that did not have curved edges?
More remarkably, however, the Bacon triptych also has a curved horizon line which presents the figure in something like a circus ring. This is more unusual - though we do find it in the example shown below - where it ramps up the bathos of vulnerable underage innocence - just as it ramps up the helpless isolation of Bacon’s alcoholic boyfriend.
So again, what Deleuze calls "non-narrative aspect", I would call narrative enhancement.
Renoir, Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando
Bacon’s curves also tend to distort their figures, which was not unusual before the Renaissance
Tuscan, 13th C. , National Gallery
In Byzantine and Romanesque art. lines want to rhythmically curve rather than follow the edges of natural forms.
It’s effects are sometimes distorting, but not in a disturbing or unpleasant way.
In the above example, the ultimate curved shape, the circle, is dominant.
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Francis Bacon, Four Studies for a Self Portrait, 1967, 36 x 13
Here’s another pice that Deleuze and Crowther write about — so I will join them.
Bacon seems to be turning himself inside out - comfortable with being uncomfortable with himself
Van Gogh, 1887
Oscar Kokoshka, 1917
Here’s two earlier examples of highly expressive self portraits. In contrast to Bacon, both portraits make eye contact with the viewer. Bacon’s face is as un-social as a digestive system. It just churns away, processing feelings . Yet his painting is the one I would prefer to live with. Van Gogh is too intense and demanding - Kokoshka is too needy and pathetic. Bacon is quite turbulent and noisy - but only on the inside. He’s just curious about himself - and it’s an unsolvable puzzle whether there is any meaningful sequence from top to bottom. The viewer is given the role of a psychiatrist whose impossible job is to make a diagnosis.
Deleuze (via Crowther) mentions this painting within his discussion of "deformation" :
At the heart of this deformation is painting's attempt to make the invisible forces that determine the body's character and configuration, present to vision. These forces include time, pressure, inertia, weight, attraction, gravitation, germination. Deleuze suggests that the expression of these involves deformation rather than transformation, because while the latter can be dynamic, the former is always bodily and static and happens at one place. Examples of this are offered.
for both Bacon and Cezanne, the deformation is obtained in the Form at rest; and at the same time, the whole material environment, the structure, begins to stir: walls twitch and slide, chairs bend or rear up a little, cloths curl like burning paper... [quoting D. H. Lawrence.] Everything is now related to forces, everything is force. It is force that constitutes deformation as an act of painting: it lends itself neither to a transformation of form, nor to a decomposition of elements.
In terms of this we might consider Bacon's Four Studies for a Self-Portrait of 1967. Here any suggestion of movement or process is derived not from motion itself, but from forces of dilation, contraction, flattening, and elongation. This achieves a kind of
"dismantling' of the face (Deleuze's own term) through which the character of the head is made visible. However, the dismantling is not a visual analysis, but one arising from the face subjected to pressures. Indeed, (though Deleuze himself does not say this, explicitly) the smeared areas of local scrubbing around the mouths exemplify both a material deformation of the painted surface and, through this action by the painter, the suggestion of forces that would distend a face by impacting upon it.
Why must we assume that a visually accurate image was Bacon’s starting point for either transformation or deformation? Did Bacon paint from models? And I doubt he could paint a reasonable likeness of a face even if he wanted to. He never went to art school. He was self taught - based on his trips to museums and galleries and the taste of his mentors/lovers. BTW - Cezanne did study at an atelier where he executed excellent likenesses of the model - and he did paint while looking at a model. But there is no evidence that he began with accurate drawings that he then distorted.
As one might expect, Deleuze sees Bacon as an exemplar of the diagram. For this painter, the 'law of the diagram' is to start with a figurative form, and then to intervene upon it, and scramble it, so that Figure emerges from it.
Deleuze (via Crowther) restates "distortion" as "intervention" and "scrambling". And he introduces "the diagram" as a way to advance the figurative" into "the Figure". It’s an unfortunate choice of words. Isn’t a diagram supposed to be understood as an idea rather than felt as as a form? Medical illustrations are diagrams.
Bacon, 1946
We have already seen that one of the key means to this is a diagram based on local scrubbing and signifying elements.
Deleuze indicates another way in which Bacon uses the diagram.
For example, in relation to Painting, 1946 (Museum of Modern Art, New York), we are told that the diagram works through creating aesthetic analogues of the starting form.
In his words,
The diagram-accident has scrambled the intentional figurative form, the bird: it imposes nonformal color-patches and traits that function only as traits of birdness, of animality.
It is from these 'nonfigurative' traits that the final whole emerges, as if from a pool; and it is they that raise it to the power of the pure Figure, beyond the figuration contained in the whole.
Quite a powerful image. The existential horror of being in mid-century Europe. Hell on earth. In Chicago, it would soon be expressed by "The Monster Roster". It’s like a sacred Christian vision - with no promise of redemption. Totally self centered on "MY PAIN". It could lead a man to drink! If you read the above account of its creation - without seeing the painting - you might assume it was blurry and almost non objective. But, indeed, the slabs of meat and the man with the umbrella are quite identifiable.
Now Deleuze holds that there are three major routes out of figuration each of which constitute a 'modern function' of painting. These are abstraction, action painting (or 'art informel), and a haptic/colouristic emphasis exemplified most emphatically by Cezanne, Bacon, Van Gogh, and Gauguin.
This gets into the canonization of Modern Art - which does not interest me — and which Crowther will assault later in his book.
If "figurative" = "illustration", it has been overcome many times in the 20th C. by various means. Or - it might be better to say that many good figurative artists, like Bacon, never made illustrations at all. No "major route out of illustration" was needed.
I wonder what the art history community made of this philosopher’s opinions on art history. The Art critic, Ben Davis, wrote about him - and it was mostly dismissive. If you cut the narrative out of Bacon, not much is left - that interests me, anyway.
Deleuze insists that he is interested in "paintings qua painting "— but he seems much more concerned with exemplifying his own philosophy. As Davis put it :
In essence, Deleuze sees in Bacon’s liquescent brand of Expressionism an illustration of his own philosophical thesis that what is most real about bodies is their virtuality, their irreducibility to any one fixed form or identity. Thus, for Deleuze, the isolation of Bacon’s figures at the center of the frame is a way of cutting them out of any narrative relation that would ascribe to them a fixed meaning; the animal imagery reflects the blurring of the self and other; the triptych is a way of showing different aspects of a single form without reducing it to a common essence; and Bacon’s use of color is a way of escaping the hypostatizing effect of linear representation, instead rendering spaces and bodies as flows of mercurial energy ("Each dominant color and each broken tone indicates the immediate exercise of a force on the corresponding zone of the body or head; it immediately renders force visible.") And what’s wrong with all of this? Nothing -- unless you actually take it seriously.
It should be noted that even the lengthy exposition of Deleuze's views that I have provided, does not even begin to do justice to his wealth of brilliant insights concerning the specifics of Bacon's work.
I’ve yet to read any brilliant insights - and since no more specific paintings will be mentioned - I will move onto the next chapter.
But not before I visit the Bacon at the Art Institute:
I can see why Deleuze thought that Bacon rubbed, scratched, and otherwise abused an illustration to get to "Art" (what he calls "the figure").
The surface is a blotchy mess. (It actually looks better online).
It’s a clever, expressive design,
but there is nothing there to savor.
It looks like a masterpiece ruined by time and weather.
Life is Hell - a message the contemporary artworld wants to see.
It would be remarkably inventive if only Bacon hadn’t used the same narrative elements before.
Kind of ironic, isn’t it?
All of these wealthy and/or successful people
celebrating despair.
I never need visit the Bacon room in the Modern Wing ever again.
Rather than exemplifying modern art - perhaps we could call it post modern.
Like conceptual art, how it looks is unimportant
as long as you get the idea.
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