Foucault on Painting 1517902428, 9781517902421

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FOUCAULT ON PAINTING

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FOUCAULT ON PAINTING Catherine M. Soussloff

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

Some of the material in this book was originally prepared for the lecture series “Foucault et la Peinture” at Collège de France in 2015. Copyright 2017 by Catherine M. Soussloff All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author and the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer. 22 21 20 19 18 17

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Soussloff, Catherine M., author. Title: Foucault on painting / Catherine M. Soussloff. Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017020944 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0241-4 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0242-1 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984. | Painting. | Art—Philosophy. Classification: LCC B2430.F724 S68 2017 (print) | DDC 750.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020944

For Genya, with love always

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CONTENTS Acknowledgments Preface

ix 1

Introduction What Painting Does

13

ONE Systems of Art Historical and Philosophical Thought

25

TWO The Place of Painting Velázquez’s Las Meninas

43

THREE The Limits of Irony Manet’s Painting

53

FOUR The Negativity of Painting Magritte’s This Is Not a Pipe.

69

FIVE Painting in the Light of Photography Fromanger’s Methods

97

Conclusion

119

Notes

125

Index

153

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS But it has remained a resource for me, to search for an analogue in painting for some emotion which I could either not conquer or bear to examine. Anita Brookner, Dolly

This book on Michel Foucault’s painting theory began as a result of an invitation that surprised me: to present a paper on Foucault and “the visual” in a conference organized by Colin Koopman at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the spring of 2009. I remember thinking how unusual it was that Colin and David Couzens Hoy, his postdoctoral mentor, wanted to have the visual arts represented in the conference, and I was flattered that Colin thought that I could have something of value to say to an audience and speakers composed of philosophers, social scientists, and literary theorists, many of whom were eminent commentators on and editors of Foucault. By the time I had written the paper, I understood that my surprise had more to do with the lack of attention paid to painting relative to other issues of “visibility” in Foucault’s thought than it did to any particular disciplinary focus alleged to him. The encouragement of Colin and David, and the enthusiastic reception at the conference by Arnold Davidson for the idea of a longer study on Foucault and painting, has resulted in the subsequent years devoted to research in the massive bibliography by and on Foucault and on theories of painting and aesthetics from the seventeenth century to the present. Some of those first thoughts on Foucault appeared in a special issue of the journal History of the Human Sciences, edited by Koopman. Since 2009 I have incurred many debts to friends, colleagues, and students who were kind enough to listen to me working through the ideas and arguments found in this book. I also had the support of institutions in the United States, Canada, Sweden, and France, much of which came in the form of opportunities to present my work-­in-­progress to audiences that challenged me to rethink, revise, and read more. My quest as a scholar often appeared daunting to me: how to write a valid and trustworthy account about what had been considered a minor aspect of a major

x  Acknowledgments

philosopher’s work while providing a meaningful contribution to how we can think about and with painting today? The number and kinds of the acknowledgments found here and in the scholarly apparatus of this book recognize the complexity of this undertaking, as well as the fact that without my many interlocutors my goals for this book could never have been accomplished. I express my gratitude to the University of Minnesota Press and especially to Doug Armato, director, who showed great faith in the manuscript at a key moment for me and who found readers whose comments I considered essential to its completion. I thank my research assistant Kendra Dority for her work on the final phase of this project, which involved the lengthy and tedious process of obtaining images and photographs. At the beginning of this project I was fortunate to have the opportunity to publish a long article on my preliminary research in a special issue of the British journal Art History on methods in the discipline, edited by Dana Arnold. I thank her for her useful comments, editorial acumen, and friendship. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, I benefited early in the project from the generosity of Joseph Tanke, who spoke to my undergraduate seminar about his then-­unpublished book concerned with Foucault and painting. I was privileged to be invited by my friend Sara Danius and colleague Dan Karlholm at Södertörn University to lecture on Foucault and visuality. Their comments, together with those of Margaretha Rossholm-­Lagerlöf at the University of Stockholm, aided me in expanding the scope of my investigations to include aesthetics. My first graduate seminar at the University of British Columbia in the spring of 2010 covered my research until that date on Foucault, and I remain especially grateful to Mo Salemy for his enthusiasm and contributions to my thinking. In 2012 I had the opportunity to present and publish further work on my thinking about Foucault and Manet as a result of my participation in a session at the Thirty-­Second Congress of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art in Nuremberg, chaired by Ruth Phillips, after which comments by Stephen Bann on Roland Barthes’s relationship to Foucault’s art theory and Keith Moxey’s about why art historians should care about Foucault on painting turned my book in yet another direction. I thank Ruth, Stephen, and Keith for their many years of friendship and interest in my work. My writing and research continued in 2013–­1 4 as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, where I thank my colleagues that year for welcoming my project: Ken Craig, Brett Finlay, Derek

Acknowledgments  xi

Gregory, Michelle LeBaron, Tof Marshall, Christian Naus, Bonny Norton, and Jamie Peck. I owe a major debt of gratitude to former director Janis Sarra, who has supported my research on Foucault in every way from that year on with generosity and an open mind. She suggested collaboration between the Wall Institute and the Institut d’Études Avancées (IEA) in Paris. The conference that resulted in the summer of 2014 allowed for many opportunities of great importance to my research and culminated in an edited volume, Foucault and the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the Twenty-­First Century. I thank Gretty Mirdal, director, and Simon Luck, scientific coordinator at the IEA, for help and support. Also in Paris I have been welcomed over the past three years by the Embassy of Canada, especially Catherine Bédard, director of the Centre Culturel Canadien, and Jacques-­Henri Gagnon, head of communications and academic relations. Around this same time I presented a paper on Foucault and Magritte at the Centre Victor Basch, University of Paris, Sorbonne, and I am grateful to my friend and colleague Frédéric Pouillaude for his invitation and the kind attention of his colleagues and students, particularly Jacqueline Lichtenstein. I also thank Terry Dolan at Temple University, Department of Art, for the invitation to lecture on Magritte and Foucault and for the generous response by her students to my work. In May 2015 I had the great honor of being appointed a visiting lecturer at the Collège de France, where I gave four public lectures on “Foucault et la peinture.” I will be ever grateful to the Wall Institute and to Professor John Scheid for his nomination and for the welcome both at the Collège and at the Fondation Hugot. I thank Professors Antoine Campagnon and Philippe Descola for their collegiality and hospitality, Guillaume Kasperski for his research assistance, and Catherine Koch for her administrative support. Giving the lectures in French in the former academic home of Foucault helped me understand how to frame many of the arguments found in this book. For his expert help in translating my texts for the lectures, I remain grateful to Eric Auzoux. I acknowledge the incredible generosity of Hubert Damisch and Teri Wenn Damisch, who helped me revise and rehearse these lectures for the Collège. They have always made me feel at home in Paris and in French art history. The residency at the Collège proved essential to the final version of this book. After the first of my lectures I had the good fortune to meet Foucault’s partner, editor, and commentator, Daniel Defert, who extended his friendship and knowledge with a gracious manner that I will never forget. I am grateful to my dear friend Hayden White, who read the final manuscript

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version of this book and gave me further insights into my arguments. For guidance in the intricacies of the French language, I thank my colleague and friend Sima Godfrey. Besides the institutions already mentioned, financial support for this book has been received from the University of California Presidential Chair funds; the University of California Academic Senate; the University of British Columbia, Faculty of the Arts; and the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Research Seminars (2011). I am grateful to all of these for making it possible to continue the long research, extensive travel, and the study of pictures necessary for a book of this scope. I thank Anne Umland and the Museum of Modern Art for their outstanding help at various stages in the completion of this book. My graduate students have been excellent interlocutors, helpful researchers, and good friends: Lucian Gomoll, Natalie Loveless, Trevor Sangrey, and Andrew Wegley at the University of California, Santa Cruz; Anton Lee and Marisa Sánchez at the University of British Columbia. I remain especially mindful of the awesome knowledge of the bibliographic and archival resources on Foucault that Anton brought to this project, for which I thank him. Many friends and close colleagues have already been mentioned here. In addition, for the duration of this project many others have given me the intellectual and emotional support needed to sustain my work. Many of these are mentioned in the notes to this book. I am always grateful for the kindness and intelligence of Mieke Bal, Karen Bassi, Susanna Braund, Margaret Brose, Anne Callaghan, Maureen Callanan, Giovanni Careri, Dana Claxton, Whitney Davis, Carolyn S. Dean, Stan Douglas, Alla Efimova, Mark Franko, Lydia Goehr, Peter Harris, Michael Kelly, Paul Krause, Tina Meinig, Tyrus Miller, Adam Morton, Michelle Normoyle, Todd Olson, Nuno Porto, Cindy Richmond, Pam and Bill Richter, Michael Roth, James and Liliane Rubin, Neil Safier, Esther Shalev-­Gerz, Deanna Shemek, Cheryl Stevens, John Tagg, Anne Christine Taylor, Heather Thomas, Mina Totino, Andrea Tuele, Lisa and Terry Turner, and Ian Wallace. My brother Andrew and his wife, Patricia, and their daughters, Caroline and Stephanie, have been consistently there for me over the years I worked on this book. I thank them for their love. I am grateful to my cousin Marie André and Eugène Savitskaya for always welcoming me when I am in Europe. I thank my daughter, Eugenia Louise Clarke, who has been so encouraging of my French art history and a loving companion in Santa Cruz and France.

PREFACE This transformation of one’s self by one’s own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting? Michel Foucault, “An Ethics of Pleasure,” in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961–­1984)

In 1982 when Michel Foucault (1926–­1984) spoke to an interviewer about the transformative effects of his writing on his being or existence, he compared himself to a painter. As Foucault well knew, the transformation of the self through one’s creation had a history in art theory that extended as far back as the late 1400s in Italy.1 The truism “every painter paints himself” (ogni pittore dipinge sè) referred to self-­portraiture and representation, but it also pertained to the projection of the artist into any of his works as a matter of maniera or style and to the effect of that invisible process on the viewer. The power of art to transform the viewer has an even longer history in aesthetics than the truism about the painter, but the place of the interpreter and of the discourse of art history in the circuitry of transformation remains less explored. Foucault’s study of and writings on painting—­its history, its theory, and its place in the larger field of aesthetics—­took on both the older and the more contemporary aspects of painting theory involved in the knowledge of the self (“son propre savoir”). Foucault resorted to painting as the ideal form through which we can observe the process and changes incurred as we come to be transformed by this self-­k nowledge, or consciousness, and from which we can begin to use that transformation toward our actions in the world. Because paintings can transform, Foucault did not understand them as “in separation from the social formation, in the technical solitude of the perceptual and technical apparatus.”2 The point for Foucault is perhaps less simple than that articulated so eloquently by Norman Bryson, who makes an outstanding contribution to the thinking of painting as socially embedded at about the same time: paintings are not things or like other kinds of objects, even though there may be a tradition

2  Preface

in aesthetics for understanding them as such. The emphasis for the philosopher is on the self: if, according to Foucault, the “self” belongs to and is situated in the world, paintings that transform interact with the world through my existence. Here, it should be stated that Foucault’s idea of painting as transformative differs significantly from Martin Heidegger’s understanding of the “representedness” of “the world picture.”3 For Foucault, a painting may not refer to an actual world or to “the world”—­a vague thought in any case—­but as a form of discourse, it refers to and includes institutions, systems of belief, and subjects that come into contact with it through interpretative and viewing situations. In this sense, it is historical and specific, rather than extrahistorical and general, as we might assume for Heidegger. While both philosophers accepted “Man’s” subjectivity or subjectivism as central to the nature of existence in the modern age, Foucault sought a way around the essentialism of the modern subject as proposed by Heidegger. A close investigation of paintings presented one path toward this goal, which became more and more pronounced in Foucault’s later philosophy. I propose that Foucault’s exclusive attention to figurative paintings—­that is, paintings that refer to the human—­in his writings allows for a better understanding of the significance of what it meant for painting not to be considered technically autonomous but transformative. As I show in the next two chapters, Foucault’s exclusive engagement with the figurative mode related to his interest in what painting does as knowledge, rather than what paintings are. Figurative painting, and the related mimetic standard of realism that goes along with it, allowed Foucault to experience and better interpret the visual rhetoric of persuasion indicative of the mode in order to theorize its impact on issues of the self. A mode of figuration always refers first and foremost to the body, that is, to the work that the body of the artist did in making the painting and to the work that the bodies depicted in the painting do within the painting. Figuration also calls on the identificatory capacities of the entailed viewer of the painting, a point to which Foucault alluded in the interview cited here. So, too, figuration always raises issues of embodiment, including perceptual and proprioceptual relays incurred by viewing and related to the possibility of the transformation of the viewing subject’s actions in the world. The particular credo about the painter transformed by his own painting that Foucault espoused may be termed post-­K antian: transformation meant a coming into ethics—­or a becoming ethical—­and it demanded an understanding of aesthet-

Preface  3

ics. The expansion of the domain of aesthetics concerned Foucault from his early study of Immanuel Kant to the later work on sexuality (most especially volume 2, The Use of Pleasure, and volume 3, The Care of the Self ) to the last seminars on “the government of the self and others.” Foucault’s choice of painting may be taken to be specific and purposeful to the conceptualization of the transformation of self that he pursued. In the interview cited here, Foucault also said that he understood ethics to be the rapport that the individual has toward himself when he acts.4 This view of an ethics achieved through aesthetics not only allied the philosopher with the painter, as he said; in specifying painting as transformative, the philosopher and the art historian might be considered collaborators in its theory and the possibilities offered by it. The present volume means to explore the ramifications of Foucault’s view of painting for the interpreter of images and aesthetics today, particularly what “the scene of painting,” including its transformative potential, means for our contemporary society’s dependence on all forms of visuality. Although “the scene of painting” was not Foucault’s term, I use this locution to conceptualize what his contribution to thinking about painting and with paintings means for us today, beyond the idea of art and/or visual culture as medium, practice, institution, or theory offered by the disciplines of art history, philosophy, cognitive science, and media studies. While Foucault often borrowed from other thinkers on art, he did not mimic or appropriate their ideas without changing them substantially, a point that I argue in this book as I trace the intellectual background of the essays on painting. While many of Foucault’s ideas about painting may differ from the conventions present in art history, they nonetheless rely fundamentally on the scholarly literature on art found in the main in the French tradition. His thoughts on painting may therefore be useful in two measures: first, as helpful and original augmentations to the more traditional interpretations of individual paintings and artists found in the disciplinary context; and second, as proposals for how to think about painting’s use-­value in the context of the visual culture and proliferation of images in contemporary society that began to occur in the 1960s, just as Foucault took on a serious exploration of painting. My close readings of Foucault’s thinking about painting allow us to understand that the scene of painting today takes place on actual and virtual stages, that it entails the image both as theoretical object and as a political tool with which we may act, and that it has formed a significant part of our determinative individual and social realities. The history

4  Preface

and theory of painting by Foucault makes a metaphorical leap that he deemed transformative and that today we might think of as constitutive, at least inasmuch as we are increasingly said to be constructed by images. For Foucault, painting had a special status in the category Art, and paintings were special works of art. It behooves us to understand exactly what Foucault meant by painting, not simply the more general categories of art and visibility that relate to it because they emerge in and from his consideration of paintings. I do not mean to suggest that Foucault has not offered art history and visual culture studies other areas or topics of great significance: visibility, scopic regimes, and a theory of the author, among them. However, I argue here that the operations and history specific to painting are of primary importance to understanding Foucault’s philosophy, especially his ethics, the general area on which his reputation in philosophy may be said to rest today. For Foucault, paintings and their history demonstrated how an observing subject could be transformed through art and what such a transformation might offer for a politics of the present. In this regard, his view of painting may be considered highly important not only for the history of art but also experientially for the political theory that his later work in particular continues to generate today.5 Ever since 1966 historians have disputed the legitimacy of Foucault’s historical method and his status as a proper historian. There should be no doubt that these criticisms have affected the attention given to Foucault in all of the historical disciplines, including the history of art. If much of his writing on painting has been ignored or, at best, sidelined in art history in the twenty-­first century, this historiography can be explained on the basis of an overall antipathy to his method, which has often manifested itself in disagreements about his accuracy and responsibility as a researcher to the facts of any given topic. In their materiality, paintings may be the most “factual” of any historical object, but in their aesthetic presence their “facticity” appears to matter not at all. Such contradictions fascinated Foucault, and the delight he took in them—­evident in the variety of his writings about painting—­ gives evidence to this claim. The majority of this writing covers four discrete periods in European art history, the seventeenth-­century southern baroque, mid-­nineteenth-­century French painting, Surrealism in the twentieth century, and figurative painting in the 1960s and 1970s, and five individual artists in those periods: Diego Velázquez (1599–­1660), Édouard Manet (1832–­1883), René Magritte (1898–­1967), Paul Rebeyrolle (1926–­2005), and Gérard Fromanger (1939–­). This historical sweep exceeds the disciplinary

Preface  5

norms of art history—­constructed according to discrete historical periods and period styles—­even if it treats only one geographic area, that is, Europe, and one medium, that is, painting. Further, in terms of geography and the expansion of the market and appetite for art since Foucault’s death, globalization has meant a growing awareness of the limitations of the Eurocentric position for an understanding of other visual cultures and experiences. The entire Foucauldian archive was apparently limitless, but confined, in fact and with few exceptions, to the European tradition. For some—­even for many—­in the postcolonial world, this comes across as a major limitation of Foucault’s contribution to political theory and proof of the poverty of his idea of freedom. On the other hand, advocates of Foucault in the twenty-­first century understand the current globalized society, particularly in its economic aspects—­which would include the art market—­as a result of the imposition over centuries of Western culture and Westernized policies onto the rest of the world. They see Foucault’s philosophy as providing potential ways to intervene from within centers of power. For Foucault, the scene of painting required a place for his own political reality and, as the contemporary examples of Rebeyrolle’s and Fromanger’s paintings especially showed him, a place where the nature of that reality might be observed with greater clarity. Further, at least in the Anglo-­A merican context, the contemporary painters about whom Foucault wrote have not been well integrated into a history of contemporary art post-­1960. A single example suffices: the Museum of Modern Art does not own any paintings by Fromanger, about whom not only Foucault but also Gilles Deleuze wrote with such commitment. Also, it needs saying that painting itself has not been considered the central practice or art medium since Foucault wrote about it, with certain significant and notable exceptions that I will not enumerate here. Given this critical situation and the history of contemporary art, the historio-­ critical exploration of Foucault’s essays in this book may be said to intervene in the so-­called death of painting, or what has recently been termed “the medium under its de-­specification.”6 I address these issues at greater length in the final chapter, where an explicit “theory of the image” in Foucault’s writing on painting concerns me. The importance of painting for Foucault may be observed in a survey of his entire body of writing. Throughout this book I turn to it in order to approach the writing on painting comparatively. Foucault’s lengthiest writings about painting occur at a key moment in the intellectual trajectory of a major philosopher of the twentieth century, that is, as he completed a revision of the idea of “history,” using

6  Preface

an “archaeological” method focused on language as discourse in Les Mots et les choses (1966). In the first two chapters, I propose that a major question concerning painting emerged for Foucault at this moment, derived from both his study of language and his radical method: How does the scene of painting itself signify in ways that can be apprehended using an archaeological method originally intended for discourse? In the writings on painting that quickly followed on the heels of Les Mots et les choses from 1966 to 1978, further questions emerged: What does painting, which might be thought of as a “visual discourse,” do differently from language? What are the forms, contents, and effects of it in a specific historical period? These questions may be termed foundational to Foucault’s later writings on painting, but it must be said that his views about specific paintings changed according to their location in history, that is, in modernity and in contemporary times, just as he moved in his research chronologically through the history of art from the seventeenth century to the present. The texts by Foucault on painting are characterized by a great variety of genres and styles that deserve attention in my analysis of them, either separately or as a group.7 More details on these aspects of Foucault’s writing on painting, along with bibliographical information, are found in the chapters that follow, but certain aspects should be signaled from the outset. Generically speaking, “Les Suivantes” (the original title of the essay on Las Meninas) constituted the first chapter of a long book on language and discourse, which had, in fact, first appeared as a journal article. We know the work on Manet from a spoken lecture format, which should be considered a work in progress toward an unrealized book on the artist. The essay on Magritte was a tribute to the artist just after his death, a memento mori in article form that expanded five years later into a small book. The essay on Fromanger was written for an exhibition of the work of a friend and collaborator. The short article on Rebeyrolle reviewed the exhibition of another collaborator. These different kinds of writing about painting—­a chapter of a book, a lecture, a journal article transformed to a small book, a gallery exhibition catalog essay, and a short review article—­indicate that the form in which Foucault’s thoughts appeared varied a good deal. Moreover, his thinking about painting moved from the first attempt in the book on madness (Folie et déraison, 1961) to understand painting as something distinct from linguistic discourse to a final critique in the essay on Fromanger (“La Peinture photogénique,” 1975) of the dominance of photography in contemporary art and mass media. We cannot know if Foucault would have taken up painting

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again had he lived longer, although, as I show in the next chapter, his extensive use of Charles Baudelaire’s art criticism in the last lecture on the Enlightenment indicates that he might well have. The committed engagement of the viewer of paintings, that is, Foucault, manifests in palpable ways in the different styles of writing he used. The artist Thomas Hirschhorn expressed the admiration he felt for the philosopher who did not want to appear to speak for the artist and who therefore tried never to transpose his style onto another.8 A brief analysis of his rhetoric in the writings on art, which follows here, reveals that Foucault wrote about painting as someone always aware of his place as the viewer-­interpreter. Research into Foucault’s larger body of writing on the arts and literature helps explain the necessity here and elsewhere in the texts on painting for the critic to suspend the usual expectations of how to read an oeuvre, in favor of close visual and textual analyses attuned to often-­overlooked ruptures and dissonances in the visual field. These sorts of analyses are found in this book. When read in its original state as a spoken text and a non-­finito, the essay on Manet makes a leap away from the more straightforward observational mode found in the first chapter of Les Mots et les choses. In addition, Foucault wove through the text a set of invented, quasi-­scientific terms, required, so he said, to convey Manet’s contribution to the history of art. The explication of these theoretical terms required Foucault to reiterate his points throughout the text as he discussed individual paintings by Manet chronologically. The writer’s discomfort with the chronological progression as a way to convey the conceptual points he wanted to raise about painting manifests throughout as an uncharacteristic lack of fluidity of expression. The essay on Magritte caused the philosopher to grapple with the ostentatious contrasts in the characteristics between words and images when they are present together in a painting. His own recourse in the essay to calligrams, diagrams, and mimetic strategies shows him working through—­with all the discursive and semidiscursive means at his disposal—­the problems revealed by Magritte’s canvases. Foucault’s identification with the role of the interpreter, or “the Schoolmaster,” rather than with the painter of the word and image paintings goes in tandem with a rhetoric that is precise, overtly theoretical, and explicitly instructional. It may also be a sign of his annoyance with Magritte, who criticized his approach to words and images taken in Les Mots et les choses. The 1973 short review essay on Foucault’s contemporary Rebeyrolle, “The Force of Flight,” which I discuss here by way of an introduction to Foucault’s rhetorical

8  Preface

strategies in his writing about painting, took on an overtly partisan tone, which is to be expected of the critic engaged in prison reform interpreting a series of ten canvases depicting angry dogs behind bars. Foucault began with the explicit address to the reader in the second-­person plural, the French Vous of the first three sentences: You have entered. Here you are surrounded by ten paintings, which run the length of a room whose every window has been carefully closed. Are you not, in turn, in prison, like the dogs you see priming themselves and pushing up against the bars? 9

Throughout this short essay, Foucault directs the reader to identify with the dogs behind bars. With the interpellating Vous, he exhorts the reader to examine the paintings that serially document the indignities of imprisonment, a position that he took in life as an activist member of the Prison Reform Movement (Groupe Information Prison, GIP), together with his partner, Daniel Defert, and others (Plate 1). Foucault said that Rebeyrolle’s paintings of caged dogs allowed the viewer to see what prisons are in the present political moment: “a place where forces are born or become manifest, a place where history is formed and where time surges up.”10 These paintings manifest or reveal a place where history sediments and where time transforms for the viewer. In “The Force of Flight,” Foucault addresses the canvases in the order of their placement in the gallery, and as he does so his expressive rhetoric increases. The forms depicted on the canvas, their serial placement, and the materials of wood and wire come together to move the viewer into action with the “force” of history: “Form is no longer charged with representing force in its distortions; the latter no longer has to jostle with form to realize itself.”11 The paintings literally appear to blow Foucault away, as the essay’s language attempted to express. Similarly, in the exhibition catalog essay on Fromanger, Foucault understood the paintings as complementary of, even completing, history. The paintings by his contemporary were said “to connect,” “to amplify,” “to multiply,” “to disturb,” and “to deflect” expectations of the past and of images.12 The rhetorical style in this essay eschews the exhortational mode found in the Rebeyrolle piece. Here, however, Foucault gives the painter a voice by quoting Fromanger on Fromanger. The painter’s speech mirrors the paintings about which Foucault wrote and that depict the painter as a shadow or ensnared by the projected slide images that he used as part of his painting process. Thus the style of Foucault’s writing partially mimics

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the contents of the canvases, causing a reverberation between visual and verbal discourses that appears unique to this specific context.

Intentional Risks The first two book-­length studies concerned with Foucault’s thinking on painting were written in English by American philosophers and appeared at the beginning of the twenty-­first century. They can be related to the historiography of Foucault’s writing given here. Gary Shapiro’s groundbreaking book of 2003 on Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche resulted from the former’s often-­stated admiration for the German philosopher, whose work Shapiro regarded as essential to understanding Foucault’s approach to painting.13 Shapiro compared the two philosophers in light of their thinking about issues broadly related to vision. Deleuze’s assessment of Foucault’s philosophy indicates the strength that painting maintained both as historical tool and as conceptual methodology in a system conceived of as centrally concerned with vision and visibility as a way to understand the situation of the subject in the world.14 I suggest in chapter 2 that these approaches could also be found in some of the early commentaries on Las Meninas by art historians. Shapiro’s treatment of Foucault’s aesthetics provided the first comprehensive interpretation of his writings on paintings, although an earlier essay in French by Stefano Catucci realized an outline of the writings on painting and the issues to be confronted.15 Shapiro’s comparative method established relationships between Foucault’s essays on painting and his other writings, as well as emphasizing the significance of Maurice Merleau-­Ponty and other post–­World War II French philosophers to his thought. I engage with and expand on these aspects of Shapiro’s book in the chapters that follow. Joseph Tanke’s 2009 book, Foucault’s Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity, addressed many aspects of Foucault’s writing on the visual arts, which the author attempted to relate to Foucault’s entire philosophical project, particularly to the investigation of the self and subjectivation found in the books on the history of sexuality and in the later seminars at the Collège de France. Tanke stated that his goal in examining Foucault’s writing on the work of art was to understand how this “lost genealogy” fits into “the historical ontology of ourselves.”16 I suggest that this genealogy had not been lost to art history, although its shape differed greatly between France and the United States. Tanke sought to place all of Foucault’s texts

10  Preface

on art in relation to a conception of modern art understood as a form of “ethical labor.”17 While Tanke admitted his approach to be distant from the historiographical one I employ here—­for example, he calls Foucault “unchronological”—­his argument more or less mirrors Foucault’s stated intention in Les Mots et les choses to present an interpretation of the operation of language in discourse in modernity. In contrast, and more in concert with aspects of Shapiro’s views, I attempt to understand that Foucault’s approach to painting sought to address both its situation in its own time—­that is, historically according to the works he discussed—­and in his present. In his writing on painting, Foucault operated under the presumption, gained from his teacher, the philosopher Merleau-­Ponty, that each field in which the image is found offers the means and processes of discourse proper to its practices and its modes of description.18 Although it has not been my intention in this book to produce a hagiography of Michel Foucault, it has proved difficult not to give the appearance of having done so. To engage in close readings of texts, which are by no means universally recognized as significant either by art historians or by philosophers, advances their importance in scholarship. To attend to the specifics of art historical scholarship necessary to understanding Foucault’s interpretations but hidden from view by their lack of scholarly apparatuses uncovers his research and ties them to the renowned intellectual history of a major thinker. To explain in the voice of an art historian the views of a philosopher deeply engaged in individual paintings, painting theory, and aesthetics enhances Foucault’s judgments and views about painting and aesthetics. My critical operations intent on uncovering essential aspects of Foucault’s writing about painting and relating them to his larger body of thought and to the history of art theory, therefore, promote what in the end is a small group of texts. But those texts are no less important for being so few in number. Their explication resolves the tendency to keep them separate from the rest of Foucault’s oeuvre, and it may reverse their lack of attention in the discipline of art history, but does it prevent anything? I hope not. By turning to a rather systematic and certainly rigorous series of short writings by a major philosopher of the twentieth century, I have intended to open up the thinking about painting today and to provide a corrective to the current thinking about what painting meant in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Reading through these texts, one can see that Foucault grappled with the problems of painting as theory and as a series of historical practices, but I am not assured that he succeeded in

Preface  11

wrestling it to the ground. In the final essay on Fromanger, the sense is that he did not want to and, indeed, that he found a way to incorporate painting’s resistance to interpretation or to a satisfactory theorization into his philosophy of the self, as the quotation at the beginning of this preface indicates. Michael Kelly has argued that painting served as an “enactment of critical agency” in Foucault’s thought.19 Would it be too far-­fetched to say that painting became part of him? I do not think so. After all, the allusion to the assimilation of the painter in the painting in the phrase ogni pittore dipinge sè is only an observation about surface if one understands painting as being about surface. Surface certainly is not how Foucault saw painting as he searched the shadows and the blacks of Manet’s canvases for what they had to reveal about their subjects and about himself.

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INTRODUCTION

What Painting Does

When the art historian Daniel Arasse explained the significance of Michel Foucault’s famous interpretation of the painting known as Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez (Plate 2), he concluded that the philosopher had “launched a theoretical machine.”1 This was meant not as a criticism but as a critique of art history’s approach to Foucault’s interpretation, which I examine in greater detail in later chapters. Here, by way of introduction to a book concerned with a major twentieth-­century philosopher’s ideas about painting, it is worth dwelling on the meaning of “the launch” or initiation of them in 1966, the date of the publication of Les Mots and les choses, where the first chapter is devoted to the analysis of a painting. Foucault had been concerned with painting and the meaning of the image since his earliest publication, if not before.2 As a practice of putting color on walls or rectangles, painting had been established in the Occident for more than thirty-­five thousand years. In post–­World War II France, when Foucault began to think about painting, it was considered a cultural practice that extended from the caves of Lascaux to the present. Georges Bataille, whose 1955 book on Manet served Foucault’s own interpretation of the artist, had published in that same year an important study of the Lascaux paintings, which he titled “the birth of art.”3 Where did a new theory of painting belong in the context of Foucault’s larger philosophical project? Arasse clearly means something more by his remark than that a philosopher had written about “a historical object produced at a certain moment under certain precise conditions.”4 This was the way that most art historians prior to Foucault had considered Las Meninas, and indeed all paintings. This normative view of painting-­ as-­historical-­object had allowed the discipline of art history to interpret paintings according to focuses made explicit in its approaches to that view of the object: the craft and processes of the painting being analyzed; the biography, training, and expression of the individual artist; the social and economic forces of the time and place when the painting was produced; the reception of the work by contemporaries. The art historian Arasse recognized that Foucault did not think like an art

14  Introduction

historian in 1966 when he wrote about Las Meninas.5 His questions and his method were outside the norm of art history.6 But he did not think like a philosopher either: he did not ask the ontological question “What is painting?” Foucault’s innovative approach to painting as theory came after almost two decades of thinking about paintings through the structures of discourse found in the sciences and social sciences, particularly in relationship to his historical investigations of madness (in History of Madness, 1961) and medicine (in The Birth of the Clinic, 1963).7 In these studies that preceded Les Mots et les choses, a book about language, Foucault had treated paintings as historical objects concurrently with texts from the period under examination. Foucault used paintings as visual examples or analogies of the social structuring that he found at work in the texts. For example, in a lengthy analysis of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych Temptations of St. Anthony in Lisbon (Plate 3), Foucault contrasted the painting’s approach to the subject of madness with the written discourse of the early Renaissance: By its own means painting was beginning the long process of experimentation that would take it ever further from language, regardless of the superficial identity of a theme. Language and figure still illustrate the same fable of madness in the moral world, but they are beginning to take different directions, indicating, through a crack that was still barely perceptible, the great divide that was yet to come in the Western experience of madness.8

In the careful analysis that followed, Foucault argued that in its substance, the painting realized the revelatory power of madness that language would find slightly later: “The vain images of blind foolishness turned out to be the truth of the world, and in this grand disorder, this mad universe, the cruelty that lay in the day of judgement began to appear. These mad images are an expression of hidden Renaissance worries about the menacing secrets of the world, and it was those fears that gave the fantastic images such coherence and lent them such power.”9 It bears emphasizing here that Foucault’s view of Bosch’s painting as a manifestation both of the idea of the world from that time and of madness itself had been acknowledged first by art historians, as he would have known.10 In their interpretations, as in Foucault’s book, the Temptations of St. Anthony functions as an object that reveals the attitudes of the era. According to Foucault, Renaissance paintings make visible what otherwise could not be expressed by language; sometimes they manifested earlier than texts the truth of the written history. Foucault makes these

Introduction  15

points concerning Bosch’s painting in the quotations I have used here. He would emphasize to an even greater extent the issue of visibility in The Birth of the Clinic, where he argued that in early nineteenth-­century medicine the “silent configuration” of the image coincided with the language used to speak about it.11 But something changed in his analysis of Las Meninas: “the historical object” of the painting could no longer be seen only as prefiguration or part of its historical moment. Foucault found Las Meninas to be a particular kind of material object that could exist both inside and outside its historicized temporality. This is what Arasse contends when he says that Foucault’s contribution in the analysis of Las Meninas made us understand this painting—­and by extension all paintings—­as potentially “anachronic in relation to its own time.”12 Painting, as such, can do what no other practice or discourse can: “It can figure something else [‘some other thing’ would be another way of translating Arasse’s words so that they resonate directly with Foucault’s book title] than that which it conceptualizes in its own time.”13 In other words, what is known through or as a result of a painting may or may not have been possible to think or to know in the era in which the painting was made. It is not inconsequential to the conceptual point that Arasse also contends that painting does its thinking through figuration, meaning the depiction of bodies and their surroundings in the entirety of the picture in the frame. Because all of Foucault’s writing on painting concerned figurative works, this observation is particularly acute for an understanding of them. According to the anachronic view, Foucault could consider the issue of chronology in painting as contingent even if—­as is the case in Las Meninas—­figures might be portrait likenesses of the Spanish royal court and their painter dressed in the clothes of the period when the painting was made; even if the surroundings depict a particular room in the Prado palace. I show later that Foucault’s point about the variability of a painting’s historicity would—­ albeit to a surprisingly limited extent—­have an impact on the conceptualization of the historical genres in art history: portraiture and narrative history painting. Las Meninas, after all, is both a group portrait and a history painting. There is more to say about Foucault’s view of temporality here other than the fact that it is not art historical or at least what was commonly held to be art historical at the time that Foucault wrote in the mid-­1960s.14 When Arasse insists on the theoretical importance of Foucault’s interpretation of Las Meninas, he stresses the transformation done to the commonly held understanding of both the historical and conceptual aspects of thinking about a specific painting and painting as

16  Introduction

a project, practice, and institution. Further, the anachronicity pertaining to the painting object Las Meninas separated it from the conclusions that the philosopher drew about language in the chapters that followed in Les Mots et les choses. To be sure, in the book Foucault considered both language and painting as part of their respective “formal settings,” the term preferred by the historian Paul Veyne in lieu of Foucault’s word discourse and one that works particularly well in regard to painting.15 A unique and particular aspect of painting’s “formal setting” had nothing to do with the discursive but redounded to its “visibility,” as Gilles Deleuze explained in his assessment of Foucault’s contribution to philosophy.16 According to this view, the painting Las Meninas might be known by its similarity to other paintings, such as the barely visible canvases depicted in it; but, beginning in the late sixteenth century—­or so Foucault argued—­true similarities did not exist between paintings and prose from the same historical period and place.17 This last point has serious implications for the studies on painting examined in the present volume: painting was like itself by virtue of its material figuration and not like philosophy, a discursive but equally conceptual manner of thinking. The emphasis on the similarities of paintings with other paintings may explain Foucault’s fascination with sequences of paintings by the contemporary artists Paul Rebeyrolle and Gérard Fromanger. So, too, the multiplicity of images of pipes in Magritte’s oeuvre constituted Foucault’s point of departure on that artist. We should not expect, nor will the reader often find, Foucault’s philosophical ideas about language replicated or mirrored in his interpretations of pictures.

What Painting Does to History Something more than differences in “formal setting” between painting and language was at stake in Foucault’s approach to painting beginning with Les Mots et les choses. That painting belonged to a different order of knowledge (savoir) than language or than any other material objects may have been intuited earlier, but as Arasse said of Foucault: he was the first to make the difference explicit as an aspect of the concept of painting that related directly to the issue of history.18 To designate painting as a different order of knowledge not only went against the disciplinary conventions intrinsic to it as “a historical object” but also contradicted—­or perhaps confused—­the humanistic underpinning of the history of art in the European tradi-

Introduction  17

tion.19 The historiography need only be sketched here; further details are found in the chapters that follow. Beginning in the early Renaissance, art theorists, among them artists themselves, had argued for the legitimacy of painting as an intellectual exercise and as the most able among the arts to achieve beauty. The history of painting and acquaintance with paintings came to be seen as part of the necessary grounding of the educated person in the arts and philosophy. This humanistic foundation for painting persisted in the twentieth century, particularly in France because of the important influence of Paul Valéry, whose lifelong study of Leonardo da Vinci brought him to argue for painting not only as an elevated form of intellection but as philosophy itself.20 Foucault did not follow Valéry in many things, but in thinking of painting as a particular and elevated kind of knowledge, which he called savoir, he certainly had read all of the earlier philosopher’s criticism. Yet, as I show, Foucault’s revision of the idea of painting in relation to the past put art history as a humanistic discipline at risk, brought an end to the elevation of painting in it, and may be presumed a key text in the antipainting rhetoric in contemporary art and criticism of the late twentieth century.21 Foucault’s essays on painting are, at least in intention, all part of the “end of man” scenario predicted in the final pages of Les Mots et les choses. In the very last words of the book Foucault projects the fate of humanity in the Anthropocene onto a portrait image, thereby alluding to the possibility that the disappearance of man spells the end of art: “then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”22 In his essay on Fromanger, Foucault speaks of the “autonomous transhumance of the image,” which relates only to itself as image.23 Yet, in a profound way, Foucault’s anachronic and conceptual view of painting could be considered “paradoxical”—­to use Arasse’s word—­for his own radical project of the transformation of the self “through the historical analysis of the limits imposed on us.”24 We might think of the work that painting does in the first chapter of Les Mots et les choses as illustrative of what a new history could provide: by its very concept, painting transformed the idea of the past that it also gave by way of its figuration. Foucault said that Les Mots et les choses and his other historical studies called for a refutation of the meaning and methods of history, so that time and the past would no longer be its goals.25 In my analyses of Foucault’s essays on Manet, Magritte, and Fromanger, I show that the author increasingly prefers to place the stress on how these paintings could transform the idea of the present, whether that

18  Introduction

present be mid-­nineteenth-century France, the early to mid-­t wentieth century, or Paris in the early 1970s. Yet painting also retains some or all of its aesthetic aspects both in the past and in the potentially transformed present. The important question arises: what or who can enact the transformation given by painting today if it is also always embedded in the past? At the end of his life, Foucault turned to Kant’s idea of the Enlightenment as a suggestion of “a way out” of the historical weight felt in the present. According to Foucault, Kant’s essential and enduring insight into the Enlightenment was in seeking to understand “What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?”26 The lecture on the Enlightenment also provided the occasion for Foucault to think about the important role that the singular artist—­particularly the painter—­has to play in the recalibration of the present. All of Foucault’s writings on painting focus on the work of a singular artist, beginning with Renaissance artists in History of Madness and concluding in his last essay on painting with his contemporary, Fromanger. Whether Foucault writes about Manet, Magritte, or Fromanger, he alleges particular ways that each one deals with his “contemporary reality alone.”27 In the Kant lecture, Foucault used Charles Baudelaire’s view of art and of the artist-­a s-­dandy to illustrate how one might envision a philosophy of the present. Foucault turned to Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of modernity as he found it in Baudelaire’s “Salon of 1846” and the essay “The Painter of Modern Life” as a way to understand Kant’s view of the present.28 While Benjamin is not cited in Foucault’s “What Is Enlightenment?,” the German critic’s approach to the problem of modernity via Baudelaire allowed Foucault to understand what it means to think the present without yesterday.29 I note here that Baudelaire’s art criticism provided a model that Foucault had already in fact endorsed in conceptualizing the end of “painting-­as-­historical-­object.” Foucault began his discussion of Baudelaire on modernity by insisting that the poet saw in painting the importance of “recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it.”30 These words recall Foucault’s emphasis on the placement of the spectator in regard to the painting depicted in the painting of Las Meninas: “The painter’s eyes seize hold of him, force him to enter the picture, assign him a place at once privileged and inescapable, levy their luminous and visible tribute from him, and project it upon the inaccessible surface of the canvas within the picture.”31 Having established the centrality of the picture of modernity within a pictorial frame, Foucault then turns to a discussion of Baudelaire on the painting of

Introduction  19

his contemporaries, particularly the performative role of the eponymous “hero” of Baudelaire’s criticism, the artist Constantin Guys: “What makes him the modern painter par excellence in Baudelaire’s eyes is that, just when the whole world is falling asleep, he begins to work, and he transfigures that world.”32 When Foucault looked at Baudelaire’s representation of Guys, he saw more than the embodiment of the heroic artist; he saw in the paintings themselves “the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it.”33 Importantly here, the practice or the work of painting references the freedom of the singular artist. Moreover, the artist’s freedom to transform the present in practice echoed Foucault’s stated intention to be a philosopher of his times. In other words, Baudelaire’s hero, the artist-­ as-­dandy, allowed Foucault to realize something about himself. As he explained: to exist in the present “is also a mode of relationship that must be established with oneself” and one that required “an indispensable asceticism.”34 Foucault’s words analogizing the practice of painting with the relationship to oneself specifically recall his thinking on the history and meaning of sexuality for the construction of the contemporary ethical subject. Veyne observed that the knitting together of the concept of style in the work of art and the concept of an ethical style of existence was particularly acute in Foucault at the end of his life as he was dying of AIDS.35 The lecture on Enlightenment comes then. But the idea of an aesthetics of existence that borrowed its conceptual frame from aspects of art may be found in Foucault’s work beginning with his first studies of the history of sexuality. In the conclusion of The Archaeology of Knowledge, the book usually considered Foucault’s justification for his historical method in Les Mots et les choses, he designated three possible areas for future investigation: painting, sexuality, and politics.36 In the studies on sexuality that followed and that concerned him for the rest of his life, Foucault said that he sought to understand “the arts of existence” by which humans “seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.”37 Foucault merges here the language of art history with his project of the study of existence via sexuality. Arnold Davidson contends that in The Care of the Self, Foucault’s last book on sexuality, Foucault called for an aesthetics of existence “requiring the experience of pleasure one takes in oneself,” to be accomplished according to a regime of asceticism.38 If, as Davidson argued, “ancient sex functions as the material around which Foucault elaborates his conception of ethics,” where does painting belong

20  Introduction

in this constellation, considering the nature and centrality of it in the late essay on Enlightenment?39 In what follows here, I attempt to understand how Arasse’s insight into Foucault’s conception of painting as anachronic and therefore of the present may be related to his views on the ethically lived life. This calls for thinking about Foucault’s project on sexuality together with the idea of painting that he had initiated in Les Mots et les choses. A concept of pleasure lies at the center of Foucault’s aesthetics of existence. Pleasure may also be found at the center of Foucault’s idea of painting. But whether in the context of sexuality or in the context of painting, Foucault’s idea of pleasure was sui generis, and that was partly the point: it was his alone and related to a personal approach to the subject, to subjectivity and to subjectivation. The concept of pleasure as found in Foucault did not correspond with the concept as found in philosophy, psychoanalysis, or art theory, although, as I have already shown, the terminology he uses often overlaps with that of aesthetics and painting.

The Pleasure in Painting In an interview published in the journal L’Imprévu in 1975, Foucault declared: “That which actually pleases me in painting is that one is obliged to look. There, that is my repose. It is one of the rare things I write about with pleasure and without fighting against whatever it might be.”40 Foucault says here that painting held its influence first and foremost because it gave the individual viewer a particular pleasure having to do with looking.41 For most of his life, painting revealed itself to Foucault as a seductive structure in which attentive looking and careful analysis of effects imposed themselves on him. Foucault also stated in the same interview that the pleasure he took in painting was not “tactical” or “strategic.”42 Foucault’s characterization of pleasure in History of Sexuality could not be more congruent: pleasure must be considered “foremost in relation to itself” and its practices, “without reference to a criterion of utility.”43 Further, according to Foucault, this pleasure “must be deflected back into the sexual practice itself.”44 The experience of pleasure cannot be separated from the practice of sexuality, just as, so Foucault contended, the effect of painting must not be separated from all the technical and material practices associated with it. If Foucault claimed pleasure as painting’s primary characteristic or affective domain, it should be directly related to the concept as he theorized it in regard to

Introduction  21

aphrodisia, the Greek word he used to designate the practices and effects of sexuality.45 In The Use of Pleasure, the second volume on sexuality, Foucault defined aphrodisia as “the acts, gestures, and contacts that produce a certain form of pleasure.”46 Importantly for Foucault’s exploration of the practices associated with sexuality, this pleasure was one and the same with the attractions and desires that caused it; pleasure consists of a “solid unity.”47 Paintings have often been theorized in this manner: figuration, material support and pigments, contents and forms inextricable from each other, from meaning, and, for that matter, from the pleasure they give.48 According to Foucault, the baser sexual pleasures associated by the Greeks with voluptas did not include paintings or any other arts related to the senses.49 Rather, true pleasure in sexuality and art “is defined by the fact of not being caused by anything that is independent of ourselves and therefore escapes our control. It arises out of ourselves and within ourselves.”50 As also related to the senses in Foucault’s view, painting should be considered like sexuality: our pleasure in it arises from the sense of sight (“one is obliged to look”), and it causes a feeling of well-­being, or “repose,” as Foucault put it. In understanding the pleasure of painting as beneficial to the body and spirit—­to its repose—­Foucault echoes Baudelaire’s conception of the function of art in “The Salon of 1846”: “Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.”51 In The Care of the Self, Foucault specifically states that pleasure for its own sake has nothing to recommend it: “It must never be taken as a reason to accomplish the act.”52 True pleasure cannot be “a sought-­after object.”53 Instead, pleasure comes as a direct result of the correct, and usually difficult, practices related to the care of the self. According to Foucault, the pleasure associated with aphrodisia therefore not only constitutes “a privileged domain for the ethical formation of the subject” but also relates directly to life lived as a work of art.54 In Foucault’s philosophy of the self, the art of painting—­both a practice and a conceptual object in the past and present—­analogizes to the self as “a domain of moral concern.”55 In my discussion of the writings on painting that follow in this book, I take painting to be of profound significance, not only in Foucault’s interpretations of individual canvases, but also for what these interpretations offer to an understanding of an ethical life. In 1975, when Foucault called painting a particularly acute and individual pleasure, it pertained directly to his construction of a contemporary idea of aesthetics as “a set of transdisciplinary concepts, theories, forms of knowledge, and critical

22  Introduction

practices” determining the ethical life of the subject.56 Foucault’s integration of art, particularly painting, with his concept of ethics as aesthetics does not agree with the doxa of philosophy, as Michael Kelly has discussed.57 However, this integration did strike his contemporary Deleuze as pertinent when he argued for the centrality of “visibilities” in Foucault’s philosophy. In his study of the philosopher, Deleuze considered the distinctive quality of Foucault’s concept of visibilities by insisting on the importance of description for it, particularly the description of paintings: “This leads to Foucault’s passion for describing scenes, or, even more so, for offering descriptions that stand as scenes: descriptions of Las Meninas, Manet, Magritte, the admirable descriptions of the chain gang, the asylum, the prison and the little prison van, as though they were scenes and Foucault were a painter.”58 Deleuze emphasized that Foucault was a philosopher who not only described paintings but described like a painter. Deleuze’s understanding of the meaning of description and its relationship to painting relies on a well-­k nown article by the scholar of literature and art history, and a colleague of Foucault’s, Louis Marin. As I show in the chapter on Magritte, Marin’s semiotic approach to painting often proved important for Foucault’s thinking. In the essay that so influenced Deleuze, Marin had considered the function of “descriptive discourse” in the landscapes by the seventeenth-­century French painter Nicolas Poussin. He argued that it constituted the kind of written expression that painting by nature of its very visibility elicits. Description indicates the place where “language and image are primordially intertwined,” for example, on the surface of the canvas.59 Further, Marin related this kind of expression to the subjectivity of the viewer-­speaker: descriptions of paintings achieve a set of “fundamental relations” for the painting in which the viewer-­speaker of the painting designates himself or herself.60 Here, perhaps, we recognize Foucault’s own elision of the practice of painting and the person of the painter in the essay on Enlightenment, which he had found in Baudelaire. In following Marin, Deleuze went well beyond the former’s formulation of a kind of description directly related to the genre of landscape painting. Marin argued that Poussin’s descriptive expression related to desire: “a viewer who reads the figures of his own desire in those that the painter’s desire, in representing, traces and displaces in the surface of the painting.”61 By using Marin’s idea of the designation of the self through descriptive discourse, Deleuze connected Foucault to the aspect of pleasure that Deleuze himself found most significant, that is, desire.

Introduction  23

But Foucault did not understand pleasure in these terms. In the interview quoted above, the pleasure Foucault took in painting was not “tactical” or “strategic.”62 By disavowing painting’s direct relationship to power, Foucault could not have had in mind its association with Deleuze’s understanding of desire.63 Pleasure for Foucault was “unified”—­even simultaneous—­not separable into desire and what follows after it. Deleuze later criticized Foucault’s idea of pleasure because “pleasure seems to me to interrupt the immanent process of desire.”64 Thus, although we might well agree with Deleuze on both the centrality of visibility in Foucault’s thought and the qualities of his descriptive prose and its connectedness to painting, we cannot associate the pleasure he took in painting directly with desire.

Life as a Painting, Not an Image According to Davidson, the Foucauldian view of ethics pertains as much to the predicaments of contemporary existence as it does to its pleasures.65 Where does painting belong in this contemporary predicament? This book attempts to provide some answers to this question. However, here it should be noted that the distinctive qualities of the contemporary image that began to be observed around 1980 have led critics to bemoan the “progressive loss of our visual innocence as a result of the explosion and global dissemination of images in the print and electronic media.”66 Is painting the “visual innocence” that we have lost to the digital image, as some might allege? Does painting function in Foucault’s work as retrogression, or is it in step with his times? Neither of these alternatives suffices, as Arasse perceived in his characterization of Foucault’s essay on Las Meninas as “the theoretical machine.” Foucault proposed something more for painting than the historicist alternative of the reconstruction through visual means of the past or an allegorical gesture to a present predicament, causing a certain degree of consternation in art history and a certain dismissal by philosophers. While Foucault and others in late twentieth-­century France explored the tacit and secretive characteristics of the painted image—­a major point addressed in the chapters that follow here—­the arguments about the visual image in Anglophone contexts became concerned with the mediations of technology and the prolific character of its reproduction. In the eyes of those sympathetic to earlier forms and technologies, the digital image provided only promiscuity and the complete occultation of meaning. Today, images are rarely spoken of as concerned with Truth or

24  Introduction

revelatory of truths, as paintings once were. Images are characterized as entertaining, deceitful, soliciting, and overwhelmingly pervasive. Foucault takes on this view of the mediatized image in his essay on Fromanger as he simultaneously reads the paintings as exceptions to such images and to the very methods used in their reproduction. In so doing, Foucault concedes the essential value that painting has for them. Following Foucault, as “anachronic in relation to its own time,” contemporary painting in the 1970s reveals truths about other kinds of images that cannot be articulated elsewhere. The present volume ultimately engages with the “image-­thinking” so characteristic of a globalized society since the early 1980s, and with which Foucault engaged in his last essay on painting.67 As Deleuze saw, Foucault’s recourse to painting allowed him to take the measure of the image in his own day, which in turn provides us with acutely pertinent suggestions for our own. Arasse’s interpretation suggests that Foucault understood the anachronic painting to be at the intersection where sexuality as aesthetics and politics converge in his thought. Foucault’s premise in the essay on Fromanger that one must think through the history of modern painting in order to approach the contemporary image critically provides an avenue toward ethics via aesthetics. The extension of this premise to the contemporary visual situation in which the digital image is primary must contend with a historiography that has not explicitly taken on the ideas surrounding painting that Foucault’s analyses provided. The shape of the arguments in this book gives an alternative to that critical situation. They follow from Foucault’s proposition that painting’s use value ultimately redounds to its primary theoretical situation in the larger visual field, and that these contemporary images require that painting be fully conceptualized as a meaningful social construct for the present, with aesthetic and political values of significance now.

CHAPTER ONE

Systems of Art Historical and Philosophical Thought

In 1965, as Foucault hesitated about including a chapter on painting in Les Mots et les choses—­the book that would make his reputation—­a version of it had already appeared in the literary journal Le Mercure de France.1 The essay prompted a commentary of sorts by Jacques Lacan, who gave a series of seminars using paintings to explore psychoanalytic concepts.2 This unusual configuration of approaches to the history of painting caused the French art historian Hubert Damisch to consider both Foucault’s and Lacan’s interpretations in his celebrated book, The Origin of Perspective, published in 1987, some twenty years after Les Mots et les choses.3 For Damisch, painting was a “theoretical object,” and in the book he proposed perspective as “the system of thought” or “the object of knowledge” that structured our approach to the world in pictures.4 The number and seriousness of responses to Foucault’s chapter on Las Meninas by art historians, philosophers, and historians speak both to the painting’s canonical status in the history of art and to Foucault’s highly original interpretation of it in the context of a book that aroused controversy, particularly in France.5 The volume of criticism related to Foucault’s interpretation of Las Meninas is of considerable significance to the discipline of art history even today, as my introduction makes clear.6 In this chapter, I provide the historio-­ critical situation for Foucault’s writings on painting, including a discussion of issues of translation and reception that impinge on the specific theoretical matters addressed by each of the texts. In the early French responses to Les Mots et les choses, Foucault’s interpretation of Las Meninas was hardly mentioned, but, as I have already shown, Damisch, Arasse, and other French art historians later deemed it foundational.7 However, the reception was quite different in the Anglo-­A merican context when the book appeared in 1970 with the title The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. The Anglo-­A merican reception of the chapter helps explain the lasting influence of the most widely read of Foucault’s contributions to the history and

26  Systems of Thought

theory of painting. It also marks the differences in the approaches to painting and photography undertaken by French and Anglo-­A merican art history and aesthetics circa 1965–­85.8 The title of the first chapter changed in translation: from the French “Les Suivantes,” meaning “the followers,” to the Spanish “Las Meninas,” “maids-­ in-­waiting.” The French title signifies the ghostly appearance in the mirror at the back of the painting of the king and queen of Spain, members of whose court are pictured and taken as coming after them in rank and order. The Spanish title refers specifically to the maids-­in-­waiting who accompany the Infanta at the front of the picture, and perhaps to the dog, pictorially in advance but who follows them all. The title in the English edition also appropriated the most commonly used title of the painting in the English-­speaking context. In 1980, a decade after its publication in English and five years after Foucault’s first visit to the United States, the chapter on Las Meninas in The Order of Things began to provoke a series of revisions of the painting and commentaries on Foucault’s contribution that continues today.9 One could say that the context was right: the past decade had seen ten books by Foucault published in English translation.10 It can be said that Foucault came late to Anglo-­A merican art history, in that he had already established a major reputation in other fields. There was a lot of catching up to do. The intertwining of contemporary art historical and philosophical critiques with the seventeenth-­century painting and the earlier literature on it illustrates the value of Foucault’s “archaeological” argument found in Les Mots et les choses. In the words of the French philosopher of science, Georges Canguilhem, this archaeology would have allowed Foucault to consider the painting “an essential displacement” and “an enigmatic discontinuity.”11 Importantly, for my argument here, the discontinuity that Foucault found in Las Meninas signaled a “transformation” in art history itself, as Foucault implied it might in the Foreword to the English edition of the book.12 I do not refer here to the break posited by Foucault (and represented for him by the painting) between the so-­called classical age and modernity. I refer to an upheaval, as it were, in the traditional historiography of Anglo-­A merican art history itself, brought about initially by the extent and nature of the criticism of Foucault’s approach to Las Meninas in The Order of Things.13 The earlier art historical literature on Las Meninas reached back to the time of Velázquez himself and was truly international in scope, although Foucault did not mention any of it.14 However, many of the contemporary American responses to Foucault enfolded into their scholarly conclusions some or most of this earlier

Systems of Thought  27

literature on the painting. In conjunction with and as a response to Foucault, this literature was reexamined by specialists and nonspecialists alike and subjected to contemporary critiques. Moreover, the American reconsiderations of Las Meninas that began in 1980 should be understood as having initiated a long period of self-­ reflection—­indeed self-­criticism—­on the part of the discipline of art history regarding the methods and approaches to its objects of study. This critical activity surrounding Las Meninas was aided and abetted by the contemporaneous insertion of post-­structuralist approaches into American literary criticism, for which Foucault himself had been partly responsible.15 Foucault’s examination of Las Meninas concerned an early modern European painting from the so-­called baroque era, that is, a “period style” in the history of art that in the United States and Great Britain had only gradually become central to the discipline after World War II.16 Certainly, the claims that Las Meninas had already made on this period history were evident in the older, and highly specialized, art historical literature and a cause of the painting’s authority in the canon. But, as the timing and proliferation of responses to it attest, Foucault’s writing opened interpretation in the discipline more widely to a variety of approaches, including the philosophy of language, Marxism, and social art history.17 The “new art history,” as it came to be called, owed a great deal to Foucault. His interpretation of Las Meninas helped art historians see “beyond or beneath the surface of the picture,” as the art historian Svetlana Alpers usefully put it at the time.18 With this statement, Alpers meant that Foucault’s chapter did more than establish a context of interpretation for the painting that was of interdisciplinary, historical, and philosophical importance, if only because it appeared as the first chapter in a long book about the nature of linguistic representation in the classical age and its meaning for modernity. Alpers’s statement about what Foucault’s interpretation did for art history pertains directly to the very methods of iconology and formal analysis used by the majority of Anglo-­A merican art historians at the time, both of which had emphasized the surface content of paintings. Given that these older Anglo-­A merican methods of picture analysis derived from a Germanic history of art and aesthetics, the significance of Foucault’s chapter on Las Meninas looms larger than what might be intuited from the essay itself, an intuition that so readily produced the acceptance of it in French art history. These Germanic approaches, particularly the kind of iconographic analysis practiced at the time in the United States by Erwin Panofsky, his students, and followers, were put into

28  Systems of Thought

question—­whether explicitly or implicitly—­by Foucault’s interpretation of the canonical painting, as Arasse later emphasized.19 Further distinctions in Foucault’s understanding of painting in relationship to language may be found in his explicit critique of Panofsky. In his review of the French edition of Studies in Iconology, written in 1967 just after the publication of Les Mots et les choses, Foucault distinguished his approach from that of the art historian, who understood painting as a “symbolic language.”20 Foucault began disingenuously by disavowing his competence in art history. He went on to explain how “foreign” the methods of iconology were to a French audience, and he predicted how seductive they would become. In hazarding these points, we can surmise Foucault’s discomfort with Panofsky’s method of analysis. According to him, Panofsky erroneously elevates discourse over the visible on the grounds that the description of the visible—­of the work of art—­requires language’s preeminence.21 Moreover, Foucault saw a flaw in Panofsky’s view that discourse and the visible cannot operate independently from each other: “It happens finally that discourse and form (la plastique) are submissive to each other, as if by a unique movement toward one coherent arrangement.”22 According to Foucault, Panofsky misunderstood this “reciprocal functioning” of discourse through the analysis of the figures in a painting, wrongly finding “the appearance of an articulated unity in the work of art.”23 Foucault suggests that the methods and procedures proper to painting alone called for another kind of approach than that offered by iconology. In Les Mots et les choses, the philosopher had posited the limits of language, just as he had proposed a new extensivity for painting. Now, Foucault also rejected the suggestion that abstract art could resolve the problem of the surface reading supposedly engendered by mimetic forms in earlier art. Figuration itself revealed the depths of the meaning of painting, according to Foucault. Panofsky’s method served as a model of wrongheaded thinking in art history: his “laws of art” did nothing more than show themselves to be nominated as such. Foucault’s approach went beneath the surface to reveal the superficiality of the Panofskian method and rules of iconographic signification. It is in this deeper, methodological sense that we can understand how Foucault’s chapter initiated a rupture in the discipline in the American milieu. The American art historian Leo Steinberg relied directly on Foucault’s words in analyzing Las Meninas to explain its significance for the discipline’s interpretative methods. The Foreword to the English edition explained at length that the value of “the processes and products of the scientific consciousness” belong as much to its

Systems of Thought  29

“negative” or “unconscious” side as to what is already “known.”24 Using an inversion typical of his thinking, Foucault called this “a positive unconscious of knowledge.”25 If painting was “the mirror of consciousness,” as Steinberg said, taking up the motif of the mirror depicted on the room’s back wall, then, in Foucault’s terms, it revealed “that which resists it, deflects it, or disturbs it.” By this Steinberg meant that the mirror at the back of the painting showed painting’s unconscious.26 By way of explication, Steinberg alluded to the expansion of our understanding of “the role vision plays in human self-­definition” made by the painting.27 He extended Foucault’s insights in regard to Las Meninas to all painting: if this painting could assume a deep level of theoretical significance, then, using his approach, all painting—­even art history itself—­could be opened up. Importantly, the increasing discussion of and attention to visual culture and “the role of vision” predicted by Steinberg in his discussion of Foucault’s chapter characterized the discipline in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-­first century.28 In explaining his controversial method in Les Mots et les choses, Foucault said: “Serial history makes it possible to bring out different layers of events as it were, some being visible, even immediately knowable by the contemporaries, and then, beneath these events that form the froth of history, so to speak, there are other events that are invisible, imperceptible for the contemporaries, and are of a completely different form.”29 Alpers and Steinberg called attention to this deeper level of knowledge, beyond the painting’s surface, taking Foucault at his word in terms of his intentions. As I showed in the previous chapter, Foucault augmented the serial history of art with the anachronic possibilities of the individual painting object.

Manet, Magritte, and Fromanger Foucault wrote his next essays on painting over roughly a decade, moving chronologically from Velázquez to the later essays on Édouard Manet and René Magritte, known by art historians as the “monographic” treatment of works by one master. In November 1967, just after the protracted publication of Les Mots et les choses (which concluded with the last-­minute insertion of the chapter on Las Meninas) and coincident with The Archaeology of Knowledge, completed less than two years later, Foucault proposed a book on the French Impressionist Manet, which he provisionally called Le Noir et la couleur (Black and Color).30 Although he never completed the book, the number of lectures that Foucault gave on Manet between late 1967

30  Systems of Thought

and 1971 in Japan, Italy, Tunisia, and Montreal attests to his ongoing interest in the project. The final lecture on Manet, called “La Peinture de Manet,” was delivered in Tunis on May 27, 1971. It survived in audio form and has now been transcribed and published in French and, more recently, in English.31 Given the history of this text, we must assume that the surviving lecture presents the results of a serious and durational investigation of Manet’s contribution to the history of painting, not simply a one-­off and half-­baked attempt at understanding a canonical French artist, as some commentators have alleged. Next, the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte came to Foucault’s attention because he had written to the philosopher immediately after the publication of Les Mots et les choses. It should also be noted that Magritte had been an artist of great interest to Lacan in the 1960s, and, as I show in chapter 5, he had been “resuscitated” in art circles in Paris during those years, bringing him to the attention of a new generation of French critics. In the correspondence with Foucault, the artist expressed the priority of his own, much earlier thinking about the relationships between words and things, Foucault’s topic in Les Mots et les choses. He pointed out to Foucault that he had already published an essay called “Les Mots et les images” in 1929 in La Révolution Surréaliste (Figure 1), which had appeared in English in 1965 with the title “Words and Things.”32 The first letter from Magritte is dated May 23, 1966. Just after the artist’s death in June 1967, Foucault published his review of Panofsky’s writings, discussed above, using the title “Les Mots et les images.”33 We can see that Magritte’s letters evidently caused the philosopher to observe just how much thinking about words, things, and images had occurred prior to his own book with that title. From Foucault’s point of view, no one “owned” the problem of words and images, despite Magritte’s claims to the contrary. Soon after Magritte’s death, Foucault published an article on him in a French periodical, which he titled “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe) after a word and image painting by the artist sometimes called by that title (Plate 4).34 Significantly, the essay was translated into English in 1976 in the first issue of October, a new American journal on contemporary art, which explains how the Magritte essay became the second-­best known of Foucault’s writing on painting in the Anglo-­A merican context.35 In 1973, when Foucault published the illustrated book also titled Ceci n’est pas une pipe, he included the two letters from Magritte.36 The Publisher’s Note in the front matter of The Order of Things (1970) establishes the trajectory of Foucault’s thinking about Magritte and painting, because it ap-

Systems of Thought  31

Figure 1. René Magritte, “Les Mots et les images,” in La Révolution Surréaliste 5, no. 12

(December 15, 1929): 32–­33. Photograph by Johnathan Mizikar. The Museum of Modern Art. Digital image copyright The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Copyright 2016 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

peared in the midst of his writing about the artist. It also primed the reception by the English-­speaking audience for the wordplay found in October’s publication of “This Is Not a Pipe.” The publisher explained that the title Les Mots et les choses had been changed for the English edition, because there already existed two other books called Words and Things, known by the literal translation of the French title.37 Ironically, there existed in French earlier books titled L’ordre des choses, necessitating the French title Les Mots et les choses used first by Foucault.38 The books in English concerned the philosophy of language: Words and Things (1958), by Roger William Brown, and Words and Things: A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology (1959), by Ernest Gellner. So, too, Foucault had published his review of

32  Systems of Thought

Panofsky ostentatiously appropriating the title and substituting for “choses” the word images. As I show, the ambiguities of translation and historical priority raised by the title of his book in both the French and the English editions appealed to the philosopher. Les Mots et les choses concerned an investigation of language. The essay and book Ceci n’est pas une pipe concerned the problem of how images change the meaning of language in the word and image paintings by Magritte. It has become a sort of truism in Foucault studies that the philosopher wrote with an unusual gift for linguistic expression and that his titles were chosen with considerable attention to wordplay and irony.39 I argue in the chapter on Magritte that the very issue of the multiplicity of versions of and variations on the painting titled The Treachery of Images—­but sometimes incorrectly known by its inscription “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”—­figured prominently in Foucault’s interpretation of the artist’s entire work. Magritte’s multiple images of pipes provided Foucault with more than a title for his essay and book, with more than an opportunity for wordplay on images with words. The Magritte paintings provided him with the extensive visual material necessary to pursue his central concern of the time with language and representation, and to bring those concerns together in an investigation of painting. Foucault’s final lengthy consideration of painting concerned Gérard Fromanger. Very much alive at the time this book was written, Fromanger was an important member of the movement known as “narrative figuration,” and he was Foucault’s contemporary and ally in the Prison Reform Movement, on which Foucault had spoken at a lecture at Columbia University in 1975.40 The essay on Fromanger, “La Peinture photogénique” (“Photogenic Painting”), was written in 1975 as a catalog essay for a solo exhibition at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris.41 Foucault’s essay did not appear in English until 1999, more than twenty years after it was written and fifteen years after the philosopher’s death.42 While one might have expected Foucault to address the political alliance between Fromanger and himself over prison reform, his essay instead probed the significance of painting in relationship to the history of photography. In this manner, the philosopher somewhat overtly inserted both himself and the work of his comrade into the current debates over the so-­called end of painting and the rise of the photographic image.43 Foucault’s writings and interviews from circa 1968–­75 leave no doubt as to his interest in the impact of photography and photographs on the consideration of painting in his time.44 The Fromanger essay provides valuable evidence of the discrepancies between French-­and English-­speaking approaches to painting and photography in

Systems of Thought  33

the late 1970s, which must be seen as significant to Foucault’s point of view in this essay. Foucault’s partisan adherence at this time to an older and more European mode of “art photography” distinguishes him from the Anglo-­A merican views. Foucault’s later essay on the photographs of his contemporary and friend Duane Michals should also be considered in this light.45 Until the English publication of Foucault’s essay, his views on Fromanger had not been considered by Anglo-­A merican art historians together with the so-­called crisis in art said to have been brought about by Dada, pop art, and conceptualism. Each of these movements questioned the significance and status of painting in contemporary life. The debates on the status of painting in the 1970s and early 1980s had been centered in the English-­speaking cities of New York and London and concerned photography and performance. In contrast, Foucault’s concerns centered on the rise of pop imagery and the question of realism, or figuration, in the narrative mode in painting and photography. The publishing history of Foucault’s essay presents a time lag in the historiography of the understanding of these antipainting movements in the English-­speaking context. At the time that the essay was written, contemporary American critics and artists observed that the “dematerialization” of the art object resulted in the rise of new photographic and performance art practices.46 Foucault recognized that Fromanger and the European artists with whom he associated refused the conceptual, nonpainterly, and nonrepresentational direction of contemporary American and British art.47 While this position might have had legs in France in 1978, it did not play in the Anglo-­A merican context. In retrospect, it can be seen that the position in support of figurative painting that Foucault took in his essay on Fromanger led, in part, to the critical aporia surrounding the work of the narrative figuration artists in the English-­speaking world, which has only just begun to be addressed by art historians.48 In 1999 the republication of Foucault’s essay on Fromanger in French with facing page translation in English, together with the essay on the same artist by Deleuze, explicitly brought Foucault’s writing on painting into a literal alignment with the latter’s interpretation of Fromanger’s “visuality.” As I have shown, Deleuze favored his own views on painting as a form of “visibility” in his book on Foucault.49 In the introduction, I discussed at greater length how Deleuze and Foucault might differ on their views of painting, and their essays on Fromanger exemplify to some extent those differences, although at the time of writing the three were together in the Prison Reform Movement. The unintended effect—­but the effect nonetheless—­of

34  Systems of Thought

this two-­author edition of essays on Fromanger has been the effacement of Foucault’s views on painting expressed there in favor of Deleuze’s interpretation. The art historians Alpers, Steinberg, and Damisch observed a deeper, visual analysis in Foucault’s approach to Las Meninas, the best known of his writings on art. Nonetheless, the more common disciplinary methods of pictorial description provided by art history have not been much noticed in Foucault’s other writing on painting because in their very commonplaceness they have prevented commentators from observing the originality of Foucault’s interpretations and from its philosophical significance in his work. As master of these art historical methods, Foucault diverted critics from an understanding of the philosophical importance that he placed on painting in particular. In being so diverted, these critics have in some sense fulfilled Foucault’s view that the pleasures offered by painting revert to the individual viewer. According to Foucault, discourse hides its operations in discourse and in the institutions constructed by and through it. Following Foucault on this point, one could say that painting hides its operations in its pleasures—­including visual mimesis and figuration—­a nd in the institutions of art where it is found, including aesthetics and art history.

The Language of Painting and Translation The first sentence of Foucault’s chapter on Las Meninas positions the relationship of the painter to his painting: “The painter is standing a little back from his canvas” (“Le peintre est légèrement en retrait du tableau”).50 Here the sound of the words in French play between le peintre (the painter) and la peinture (painting) and force a dissonance with le tableau (the painting). They signal the knot of meanings around and through which Foucault theorized painting. What lies between the subjects of the painter (le peintre), painting (la peinture), and the painting (le tableau)? This was the essential question for Foucault in all his writings on painting: “Between the fine point of the brush and the steely gaze, the scene is about to yield up its volume” (“Entre la fine pointe du pinceau et l’acier dur regard, le spectacle va libérer son volume”).51 In a 1962 essay, “The Name of the Father,” Foucault separated the history of painting in modernity from earlier periods. He distinguished the more recent history of painting as dependent on a transformed concept of the artist. Foucault recognized that an older art history, such as that represented in Vasari’s Lives of

Systems of Thought  35

the artists, had relied on “the evocation of an immemorial past . . . according to an ordained and ritual order,” with the artist at the center.52 Foucault argued that this older conception of the “heroic artist” changed with modernity—­from an earlier one that viewed the artist as the genius in “Platonic ecstasy” to one where the artist identified with the work that “makes him different—­from all those who remain silent.”53 According to Foucault, the psychology of this emergent artist of modernity became the focus of art history and served others as “an index of their [own] separation, negation, and culture” from their earlier state of unity.54 Foucault understands the modern artist as being in a “subterranean relationship” with his own art—­a situation reflected in the very language used to speak about art.55 This idea of the modern artist, theorized briefly by Foucault in the “Father’s ‘No’” essay, expanded in the writings on painting that followed and concluded with the thoughts on Baudelaire’s artist in the essay on Enlightenment. If paintings and the painter stand apart, as Foucault argued, then they can reveal what nothing else can. The conceptualization is necessarily difficult here: To reflect the actual means and processes peculiar to painting, how does a “subterranean” message reveal itself? What are the methods of dissimulation of meanings and intentions that painting not only undertakes, but which the artist also exploits, in his or her role as the revealer of truth to the viewer? This question returns us to the issue of language and meaning in painting and to Merleau-­Ponty’s earlier approach to the phenomenology of painting as “tacit,” meaning that which is not openly expressed or stated but implied, understood, or inferred. In his influential essay of 1952, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” Merleau-­Ponty, Foucault’s teacher, claimed tacitness as a major characteristic or aspect of painting: “Let us begin by understanding that there is a tacit language, and that painting speaks in its own way.”56 The essay’s ironic title, with its juxtaposition of “voice” and “silence,” must have intrigued Foucault, for it indicates with admirable brevity the contradictions inherent in painting. Foucault adopted his teacher’s understanding of the ambiguities in and dissimulated structures of painting. The significance of painting lay not only on the surface, that is, in what you see depicted with pigments, lines, and shapes on the canvas, but also in what could be found beneath the surface, in the depths of the shadows or in the stretchers across which the linen—­le toile—­had been stretched. In this sense, one can understand the fascination that Las Meninas held for Foucault, with the turned canvas in the picture showing to the viewer what was hidden from view, that is, the depiction

36  Systems of Thought

of its other side: “And the canvas has its back turned to that spectator: he can see nothing of it but the reverse side, together with the huge frame on which it is stretched.”57 Foucault’s concern with the other side of painting—­its simultaneous visibility and invisibility—­occupies the first four pages of Les Mots et les choses. The dialectic between the visible and the invisible inherent in painting runs throughout Merleau-­Ponty’s later philosophy. It gave Foucault a particular purchase on his interpretation: “The tall, monotonous rectangle occupying the whole left portion of the real picture, and representing the back of the canvas within the picture, reconstitutes in the form of a surface the invisibility in depth of what the artist is observing: that space in which we are, and which we are.”58 The term painting in English is deceptive because it lacks the theoretical nuance and ironic potential inherent in the use of the two terms for painting in French: le tableau and la peinture, both of which Foucault exploited in the first sentence of Les Mots et les choses. In his investigation of the significance of the singular term painting in English, Damisch observed: “The fact that one and the same word may denote the product of painting and the material base on which it is placed may well make us wonder what relationship exists between what one might call the ‘operation’ of the painting with its external form, its ‘exterior’ and it substrate, if not its very substance.”59 For Damisch, the term painting in English furthers the tacit mystery that painting is. However, in the French language the operation and material aspects of painting signify to the listener or reader in a more exacting way. Le tableau—­the metonymic term for a painting—­provides in its concreteness a certain degree of assurance regarding the external form of a painting because the term can refer to “an object, a plane, a flat surface of wood or of canvas mounted on a frame, something like a table [i.e., un tableau], but one that is placed vertically, at a level and in such a way as to serve as the base for whatever one may wish to inscribe or display on it.”60 In English, the term easel painting comes closest to le tableau, but it does not cover the full range of meanings found in the French. As Damisch suggested, the two terms for painting in French place the discourse and action of painting, that is, la peinture, and the material object, that is, le tableau, in a relational position to each other, increasing the possibility of expressing the dialectical complexity of painting in theory. The nature of the relationship between the two terms depends on their respective situation and historical context and in each singular material object that presents itself as le tableau. Further nuancing the relationality of le tableau and la peinture, Damisch noted that the singular noun la peinture signifies the

Systems of Thought  37

idea, medium, or institution of painting, while the plural noun les peintures are the individual pictures collected by museums, galleries, or individuals. Although Damisch does not mention it, the gendering of the two terms for painting in French also deserves attention: the masculine, material substance of le tableau as opposed to the feminine, operational sense of la peinture. This opposition may be extended allegorically as well, because in the history of Italian art the idea of Painting, or La Pittura, was depicted as a female figure, making it the ideal allusion or referent for the self-­portrait of a woman artist. For example, in the picture by Artemisia Gentileschi (London, Royal Collection), the figure holding the brush literally appears to meld with the material of the canvas on which she paints. La Pittura—­which has the same meaning in Italian as la peinture—­materializes as le tableau (Plate 5). The feminine becomes the masculine because painting transforms. To express this in English, as in “Painting becomes the painting,” is neither linguistically or theoretically satisfactory, for the phrase lacks the critical dimensions of the nomenclature available in French. In his writings on painting, Foucault capitalizes on this terminology in relation to the subjectivation of the viewer by the painter and the painting, often referring to the operation of entrapment that painting performs.61 For example, in his analysis of the representation of the light from the window at the right of the picture of Las Meninas, he writes: “As soon as they place the spectator in the field of their gaze, the painter’s eyes seize hold of him, force him to enter the picture, assign him a place at once privileged and inescapable, levy their luminous and visible tribute from him, and project it upon the inaccessible surface of the canvas with the picture. He sees his invisibility made visible to the painter and transposed into an image forever invisible to himself.”62 These linguistic variations in painting available in French to art theory presented Foucault with numerous occasions for punning and wordplay using the terminology of painting. I have already explored some of these in the linguistic variations on words, things, and images. Even the title Les Mots et les choses signaled a play between language as a system, as in painting (la peinture), and material objects or things, as in paintings (les tableaux or des peintures). Foucault understood that the linguistic trickery intrinsic to painting related also to the difficulties presented to the interpreter who could not “fix” a stable subject. Thus painting succeeded through “a subtle system of feints” (“un système subtil d’esquives”) that had to be recognized and then described, perhaps, as others have suggested, using a painterly language.63 The artist’s negative presence—­a s someone who stood apart from his

38  Systems of Thought

fellow men—­demanded that the interpreter follow his “indirect and elusive path.”64 In the long paragraph exposing the feints of Velázquez in Las Meninas, Foucault moved through the vocabulary on painting with an impressive facility: His dark (sombre) torso and bright face (son visage clair) are half-­way between the visible and the invisible: emerging from that canvas (cette toile) beyond our view, he moves into our gaze (nos yeux); but when, in a moment, he makes a step to the right, removing himself from our gaze (nos regards), he will be standing exactly in front of the canvas (la toile) he is painting (peindre); he will enter that region where his painting (son tableau), neglected for an instant, will, for him, become visible once more, free of shadow [or darkness] (ombre) and free of tacitness.65

Attentiveness to the finely tuned linguistic matters present in Foucault’s writing on painting yields much to the close reader, particularly because the author sought in both the activity of painting and the paintings themselves a way to somehow move between metaphysical considerations and historical ones, or between reality, aesthetics, and ethics. The terminology of painting within the aims of Foucault’s approach to it has not been examined to any significant extent until now, but it is clear that he would have known this specialized language from the art theory of the Renaissance on.66 I am suggesting that Foucault’s approach to la peinture and to le tableau in the analysis of painting was founded on a preestablished discursive tradition. The first extant treatise on painting, by Leon Battista Alberti, appeared both in Latin and in the Tuscan vernacular in 1435. Alberti concerned himself with the precise definition of terms for the practice and theory of painting throughout his book, consistently comparing it to linguistic discourse, insisting that the acquisition of the ABCs of painting—­its methods and materials—­must precede the use of “whole words.”67 So, too, in Les Mots et les choses Foucault placed the chapter on painting before “The Prose of the World,” a chapter on language. The issue of the terminology of painting, then, begins with translation, first between the language of the scholar and the language of the painter—­between Latin and the vernacular—­and later, as Damisch had put it, between the operations of painting and its material description.68 Foucault’s understanding of the importance of the linguistic aspects of the theory of painting that I have discussed thus far accorded to an extraordinary extent with the views on painting expressed by the slightly younger Louis Marin (1931–­1992).

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Importantly, Marin’s essays on semiology that Foucault found so compelling systematically refuted Panofsky’s views on iconology. Marin had been trained as a literary historian, with an important and often-­cited thesis Logique de Port-­Royal (1973), which analyzed the idea of linguistic representation in the classical age, a subject close to Foucault’s own interests.69 In his earlier essays, however, Marin restricted himself to the problems of “reading” un tableau. In 1969 he published two important essays on the terminology of painting: “Eléments de sémiologie picturale” (“Elements of a Pictorial Semiology”) and “Comment lire un tableau?” (“How to Read a Painting”).70 That neither essay had much influence in Anglo-­A merican art history can be explained by the dominance of the Panofskian methods regarding the language of symbols at the time. In these essays, Marin may have been influenced by Les Mots et les choses and the article on Magritte. On the other hand, Marin and Foucault addressed similar problems concerning painting at the same time, in part certainly because of the influence of Merleau-­Ponty. The issue of the priority of influence is surely a moot one. Like Merleau-­Ponty, both men considered painting “a world,” because every picture contained within it all that was necessary for its “effects.” Connected to this sense of the painting’s completeness, Marin wrote: “The world and culture are in this tableau and all of painting (la peinture); and by that is affirmed the absolute autonomy of the pictorial order in this tableau.”71 Marin recognized that this absolute autonomy posited for the tableau put his preferred method of reading a painting semiologically at risk.72 The art historian Pierre Francastel had articulated the problem as one of difference as early as 1956: “In art there are material and intellectual techniques and, in effect, one does not observe any difference between the form particular to the techniques of art and the form equally particular to other human techniques.” 73 However, like Merleau-­Ponty and Foucault, Marin found painting to be the practice in which the operations of a visual language could best be observed and analyzed. Thus Marin regarded painting as special in the category art because it provided the interpreter with the location where pictorial semiology could be best understood and applied.74 He proposed: The pictorial object is, therefore, that figurative text in which the visible and the readable intertwine, one with the other, according to a continual weaving, the analysis of which must be able to distinguish and count the threads, pick out their knots and specific natures, and—­thanks to language—­briefly articulate the ground without tearing the canvas.75

40  Systems of Thought

Because Marin wanted to distinguish the distinctive semiology of painting, he posited le tableau as a “figurative object” (“un objet figurative”), which he opposed to “the figure in the text” (“la figure dans le texte”).76 This view and the terms used to explain it resonate with Foucault’s criticism of Panofsky. Likewise, in his later book on clouds, Damisch argued that this motif in painting operated at the border between a figurative object and the figure in the text, thereby bringing into visibility the very issue of the visible itself.77 The most valuable contribution of Marin’s semiology of painting to our understanding of Foucault comes in his discussion of the referent in the picture.78 Marin stated that the referent is not the objective referent from the actual world, for example, the thing referred to is not an object of the world but the tableau itself. The entire tableau is thus a referent, which is also the pictorial artifact. But the tableau is also a designator, in which the designated, that is, the depicted form, is the pictorial instance that contains it. In this complex thinking-­through of the function of the tableau as referent, designator, and material thing or pictorial instance, Marin makes clear the significance of the vacillation between the theory of painting, that is, la peinture, and a particular tableau, which Foucault had also addressed.

Conclusion My investigation of French art history and theory in the 1960s and 1970s has emphasized the centrality of the language of painting—­including terminology and semiology. This focus on painting and its linguistic aspects separated French art history from the dominant Anglo-­A merican art historical approaches to art and theory. In this, it must be said that Marin’s arguments, gained from his semiological analysis of le tableau, rested in the main on mimetic or representational painting from the classical age of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As I show in the following chapters, Foucault also focused on representational painting even when he explored modernity. Marin’s semiological approach showed its flaws most obviously in his own analyses of abstract paintings by Paul Klee and others, as Damisch realized when he addressed the problem of relationality in nonrepresentational work.79 I have argued here that the very terminology of the practice made it possible for painting in France to remain figurative and vital, for it to hold on to its status as a theoretical object, or philosophy, well into the late twentieth century. In the Anglo-­A merican context, however, painting came under attack in these same

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years, and not for linguistic reasons alone. The historiography of conceptual art practices in the United States and Great Britain reveals that the language–­visual problematic found expression through those modalities, rather than through the pictorial and figurative means so firmly established in France. Both the strengths and the weaknesses of each critical tradition for the history of art should be acknowledged here. The dialectical possibilities posed by the terminology of painting in French (and in the precedent Italian discourse on art) led Foucault to explore its ironic status in the contemporary world. They led Marin to press on semiological methods of analysis that could supersede the Germanic approaches to iconography. Damisch came to probe the very foundation of visuality imposed on the tradition by the figure, and later by perspective. Foucault shared with contemporary French philosophers and art historians alike a skeptical approach to the given and the depicted in the picture. His investigation of Las Meninas exemplifies this skepticism. Unlike the situation in America, the problem of painting in post–­World War II France was not one of depiction or realism; therefore the turn to abstraction did not resolve anything about it. Foucault’s “apprehensive conception” of the spatialization of the picture in modernity—­a view also found in Francastel’s writing—­oriented him toward the figure in a mimetic regime of representation, but the methods of iconology that dominated the Anglo-­ American art history of the day provided no solution for him.80 Largely because of Merleau-­Ponty, French philosophy and art history since the 1950s had insisted on the material integrity of painting, which included its historical existence both as object and as a potential philosophical system. Francastel’s words help here: art did not “allude to or produce more or less arbitrary signs constituting a completely intellectual and imaginary system outside of man and exterior to him.”81 In the following chapters I show how these French insights into art theory could be augmented by Foucault’s writings on painting.

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CHAPTER TWO

The Place of Painting Velázquez’s Las Meninas

In the previous two chapters I emphasized the priority of Foucault’s analysis of Las Meninas for an understanding of how painting concerns his larger philosophical project and the history of art. Here I want to draw on that material and my earlier research to explore specific aspects of the painting of 1656 by Velázquez that relate to Foucault’s interpretation of it as knowledge (savoir) itself, a point he made about painting in general in The Archaeology of Knowledge.1 Significantly, this assessment of the painting was not original to Foucault. It came directly from the biography of the artist by the seventeenth-­century Spaniard Antonio Palomino. The biographer ventriloquized the words of the contemporary painter Luca Giordano, who called Las Meninas “the Theology of Painting.”2 Palomino explained: “By which he meant that just as Theology is the highest among the branches of knowledge, so was that picture the best there was in Painting.”3 Thus the first chapter of Les Mots et les choses consisted of an extended analysis of a painting considered canonical in the history of art precisely because of its status as knowledge. The attraction to the philosopher can be surmised. Furthermore, according to Foucault, his distinctive “archaeological” method allowed others to see painting as knowledge. Using this method, Foucault intended to challenge the two ways that painting had been theorized previously: “Painting is not a pure vision that must be transcribed into the materiality of space; nor is it a naked gesture whose silent and eternally empty meanings must be freed from subsequent interpretations.”4 For Foucault, interpreting Las Meninas using his archaeological method resolved these long-­standing problems with painting and enabled it to be understood as a particular kind of visual practice. He said that rather than being impeded by vision and visual “techniques and effects,” painting used these to convey knowledge, as his analysis of Las Meninas meant to show.5 In his book on Foucault, Deleuze argued that the philosopher’s concept of visibilities pertained directly to “his conception of thought in general.”6 If this is so,

44  The Place of Painting

the chapter on Las Meninas was fundamental to that judgment. Foucault addressed the painting not simply as an object in the history of art but as a demonstration of the potential of the visible to an understanding of the world represented and constructed by perceptible form. With this demonstrative potential of the visual in mind, the chapter should not be read as a straightforward visual analysis whose intent is to invoke the object analyzed through linguistic description, as one would expect of much art-­history writing. Deleuze maintained that Foucault’s use of paintings in his work allowed him to think beyond the material object and its history to fundamental physical, cognitive, psychological, and social questions that concerned his philosophy: “We are not asking only about the objects with which we begin, the qualities we follow and the state of things in which we are located (a perceptible corpus), but also how can we extract visibilities from these objects, qualities and things, how do these visibilities shimmer and gleam and under what light, and how does this light gather on the stratum? Furthermore, what are the variable subject-­positions of these visibilities? Who occupies and sees them?” 7

The Threshold of Painting The preface to Les Mots et les choses provides a key to how Foucault understood the function of the painting analyzed here. Painting operates in what he called the “middle region” between what we think we see and what we think we know.8 He explained this space in both temporal and formal terms: “between the already ‘encoded’ eye and reflexive knowledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself: it is here that it appears, according to the culture and the age in question, continuous and graduated or discontinuous and piecemeal, linked to space or constituted anew at each instant by the driving force of time, related to a series of variables or defined by separate systems of coherences, composed of resemblances which are either successive or corresponding, organized around increasing differences, etc.”9 Throughout the chapter, the analysis of Las Meninas vacillates between the temporal and the formal aspects that Foucault finds in the painting, almost as if he needed to keep reestablishing the space or threshold that the painting occupied between the two ways of seeing. Assuming we can find it, this “middle region” establishes a place of critique—­Foucault calls it experience—­so that we can have “the pure experience of order and of its modes of being.”10 The book’s stated goal

The Place of Painting  45

is “to analyse that experience,” to truly understand that place, which also provides insight into the operations of painting in history.11 In a study that proposed its aims metaphorically and as simultaneously temporal and formal, the material object of a painting emerged as ideal for locating the “middle region” Foucault sought to uncover. So, too, archaeology, as he insisted, provided the ideal method for its description.12 Thus Las Meninas provides both a place and a means of understanding “the epistemological field” because, according to Foucault, vision and the visible are major themes in it.13 Might this be interpreted as a sort of tautology on the philosopher’s part, that is, to use the thing and its characteristics to explain the thing itself? There is enough evidence in the language of the preface to indicate that Foucault could have found himself in the midst of such a dilemma. The twists and turns in the first chapter between temporalities, formal aspects related to perspective, and different subjectivities may also signal the difficulties Foucault faced between the painting and an explanation of its knowledge-­bearing existence. On the other hand, perhaps the painting—­as historical and visual artifact—­helped him to expose the dilemmas inherent in his method and aims, already written into the study of language that followed the preface and first chapter of Les Mots et les choses. When Foucault described his archaeological method in concrete terms as “addressing itself to the general space of knowledge, to its configurations, and to the mode of being of the things that appear in it,” the use-­value of a painting object to his project emerges clearly.14 This painting, particularly the mirror depicted in it, also contributed to his stated goal of “breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the places with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse an age-­old distinction between the Same and the Other.”15 With this goal for the book in mind, we can understand that Foucault’s method of analyzing the picture led him to reconsider the roles played by the primary subjects involved in the interpretation of all figurative paintings, including Las Meninas: the viewer, the artist, and those beings depicted on the canvas. In the preface, Foucault said that the archaeological method allowed him “to circumscribe the threshold of a new positivity.”16 This is a temporal point: Las Meninas existed within the chronological account of art history from the Renaissance to the modern period. In its location at the threshold, this painting allowed Foucault to see what painting as representation had been and what it would become. The

46  The Place of Painting

painting established “the representation as it were, of Classical representation, and the definition of the space it opens up to us.”17 In Foucault’s chronological thinking, the classical age stood in between the earlier Renaissance when, as he had said of Bosch’s painting of St. Anthony in Lisbon, representation had held things together in a coherent whole, and the modern age, when content evacuated into “pure form.”18 Las Meninas showed something by virtue of its exact location in seventeenth-­century European history. Importantly, Foucault used the threshold metaphor a second time in the book to discuss the figure of the painter depicted in Las Meninas: “As though the painter could not at the same time be seen on the picture where he is represented and also see that upon which he is representing something. He rules at the threshold of those two incompatible visibilities.”19 Like the painter, Foucault as interpreter moves back and forth between what is represented and what is not represented in order to pre­ sent the significance of painting as a system of knowledge. In the second chapter of the book Foucault explained this “sort of natural twinship existing in things” in the following manner: “His inner sky may remain autonomous and depend only upon itself, but on condition that by means of his wisdom, which is also knowledge, he comes to resemble the order of the world.”20 In Foucault’s analysis of Las Meninas the placement of the painter and the canvas is therefore interdependent in terms of the system, or ordering, of visual knowledge. The philosopher saw that in the picture Velázquez depicted himself as in control of two regimes of representation: he represents and he is represented as a self-­portrait. Foucault signaled the importance of the painter and the canvas to his argument in the first sentence: “The painter is standing a little back from his canvas” (“Le peintre est légèrement en retrait du tableau”).21 The “neutral centre of this oscillation,” as Foucault called it, between painter and painting holds a theoretical significance that concerned Foucault for a large part of the first chapter.22

Halfway between the Visible and the Invisible Who is this unnamed painter of the first sentence? On the one hand, the viewer “knows” him well as the artist Diego Velázquez, who painted a masterpiece. We also “know” him in another sense, because we see him portrayed before us in the form of a self-­portrait in his painting. But, because Foucault’s method concerned precisely the issue of visual knowledge, what and how precisely does painting allow

The Place of Painting  47

us to know beyond what is known so well? First and foremost, just as he appears at the beginning of the chapter, by virtue of “knowing” him so well, this Old Master masks the significance of meaning that Foucault wanted to find. Therefore, his name does not come up until later in the chapter because, as Foucault reiterated, the name of the Master is not the point: “And the proper name, in this particular context, is merely an artifice: it gives us a finger to point with . . . one must erase those proper names and preserve the infinity of the task.”23 Without the artist’s name as designator, the viewer must see on his or her own. This point is also a historiographical one: the archaeology of painting according to Foucault rejected the long-­standing centrality in the history of art of the artist’s personality and style as the primary means of understanding the significance of painting because, without them, something else could be understood about a painting. To put it using Foucault’s own words, he used the painting of Las Meninas to understand the function of painting without the distraction of the “ideological product” of the named artist.24 In the Foreword to the English edition, Foucault addressed the point explicitly. Moreover, he rejected not only the artist’s primacy but also a method that gave the viewer priority: If there is one approach that I do reject, however, it is that (one might call it, broadly speaking, the phenomenological approach) which gives absolute priority to the observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity—­which, in short, leads to a transcendental consciousness. It seems to me that the historical analysis of scientific discourse should not, in the last resort, be subject to a theory of the knowing subject, but rather to a theory of discursive practice.25

Nonetheless, however much his is an “art history without names,” the figure of the painter in the picture plays a major role throughout Foucault’s text.26 For example: “The painter is looking, his face turned slightly and his head leaning towards one shoulder. He is staring at a point to which, even though it is invisible, we, the spectators, can easily assign an object, since it is we, ourselves, who are that point: our bodies, our faces, our eyes.27 The reader is left to conclude that Foucault’s archaeological method seeks to interpret the painting while preserving the importance of the artist to the picture in which he is depicted. The position taken by the artist of standing back from the canvas and looking allowed Foucault to understand the reciprocal roles of the viewer and the painter

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in the visual regime of the painting. We are, so to speak, enfolded into the artist’s perspective. In his gesture of lifting the brush from the canvas that we cannot see, Foucault suggests that we are made aware of this simultaneous positionality: “Between the fine point of the brush and the steely gaze, the scene is about to yield up its volume.”28 So, too, the organ of vision, the eyes and the glances they make, plays a major role in Foucault’s analysis. He wrote: “From the eyes of the painter to what he is observing there runs a compelling line that we, the onlookers, have no power of evading. . . . this dotted line reaches out to us ineluctably, and links us to the representation of the picture.”29 The painter takes us into the painting’s contents and forms. The chapter’s first four pages analyze the complex interchanges of gazes between those depicted in the picture and their effects on the viewer. Yet, in “standing a little back,” both painter and viewer also assume a position of irony toward the picture and toward themselves. Foucault termed the canvas that is visible only from the back “ironic.”30 The depicted canvas and its ostensible subject have been denied to view, thereby fulfilling a common definition of irony as that which conceals rather than shows, and underlining the dialectic in painting between visibility and invisibility, a theme of great interest to Foucault for the entire essay. Foucault related the verso, or backside, of the canvas to “the other side of a psyche.”31 Like the unconscious, it functions in the painting as a whole as “the double that until now has been denied us.”32 In this phrase, we understand that Foucault alludes to the prior history of art, when paintings were always shown and showed themselves in representations from the “right” side; we never saw the other side of painting until now. Therefore, the theoretical significance of Las Meninas, according to Foucault, lies in the visibility of what normally would be invisible. Foucault’s approach to a painting as “the other side of a psyche” suggests awareness on his part of Lacan’s use of the concept of anamorphosis, a visual technique or strategy of representation related to perspective that had been perfected in the era that Velázquez painted Las Meninas.33 In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Seminar XI of 1964, Lacan used paintings to exemplify the bipolar action of “I see myself seeing” (je me vois me voir), which he understood to be “the privilege of the subject.”34 These words echo in Foucault’s text: “We are observing ourselves being observed by the painter, and made visible to his eyes by the same light that enables us to see him.”35 Further, Foucault drew on Lacan’s psychoanalytic view of anamorphosis in his understanding of the turned canvas in Las Meninas. Anamorphosis plays an exemplary role in Lacan’s idea of perception because it re-

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veals “how, in the perspective of the unconscious, we can situate the conscious.”36 Thus it has everything to do with what we think we know because we see, which was also Foucault’s concern, as I explained above. Lacan opposed anamorphosis, which he established as the view from the unconscious, to phenomenological viewing, which he equated with the operation of consciousness. Lacan used paintings that exhibited anamorphosis in his investigation of the unconscious because they gave an alternative perspective to what we think we know because we see. Lacan argued, somewhat perversely, against the view “that perception is not in me, that it is with the objects that perception apprehends.”37 The anamorphic perspective that painting could espouse established the privilege of every viewing subject over the object. He explained: “The privilege of the subject seemed to be established here with this reflexive and bipolar relation, that does no more than, as long as I see, show me my representations appearing to myself.”38 So, too, in the visible reverse side of the canvas—­its anamorphic perspective—­and in the exchange of glances between viewer and artist, Foucault established the reflexive position of subjectivity for understanding painting. The knowledge that that painting offered had everything to do with the self. This relationship between the subjects in the painting and the viewer lodged in Foucault’s interpretation in issues of visibility, which returned at the end of Foucault’s chapter in the analysis of the mirror depicted in the picture behind the turned canvas, on the back wall.

The Invisibility of What One Sees In Foucault’s analysis of Las Meninas the mirror functions to disorient the viewer’s subjectivity by questioning the perspective given by it. It appears to give access to what the painter “sees” and to what we, as viewers, cannot see. Foucault explained this complex relay of visibility and invisibility in the following manner: the painter (who gazes out of the picture) sees the actual king and queen of Spain who are simultaneously seen by us as reflections in the mirror-­depiction (which he cannot see but which he painted). This is a double invisibility made visible. So, too, the king and queen ostensibly see the painter, and we who assume their position also see the painting or, better, the picture. This is an oscillation between invisibility (the king and queen) and visibility (we see the picture). Foucault explained further: that whereas the mirror is “an effect of composition peculiar to the painting,” the idea that we look at pictures is “the law” of pictures themselves, that is, as a particular

50  The Place of Painting

kind of object they are meant to be looked at. Both in the specific instance of this painting and in the general law of painting, the mirror functions to bring two invisibilities together: “Here, the action of representation consists in bringing one of these two forms of invisibility into the place of the other, in an unstable superimposition—­and in rendering them both, at the same moment, at the other extremity of the picture—­at that pole which is the very height of its representation: that of a reflected depth in the far recess of the painting’s depth.”39 For these reasons having to do with what the mirror shows about what we see and do not see, Foucault says the mirror “provides a metathesis of visibility that affects both the space represented in the picture and its nature as representation.”40 But what about the actual painted representation of the mirror on the wall of the room, in all its blurriness and imprecision, such that art historians have argued about whether the reflection is this or that portrait of the king and queen; whether it is positioned and sized correctly to even offer an accurate reflection of them? Should not “a metathesis of visibility” show things or manifest its thesis more clearly than this mirror does? For Foucault, this blurred and half-­length double portrait allowed for a fuller understanding of the significance of painting’s ability to provide a perspective on knowledge precisely because of its compromised visual status. For Foucault, “disprized works,” incomplete pictures, and infelicitous images provide more conscious, active forms of engagement on the part of the viewer such that an awareness of the self in the role as viewer of the aesthetic object of the painting makes one more readily available to ethical and political choices.41 In the essays on painting that followed Les Mots et les choses, Foucault often chose to focus on the most difficult of paintings to interpret, the most impenetrable of visual signs or images. The visual problems with the very image of the mirror that is so central to Foucault’s points about visibility in his chapter must be considered exactly what attracted him to it. It made, so to speak, his argument about painting as knowledge. This is the “essential void,” at the center of “painting as representation,” that allows us to understand the key point about the modern subject who is intimated as lurking in this picture: that subject is disappearing before our very eyes, as Foucault states both at the end of this chapter and at the conclusion of the book: “This very subject—­which is the same—­has been elided. And representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure

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form.”42 It is a painting that allows us to know of that disappearance and to know him or the subject at the very moment of occlusion.

Conclusions In the chapter on Las Meninas, Foucault posited that the convergence of the positions of the subjects portrayed in the painting with the operations of perspective and reflection given by the painting allowed the viewer to see something potentially transformative. It also marked a moment of historical transition between ways of seeing and representing. Foucault had come to painting following Merleau-­Ponty’s investigation of it in the essays “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945), “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (1952), and “Eye and Mind” (1960). Merleau-­Ponty’s posthumous publication in 1964 of The Visible and the Invisible also factored into Foucault’s thinking about painting, as one of the major topics addressed in Les Mots et les choses. However, as a result of his archaeological method, Foucault’s understanding of painting necessarily differed from the metaphysical views maintained by his teacher. Nonetheless, he responded to an overt challenge having to do with history that Merleau-­Ponty presented in his last essay on painting. The older philosopher insisted that his lack of familiarity with historical methods would not allow him to legitimately approach the “labor” of a “philosophical meditation” on painting.43 We can assume that Foucault understood the challenge as twofold: to show where painting’s philosophical status could be located concretely in history; and to demonstrate how a history of painting could be deemed significant to philosophy. In turning to an analysis of Las Meninas, Foucault declared the significance of painting—­and all that its practice, techniques, and effects entailed—­for an understanding of the modern subject, the subject just coming into view in 1656. His subsequent examinations of the meaning of painting from the modern period to his own time, which I discuss in the following chapters, indicate both the continuation of Foucault’s investment in a historical approach and the seriousness of painting in his overall philosophical project.

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CHAPTER THREE The Limits of Irony Manet’s Painting

When Foucault called the turned painting depicted in Las Meninas the “ironic canvas,” he meant that the canvas was in an ironic position to itself as painting.1 The back of the painting in the painting ostentatiously concealed that which was meant to be revealed. Foucault was led to an appreciation of the ironic position required for the interpretation of painting as knowledge by a painting itself. The significance of Édouard Manet’s place in the history of painting as knowledge had occurred to Foucault as early as 1964, when he wrote that Manet undertook to explore “the new and substantial relationship of painting to itself.”2 This new self-­referentiality of painting can be considered a sign of modernity: the discussion of Manet here coincided with remarks on Gustave Flaubert. According to Foucault, Manet made every painting a commentary on painting itself, a situation already predicted by the turned canvas in the picture by Velázquez, where painting began to depart from its former and traditional manner of showing itself as meaning. In Las Meninas we began with the painter: his brush poised above the invisible surface of the painting and the gaze of the artist in dialogue with the viewer. In the Manet lecture, Foucault began his chronological analysis with Music in the Tuileries Gardens (National Gallery, London), which also contains a self-­portrait of the artist (Plate 6).3 However, this figure holds no attributes of the painter’s craft. Dressed in his signature “very tall wide-­brimmed hat” and with his notably “elegant” beard, Manet located himself at the far left edge of the canvas, actually partially cut off from the pictorial space by the frame. Contrary to Velázquez—­located in the center of his picture—­Manet stands at the edge of the crowd he depicted, like a commentator in fancy dress introducing the narrative of modern urban life on display before him.4 As the art historian Carol Armstrong observed: “And thus, doubled by his monocled friend, the figure of Manet articulates a spectatorial rather than a producerly relationship to his world, and identifies lui-­même with its frame rather than its center, its edges and limits rather than its core.”5

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As his approach to Music in the Tuileries Gardens indicates, the connections between Foucault’s interpretation of the turned canvas in Las Meninas and Manet’s painting continued after the publication of Les Mots et les choses. The beginning of the lecture on Manet acknowledged that Foucault’s interest was both formal and historical: it was based on painting’s relationship to itself as “techniques and effects” and to the larger narrative of the history of art. In Foucault’s discourse, an integration of formal and historical analysis goes hand in hand with a chronological account of Manet’s paintings, a manner of proceeding familiar to art historians.6 Indeed, Foucault’s judgments about the artist had the ring of art historical authenticity: “What Manet made possible was all the painting after Impressionism, is all the painting of the twentieth century, is all the painting from which, in fact, contemporary art developed.” 7

The “Object Painting” In his study of the artist, Foucault sought to understand and to explain: what about Manet’s paintings as paintings had so radically altered the history of art? The answer to this question lay in the paintings themselves, a conclusion also not unfamiliar to the art historian. However, Foucault took great pains to distinguish with exactitude how painting about painting itself might be constituted by and revealed in the painting object, and to do so he invented a unique terminology, with signification that is difficult to convey in English. The terms le tableau-­objet and la peinture-­objet denoted Foucault’s sense of the contribution of Manet’s paintings to knowledge and, ultimately, to the history of art.8 Confusingly, the English translator of Foucault’s essay on Manet used the terms picture object and painting object, but these occlude rather than illuminate the meaning of Foucault’s inventive vocabulary because picture and painting do not signify in the same ways in English as le tableau and la peinture. I prefer to use the single term object painting to translate both le tableau-­objet and la peinture-­objet. For Foucault, the object painting signaled the meta-­space between painting as le tableau and painting as la peinture, that is, the special place of the object, painting. In the Manet essay, Foucault explicitly defines the space between le tableau-­objet and la peinture-­objet as “the elemental materials of the canvas,” which extend painting into theory.9 Foucault coined the term object painting (le tableau-­objet, la peinture-­objet) to discuss the works of Manet, but the philosophical concepts involved with the terms

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must be considered using a wider theoretical lens than his admittedly provisional lecture provides. I have already discussed the significance in French of the two terms le tableau and la peinture for understanding Foucault’s conceptualization of painting. His writing on painting has thus far suggested that the common conceptual slippage between le tableau and la peinture caused historians, with the important exceptions of Arasse and Damisch, to miss that the truth of painting for Foucault lay in the proposition of its “objectness,” a state not to be confused with either its traditional materiality or its predominate representability, both of which, however, redound to and at times appear to conflate with it. This is the point he made most clearly in the Manet lecture, where he further exploited the theoretical possibilities of the French vocabulary of painting by inventing a new terminology that could designate the artist’s originality in regard to the change in the viewer’s perception brought about by his paintings: “And Manet reinvents (or perhaps he invents) the ‘object painting,’ the painting as materiality, the painting as something coloured which clarifies an external light and in front of which, or about which, the viewer revolves.”10 In the lecture’s conclusion, Foucault conflated his own terms in the phrase le tableau-­objet, la peinture-­objet to indicate Manet’s contribution to “the fundamental condition” of painting, which eventually led to nonrepresentative painting—­something like the proleptic signification of “object painting” as pure painting.11 In a chapter of The Archaeology of Knowledge, “The Formation of Objects,” written around the same time as the Manet lecture, Foucault approached the inter­ related problems of objects and things. His writing in The Archaeology of Knowledge is prescriptive: it is time “to dispense with ‘things’” (les choses).12 Objects, on the other hand, can be defined only “by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance.”13 This statement related explicitly to Foucault’s intentions in The Order of Things, expressed retrospectively in the Foreword to the English edition: “In short, I tried to explore scientific discourse not from the point of view of the individuals who are speaking, nor from the point of view of the formal structures of what they are saying, but from the point of view of the rules that come into play in the very existence of such discourse.”14 Rules allow objects to be seen as such; correspondingly, terminologies such as le tableau and la peinture emerge as distinctive and important for the philosopher, because they designate the “formal structures” of the topic. Once their status as objects in the discourse “painting”

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emerges through interpretation, they are no longer merely things: paintings may be considered critically and understood as productions related to their surrounding discourse, which is historically situated. Foucault concluded the explication of his method in this way: “‘Words and things’ is the entirely serious title of a problem; it is the ironic title of a work that modifies its own form, displaces its own data, and reveals, at the end of the day a quite different task. A task that consists of not—­of no longer—­treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.”15 Here, in explaining the important connection between an object, its relationship to things, and the ironic approach necessary for understanding the theoretical significance of so doing, Foucault also signaled a relationship to the broader philosophical field known as language theory, which helps me here to elucidate his meaning of object painting in the Manet lecture. The groundbreaking essay “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages,” by the Polish mathematician Alfred Tarski, established the field of language theory in 1933.16 Tarski proposed a meta-­language, or the language of logic, that could be used to investigate an object language, which in French is le langage-­objet. Foucault explicitly appropriated and paralleled this term with le tableau-­objet and la peinture-­ objet, invented for the Manet lecture. My translation of the terms as “object painting” accepts the conversion to “object language” made in English for Tarski’s le langage-­objet. In so doing, I stress the formation of the rules of language theory that Foucault transposed into painting theory. In language theory, the classical idea of the object, as found in Descartes, no longer held. The object was not what is thrown out in front of the mind to be examined in its separateness and integrity. Instead, language theory explored how language itself operated to express or be considered adequate for an expression of truth. According to formalized propositional logic in philosophy, a meta-­language is a language used to talk about a natural language, that is, its object. This thinking about the operations of language suggested to Foucault a way to address painting. We might imagine that he naturally turned to the self-­portrayals of Velázquez and Manet, who stand back or apart from their object paintings, in order to express to the interpreter the idea of a meta-­painting with which to define the natural, or traditional, language of painting. With this observation, I also raise the significance of the dialectic of the subject with the object painting, suggested in my discussion of the Las Meninas chapter. In the Manet lecture, that subjective interaction that the object painting allows follows from the

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ironic position of the painter of modern life to it, the object painting. Recognized as embedded in painting itself, the painter’s subjectivity may propose to the viewer the truth about painting. Foucault’s writing about object paintings in the Manet lecture was not fully developed; these unfinished thoughts clearly had ties to his earlier chapter on Las Meninas and to the coincident thinking through of his methodology in The Archaeology of Knowledge. In art history, the formalist approach that Foucault used to interpret light, shadows, and color in Manet’s paintings entailed the presumption of a historical context or situation for and from which certain forms emerge and can be identified.17 Foucault’s use of a formalist method to interpret Manet’s paintings adhered both to its object-­oriented meaning as found in language theory and to its meaning art historically.18 Manet’s “object painting” allowed Foucault to argue for its “specific historicity” in modernity.19 Here I emphasize that Foucault’s understanding of a coincident historicity and theory in painting did not entail a traditional, art historical historicism.20 In point of fact, near the end of his life Foucault opposed formalism to the traditional historicism that he rejected.21 By the time of his “Response” to the questionnaire on his method put to him by the Cercle d’épistémologies in the summer of 1968, Foucault had learned through his investigation of Manet that formalism focused on the internal level of a discipline, such as painting, where, as he stipulated, he could find epistemological breaks and ruptures.22 An idea of rupture was key to his reading of Manet’s paintings in their formal aspects. To put it somewhat literally: in the rupture of visual forms (shadows, light, spaces), the truths of Manet’s paintings could be ascertained.

Linguistics A good example of the object painting seen in both its formal properties and its historical situation came at the beginning of Foucault’s Manet lecture, where he attempted to situate the artist’s contribution to the Impressionism that was to follow and the traditional “game of sidestepping, of hiding, of illusion or elision which painting had practiced since the quattrocento.”23 Foucault used wordplay to bring out the significance of the issue of depth (profondeur), or what he called “the interior” (profondeur) of the painting revealed by Manet, but which had been made invisible in the tradition, resulting in a negation of the painting’s actual two-­dimensional spatiality. Foucault therefore combines the formal aspects of Manet’s contribution with

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his place in the history of art: “Manet in effect is one who for the first time, it seems to me, in western art, at least since the Renaissance, at least since the quattrocento, allows himself to use and in a way to play with, at the very interior of his paintings, even at the interior of what they represent, the material properties of the space on which he paints.”24 In this passage Foucault responds in his analysis to the two levels of representation also recognized in Las Meninas. In the interpretation of Manet’s painting, the physical properties of the object painting are integrated with the depiction of specific spatial configurations through the use of wordplay that employs a particular terminology proper to painting itself, in this case the term profondeur. The term means depth in two senses: first, a spatial depth achieved both through pictorial and through perceptual means; second, a depth of thought or seriousness, as in a profound idea. Foucault thought that in Manet’s pictures, the artist purposefully related depth both to pictorial techniques and to effects contained within the frame, particularly the qualities of coloration, light, and shadow, and to the viewer’s perceptual and subjective responses. For example, in The Balcony (Paris, Musée d’Orsay) he observed that the significance of the “rupture in depth” caused by Manet’s extensive use of black relates both to the figures in the painting—­their pictorial existence—­and to the viewer’s subjectivity: “Here you have a window which opens onto something which is entirely obscure [obscur], entirely black. One distinguishes with difficulty a very vague reflection of a metallic object. . . . And all of this great hollow space, this great empty space which must normally open onto a depth [sur une profondeur], why is it rendered invisible to us and why does it render us invisible?”25 According to Foucault, Manet’s paintings were modern because they refused the traditional approach to painting as pure perception. Manet exposed painting’s visual truths, as he said in the analysis of The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (Mannheim, Städtische Kunsthalle), dated 1867: “Pictorial perception must be like the repetition, the redoubling, the reproduction of the perception of everyday life. . . . There, we enter a pictorial space where distance does not offer itself to be seen, where depth [profondeur] is no longer an object of perception and where spatial positioning and the distancing of figures are simply given by signs which have no sense or function except inside the picture; that is, by the relationship, in some way arbitrary, in any case purely symbolic.”26 In the passage quoted here, Foucault’s debt to the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure is obvious, particularly their relationship to the language theory that

Figure 2. Édouard Manet, The Balcony, 1868. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 3. Édouard Manet, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, 1867. Städtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

had suggested the idea of the object painting. In a 1967 interview, Foucault had said that Saussure’s distinction of la langue from la parole “had allowed for the appearance of a linguistic object, that could be analyzed philosophically.”27 Here Foucault stressed that when Saussure separated the system of language (la langue) from the individual and situated utterance (la parole), he also made it possible to think about the basic conditions necessary for language. Transposing this insight to painting theory, the distinction already existing between un tableau and une peinture did not appear adequate to Foucault in his understanding of Manet’s work. He therefore turned to the possibilities offered by the concept of the object painting and the attendant invention of terminology necessary for its explication. If, according

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to Foucault’s analysis of The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, “signs which have no sense or function except inside the picture; that is, by the relationship, in some ways arbitrary” give the conditions for the possibility of the object painting, they depend on the individual occurrence and situation in each particular canvas.28 This formulation mirrors exactly that of Saussure’s linguistic theory and its concept of the arbitrary sign.29 Foucault’s close reading of Manet’s pictures in strict chronological order therefore gives the particularized data required for a meta-­critique of painting. Moreover, and this was crucial in Foucault’s view, Saussure’s revolutionary insights into linguistics were determined by his historical situation; they would not have been possible at any other time than the late nineteenth century, just as Manet’s modern painting would not have been possible earlier and, indeed, led to Impressionism.30

Critical Precedents Foucault’s view of Manet’s place in the history of art was greatly influenced by Georges Bataille.31 In fact, more than in any of Foucault’s other writing on the visual arts, Bataille’s impact on the Manet lecture is most obvious and makes the originality in Foucault’s terminology related to language theories all the more striking. Bataille’s book on Manet appeared in 1955, the same year as the publication of his study of the Lascaux cave paintings.32 Bataille’s approach to Manet, and Foucault’s after him, depended first on extensive research into sources contemporaneous with the artist, including letters, and writing on him by Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Émile Zola, and later critical essays by Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, and others. This literary tradition was also Foucault’s, whether or not he took it first from Bataille. In any case, the French art historian Françoise Cachin has made the point that Manet “attract[ed] writers like magnets.”33 In all this critical literature, the question of what it meant to be “modern” figured large, as I have already shown in Foucault’s appropriation of Baudelaire’s art criticism for his understanding of the Enlightenment. Bataille’s view of Manet as the first of the moderns had relied specifically on the earlier art criticism by the philosopher and author Valéry. In 1932 Valéry had written of Manet: “He either foreshadowed or founded a system of values which is only now ceasing to be ‘modern.’ Perhaps an age feels itself to be ‘modern’ when it finds it can admit equally a whole host of doctrines, tendencies

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and ‘truths’ all different from each other if not totally contradictory, all existing simultaneously and actively in the same individuals.”34 Similarly, Bataille asserted that it was Manet’s destiny to bring the arts into the modern era: “Manet appears as the symbol of all the conflicting inclinations a free man is torn between. In retrospect the actions of his life resemble the spinning of a compass needle thrown out of kilter. Those who came after him were free to choose. Manet had no choice but to make a clean break with the old order.”35 Foucault’s assessment of the revolutionary aspects of Manet’s paintings came directly out of this critical tradition. Bataille based his view of Manet’s significance for the history of art on the painting’s formal properties: “The solutions Manet tested out were not solutions for himself alone. What inspired him as much as anything was the prospect, for him an act of grace, of entering a new world of forms which would deliver him, and with him the others, from the bondage, the monotony, the falsehood of art forms that had served their time.”36 Bataille made the contrast between the forms in Manet’s paintings and those of his more “academic” contemporaries: “What had to be found, above and beyond conventional majestic forms, was some supreme, unimpeachable reality capable of withstanding the immense pressure of a utilitarian tradition.”37 According to Bataille, with the new forms, Manet succeeded in “the destruction of the subject” in the masterpieces of The Execution of Maximilian and Olympia.38 He discussed this destruction of the subject obliquely, that is, in painterly terms: I would stress the fact that what counts in Manet’s canvases is not the subject, but the vibration of light. The role of light in his art is more complex than is implied either by Malraux’s analysis of Manet or by those who see the apotheosis of light in the impressionist technique. To break up the subject and re-­establish it on a different basis is not to neglect the subject; so it is in a sacrifice, which takes liberties with the victim and even kills it, but cannot be said to neglect it. After all, the subject in Manet’s pictures is not so much “killed” as overshot, outdistanced; not so much obliterated in the interests of pure painting as transfigured by the stark purity of that painting. A whole world of pictorial research is contained in the singularity of his subjects.39

Bataille’s understanding of the destruction of the subject in Manet’s art paved the way both for Foucault’s “object painting” and for his concept of rupture en profondeur. To more fully articulate what Bataille had understood by Manet’s destruction of the traditional idea of the subject, Foucault turned to his concept of transgression,

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Figure 4. Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

defined as an emphasis on or a bringing into visibility of the limits of discourse about the body, particularly the sexualized body.40 In his 1963 homage to the older theorist, “Preface to Transgression,” Foucault characterized as “misplaced” the contemporary assumption that the truth of sexuality had been liberated from “the shadows” where it had “long been lingering.”41 Foucault judged that Bataille allowed his contemporaries to see how sexuality constituted the limit marker of transgression: We have not in the least liberated sexuality, though we have, to be exact, carried it to its limits: the limit of consciousness, because it ultimately dictates the only possible reading of our unconscious; the limit of the law, since it seems the sole substance of universal taboos; the limit of language, since it traces that line of foam showing just how far speech may advance upon the sands of silence.42

In his lecture Foucault sought to incorporate sexuality and painting under Bataille’s concept of transgression, joining, in a manner of speaking, the theoretical concept

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with the interpretation of Manet found in the 1955 book.43 For example, Bataille based his interpretation of Manet’s Olympia on an idea of the limits of the representation of sexuality allowed by the hallowed subject of the nude in the history of art. “Looking at Olympia,” he wrote, “we feel very keenly that something has been suppressed; we feel a charm refined to its purest—­a pure state of being, sovereignty, silently cut off from the old lies set up in the name of eloquence.”44 Bataille asserted that Manet had broken with the past by representing “a woman, not a goddess.”45 He saw in this explicit destruction of the earlier form of the European tradition “a negation of that world . . . and everything it stood for.”46 In his lecture on Manet, Foucault expanded on the specific vocabulary Bataille had used to speak of masking and concealment in the sexuality of the artist’s paintings of women and combined these with a notion of the limits of representation, also gained from the older theorist. At the beginning of his lecture Foucault stated: “What Manet did (it is in any case one of the important aspects, I believe, of the changes contributed by Manet to western painting) was to make reappear, in a way, at the very interior of what was represented in the painting [à l’interieur même de ce qui était représenté dans le tableau], these properties, these qualities or these material limitations of the canvas which painting, which the pictorial tradition, had up until then made it its mission in some way to sidestep and to mask.”47 Throughout the lecture, Foucault refers to the ways in which Manet “masks” through his use of black pigment in order to close off spaces and to expose through the contrast of light the irony of the compositions. This point is made particularly clearly in the description of The Masked Ball at the Opera, where the actual black masks worn by the figures in the painting serve also to mask them as individualized subjects.48 In his book, Bataille used the term masking, by which he meant concealment by visual means of “the rankling sensuality that makes itself felt in certain pictures” of women.49 This overt covering up of the object of desire made it even more visible to the interpreter of the paintings. Manet’s frequent depiction of makeup and fans for his female figures thus denoted for Bataille the true attraction to the viewer found in Manet’s paintings. Their covert sexuality signaled the subject transformed, which he associated with modern art. Concerning the haunting portrait of Berthe Morisot in The Balcony (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), Bataille wrote: “To gain initial entry into Manet’s work, a real subject had to slip its surreptitious way into the ambiguity of The Balcony or, in other portraits, into the tremor of their suspended animation, or, stranger still, in between the spokes of an outspread fan through which nothing is

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visible but a pair of mysterious eyes.”50 So, too, for Bataille, Olympia’s pale fingers stretched over her sex denoted through their very concealment his interest in the limits of the representation of sexuality: “If it is true, as I believe, that Manet’s initial secret is to be discerned in Olympia, that transposition of a Renaissance Venus, there is a deeper secret [au profondeur], perhaps, whose hiding-­place is hinted at by the outspread fan [of her fingers] that conceals it.”51 Like painting itself, the Venus pudica reveals its object—­the very depths of the sexual organ—­by masking it.52 In his book on the cave paintings Bataille had equated darkness and shadows with the most primal origins of art.53 It is with this understanding of the fundamentality of the darkness of Manet’s paintings that Foucault took up and glossed, in the manner that I have explained above, Bataille’s term au profondeur. Foucault associated “rupture in depth” (cette rupture en profondeur) with the artist’s revolutionary technique of using strong areas of reflective light and color together with the contrast of deep areas of black pigment (les noirs). According to Foucault, the bright areas of color correspond to the surface level of the painting, and their effects represent a gesture to the impressionistic techniques on Manet’s part. Conversely, Foucault alleges that the significance of Manet’s “rupture in depth” concerns the space represented in the paintings—­what he calls its profondeur, gained through the use of the black, especially characteristic of his early style.54 In the historical sense, Foucault found that Manet’s painting marked the moment in the history of art when painting became modern because it represented a “serious rupture” (cette rupture profonde) with the past.55 In a specifically formal sense, Foucault found that Manet’s paintings marked a “rupture in depth” (cette rupture en profondeur) with the literal surface of the canvas on which the paint was applied, and the dimensionality of the space depicted in the composition. Throughout the lecture on Manet, Foucault engaged with such wordplay and double meanings—­le tableau-­objet and la peinture-­objet and rupture profonde (a serious or deep rupture) and rupture en profondeur (rupture in the depths)—­in order to represent the effects of Manet’s historical and formal contributions to the history of art. These plays on the historical and material meanings of “rupture” and the invention of a hyphenated terminology to indicate a new kind of painting object also signaled the ironic dimensions of painting that relates to painting itself. Foucault concluded his Manet lecture with an analysis of A Bar at the Folies-­ Bergère (London, The Courtauld Gallery), which “was a painting that fascinated him as the inverse of Las Meninas.”56 What does an inversion of the ironic canvas

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Figure 5. Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-­Bergère, 1882. The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London.

show? That which had been hidden becomes exposed: the painting shows itself and its operations qua painting. The painting refers only to other paintings. Foucault said: “Manet plays with the picture’s property of being not in the least a normative space whereby the representation fixes us or the viewer to a point, a unique point from which to look.”57 To Foucault, the contrast with the directed gazes that he described so carefully in the figures in Las Meninas could not be clearer. In Las Meninas Foucault discerned that areas of light signaled the lines of sight, such as windows, pictures, open door, and mirror, and that they operated as traps, designed to purposefully draw the viewer into the logic of the picture.58 On the other hand, Foucault suggested that Manet’s picture, with its enormous reflecting mirror, gives a mobile point of view: “In a picture like this one, or in any case in this one, it is not possible to know where the painter has placed himself in order to paint the picture as he has done it, and where we must place ourselves in order to see a spectacle

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such as this.”59 As Foucault explained, this destabilization of the expectations of a painting produces in the viewer juxtaposed and contradictory feelings, because it “explains at once the enchantment and the malaise that one feels in looking at it.”60 Bataille, too, had felt the attraction of the malaise in Manet’s depiction of women. The response of a simultaneous attraction-­repulsion in the viewer of Manet’s paintings persists throughout Foucault’s writing about them. This destabilizing reaction in the viewer to the paintings led Foucault to propose the meta-­historical investigation allowed by the object painting as Manet’s special contribution to painting.61 We have seen that Foucault used Bataille’s concept of transgression, in both a historical and a conceptual sense, to explore Manet’s paintings. In so doing, he also recognized the connections between Bataille and Merleau-­Ponty over certain concepts in the theory of painting, particularly issues related to visibility and invisibility; darkness and depth; masking and revelation. Foucault liked “the very curious connection between thought and discourse and the links, reciprocal transgressions, interlacings and disequilibriums between them.”62 Based on the extant lecture analyzed here, Foucault’s proposed book on Manet would have fused Bataille’s concept of transgression and language theory together and brought them into the theory of painting.

Modernity, Painting, and the Present During the years in which he was giving the Manet lectures, Foucault was in and out of Paris. In 1966 he accepted a position as chair of philosophy in Tunis, which he held for three years. There he rode out the storm that came with the publication of Les Mots et les choses and finished The Archaeology of Knowledge, his book on methodology. When Foucault explored Manet’s paintings after 1966, the project could be seen as an ironic commentary from the periphery on the prevailing metropolitan attitudes toward contemporary oil painting, which was seen as a debased practice related to the elite, to the marketplace, and to an ossified national tradition. The situationist Guy Debord had insisted that the best way to treat proper French paintings was to destroy them, and many agreed with him.63 Beginning in April 1966, when Les Mots et les choses was published, and right up through May 1968, most French commentators criticized Foucault’s book. Jean-­Paul Sartre famously called it “the last rampart of the bourgeoisie.”64 Indeed, the prominence given in the book’s opening chapter to one of the most famous paintings in the history of art and a

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portrait of royalty may have contributed to the vehement attacks on Foucault and to the lack of mention of that chapter in contemporaneous criticism.65 In his day, many of Foucault’s contemporaries might have found his view of the value and appeal of oil painting to be anachronistic and conservative. But the reception of Les Mots et les choses did not dissuade him from pursuing his interest in the paintings of Manet. Foucault accepted the “privilege,” as Merleau-­Ponty had called it, of oil painting.66 It must be said that the idea of Manet’s importance for contemporary art emerged almost exactly at this moment in the writings of the American art critic Clement Greenberg. Carol Armstrong has expanded on Greenberg’s “longer hindsight that ‘Manet’ became the teleological origin of modernism in its most familiar incarnation.”67 She explained that the familiarity of this account in American art history and criticism begins with Greenberg and extends after him to T. J. Clark, Michael Fried, and others.68 Given the French philosophical tradition outlined in this chapter, Manet’s centrality for modernity would have been no less familiar, but its genealogy differed greatly. These differences must be taken into account if we are to understand the significance of Foucault’s work on Manet. Foucault’s approach to Manet cannot be considered Greenbergian, but the question will remain as to whether Greenberg’s approach may be in part, at least, indebted to Bataille and the tradition of criticism that he relied on.69

CHAPTER FOUR

The Negativity of Painting Magritte’s This Is Not a Pipe.

For Foucault, the painting by René Magritte variously known as The Treachery of Images (La Trahison des images), The Use of Words I (L’usage de la parole I), and This is not a pipe. (Ceci n’est pas une pipe.) constituted a lesson about visual and verbal representation as found in word and image paintings.1 Foucault’s determining questions for the pipe paintings were: What happens when the image of a pipe appears to be paired with a negative proposition concerning what it appears to be? And what happens when two paintings that appear similar are referred to by different titles? At least five paintings of pipes by Magritte exist, including two versions of The Treachery of Images.2 Foucault wrote about three of them, but he could have known about all of them. Foucault’s interpretation of Magritte’s lesson appeared in a 1968 article and in a later, slightly expanded book published in 1973.3 The study of Magritte extended Foucault’s ongoing investigations into the nature of language and painting to consider the literal conjunction of language and the image in paintings. Foucault’s thinking about Manet’s contribution to the transformation of painting in modernity with le tableau-­objet, la peinture-­objet—­undertaken over the same years in which he composed and expanded his study of Magritte—­played a role in how he situated Magritte’s word and image paintings in the history of art. Foucault explicitly explored the impact of avant-­garde word and image paintings in the history of twentieth-­century painting beginning with Surrealism and concluding with contemporary pop art. He proposed that the “circulating similitudes” initiated by and proposed in The Treachery of Images were fulfilled in the series of paintings of Campbell’s soup cans by the pop artist Andy Warhol.4 In the first sentence of This Is Not a Pipe, Foucault described the painting and made analogies between the words found in it and the formal properties of the script of a nun, the title of a student’s notebook, and the words on a chalkboard used by a teacher for instruction: “a carefully drawn pipe, and underneath it (handwritten in a steady, painstaking, artificial script, a script from the convent, like that

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found heading the notebooks of schoolboys, or on a blackboard after an object lesson [une leçon de choses], this note: ‘This is not a pipe.’”5 The importance of the content and form of the school lesson for the pipe paintings, whose materiality as script and paint enhanced the epistemological investigation that is “a lesson about things,” enabled Foucault’s many insights into language and painting in his interpretation of the entirety of Magritte’s work. As a thing that represents something else, an image plays as significant a role in our understanding of “things” as words do. Foucault recognized that when the two are conjoined, as they are in word and image paintings, the lesson could be profound and transformative. Further, the characterization made of the artist as teacher and the assumption of the self-­same role by the critic, that is, Professor Foucault, underlines the equal significance of both painting and language as mutually reinforcing methods of identification in the formation of the knowing subject. When the important California conceptual artist Ed Ruscha pretended to cast doubt on the significance of The Treachery of Images in 2006 (by then the painting had hung in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for over twenty-­five years), he did so by employing a rhetorical strategy operative both in the painting and in Foucault’s book.6 Ruscha said: I always doubted the importance of that work that says, “This is not a pipe.” Other people will say that it’s a turning point in art history. They point to it as being a particularly strong, profound statement, and I have doubts about that. His inscriptions on his paintings, whenever they become dominant, don’t really have much effect on me.7

The ironic doubling of disavowal and denial in Ruscha’s judgment of Magritte’s significance for art history—­and of the effect of the word and image paintings in particular—­underlines and speaks directly to what Foucault had ultimately found so important about these paintings: their systematic negation of our expectations of painting as a particular system for the representation of images. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault wrote: “But there is a negative work to be carried out first: we must rid ourselves of a whole mass of notions, each of which, in its own way, diversifies the theme of continuity.”8 The intelligence of Ruscha’s commentary on the role of disavowal, or negativity, in Magritte’s art aids the reader of Foucault in understanding the complex philosophical points about representation that he made in his book, and I return to it here throughout this chapter.

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In the study of Magritte, Foucault explicitly delineated the two expectations, or principles, of painting that Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky had overturned even before the earliest version of The Treachery of Images: “The first asserts the separation between plastic representation (which implies resemblance) and linguistic reference (which excludes it).”9 By this, Foucault meant that the traditional separation between word and image rested on their purportedly different uses of a concept of resemblance: painting required that resemblance exist between the thing and its visual representation, while language relied on other means of correspondence, such as allegory. Foucault explained that the second principle that Klee and Kandinsky had overturned concerned the practice of painting (la peinture) specifically: “The second principle that long ruled painting posits an equivalence between the fact of resemblance and the affirmation of a representative bond.”10 Foucault explained that this equivalence that belongs to painting alone is made possible because of its visibility in that it requires that “‘What you see is that.’”11 However, Foucault made the point with Klee’s painting that this representative bond disappeared or appeared as an expectation of the discourse that would no longer hold if disturbed by the conjunction of image and sign. For example, Klee’s Villa R of 1919 (Basel, Kunstmuseum) could be a driveway or red fields of color, a villa or blocks of color, the sun or a yellow spot. The “R” in the midst of the painted visual forms disturbs our understanding of them and transforms from an equivalence presumed of visual forms in the field of painting to a dissonance between the image and a linguistic form. According to Foucault, Magritte built on these initial negations of the rules of visual representation brought about by Klee and Kandinsky while adding yet another negation: titles were used to indicate a “nonrelation” between the visual representation of the whole and its designated name. In Klee’s Villa R the title confirms or designates our view that the blocks of color in the painting represent an edifice. With Magritte, and contrary to the common designation of visual content or idea used for the titles of painting in the history of art, the title signifies nothing represented. Indeed, in Magritte’s painting, the title may often appear as an overt negation of what appears to be seen. To summarize: according to Foucault, in Magritte’s word and image paintings we no longer have resemblance as the distinguishing aspect between word and image; we cannot be sure that painting represents what we see in it; and words, particularly titles, cannot help us understand what a painting shows us.

Figure 6. Paul Klee, Villa R, 1919. Kunstmuseum Basel. Nimatallah / Art Resource, NY. Copyright 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Ruscha’s remarks indicated a familiarity with The Treachery of Images in LACMA and Foucault’s book, where word and image paintings were referred to as “traps” and their effects on the viewer as entrapments, something also alluded to in the Las Meninas chapter and in the Manet lecture.12 Ruscha had often used words and images as traps or entrapments in his own paintings.13 Like Foucault, Ruscha focused on what he called the “dominant” textual device of the “inscription,” “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.,” which functions both as a title and as words that are part of the painted composition and, moreover, is itself a negative statement about painting. Foucault had used the inscription to argue for the significance of word and image paintings in the history of art because they simultaneously destroyed the representational space of both painting and language: “The trap shattered on emptiness: image and text fall each to its own side, of their own weight. No longer do they have a common ground nor a place where they can meet, where words are capable of taking shape and images of entering into lexical order.”14 In his book, Foucault used illustrations of three rectangular diagrams of the words in the pipe painting and the image of the pipe paintings to plot out the “logic” of the “trap” of the calligram, a semiotic form that signified for him what the painting actually showed in its visual field.15

Titles With the calligram, a form consisting of a group of words configured as an image, Foucault illustrated that the word and image paintings took place in a new context—­ not painting as it had been known or language as it had been written. Linguistic discourse alone no longer constituted the horizon of legibility, and neither artist nor interpreter could be assured of a stable location for enunciation.16 In appropriating the dominant inscription on the painting—­Ceci n’est pas une pipe—­for the title of his article and later book, Foucault demonstrated that he had learned from “the lesson” that the artist had offered. Just as Magritte had made multiple versions of pipe paintings, Foucault too emphasized the plenitude of meanings to be found in the repetition of titles and of multiple versions by publishing a second version of an essay with the exact same title.17 Repetition, as in the repetition of titles or in multiple versions of paintings, served in substantive ways to inform the idea of representation transformed that Foucault found in Magritte’s oeuvre. Unlike the pipe picture, however, neither Foucault’s essay nor book title contained the punctuation mark of the period or full stop found in the inscription. I shall return to this point

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about the “openness” of the visual image in due course, but for now we can say that the article/book title is distinguished from the painting inscription in form and context, yet it ostentatiously refers to the singular importance of the paintings bearing that inscription. In the first version of his text on Magritte, Foucault wrote: “The exteriority of written and figurative elements, so obvious in Magritte, is symbolized by the non-­ relation—­or in any case by the very complex and problematic relation—­between the painting and its title.”18 He used this sentence again in the book version at the beginning of the chapter “Le Sourd travail des mots” (“The Deaf Work of Words”).19 Foucault asked, what use are words inscribed on paintings and not heard as speech? To explain this inscription/title problem, Foucault quotes directly from Magritte: “The titles are chosen in such a way as to keep anyone from assigning my paintings to the familiar region that habitual thought appeals to in order to escape perplexity.”20 Foucault glossed this explanation: “Make no mistake: In a space where every element seems to obey the sole principle of resemblance and plastic representation, linguistic signs (which had an excluded aura, which prowled far around the image, which the title’s arbitrariness seemed to have banished forever) have surreptitiously reapproached.”21 By this Foucault meant that if visual images have until then had their own manner of representation and aura, the insertion of words, particularly words not also found in the title, such as “This is not a pipe.” in a painting titled The Treachery of Images, will operate subversively. This subversive intention lies behind the word and image paintings, and works against the familiar or the expected in painting. The subversion that words could play with the idea of a painting had already occurred to Surrealist artists, including Magritte, in the first part of the twentieth century. Moreover, Foucault’s recourse to the earlier literature on Klee, Kandinsky, and the Surrealists in his research on Magritte revealed his desire to understand the significance of word and image painting in that history. The LACMA painting contains a sentence that functions as a negative proposition, “This is not a pipe.” As such, it performs rhetorically as apophasis, meaning that it pretends to deny what the very form of the painted pipe juxtaposed with it already affirms. The title of Foucault’s first chapter, “Voici deux pipes” (“Here Are Two Pipes”), transformed the title of the whole book and the inscription on the pipe painting in order to signal the affirmative, in opposition to the negative. This positive articulation, “Here are two pipes,” provided the mirror image, or the inverse, of the negative statement “This is not a pipe.” According to Foucault, The

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Treachery of Images presented a hall of mirrors of actual paintings of pipes with inscriptions found in Magritte’s oeuvre.22 Let us recall that the function of mirrors in the space of representation in classical and modern painting had been a major concern of Foucault in his analysis of Las Meninas and in his interpretation of Manet’s Bar at the Folies-­Bergère. The repetition of images and of inscriptions, as well as the multiple versions of the same picture—­a lbeit at times with different titles—­in Magritte’s oeuvre called into question the traditional understanding of the function of a mirror that classical painting had allowed, such as in the mirror on the back wall of Las Meninas, which reflects the images of the royal couple and inserts their authority into the picture. The mirror also predicted a rupture in the space of classical perspective that Manet’s painting had fulfilled in the object painting of A Bar at the Folies-­Bergère. Foucault described a second version of a pipe painting in the second paragraph of the article and book: Les Deux Mystères (The Two Mysteries) of 1966. Foucault calls it “the last one,” meaning the last one of the pipe paintings, and perhaps what he took to be Magritte’s final painting before his death. According to Foucault, in the LACMA picture the scrupulously depicted pipe appears in a form appropriated from mass-­media reproductions, whereas in “the last one,” an image of the pipe floats above a framed painting of what might be the same pipe in the first picture. Foucault compared them: “The first version disconcerts us by its very simplicity. The second multiplies intentional ambiguities before our eyes.”23 For Foucault, then, multiplicity and repetition present the key to the understanding of the distinctions between words and images, language and painting found in the first version; and this also related to the visual instantiation of the joining of word and image in the textual/visual figures of the calligram illustrated in his book.24 As he insisted, the calligram—­the single visual figure made of text—­both actively forms and is “undone” because of Magritte’s use of the negative statement together with the picture it denies, or no longer affirms. In the section of the book called “Seven Seals of Affirmation,” Foucault examined how the pipe paintings systematically negate the “affirmations” of similitude and resemblance: “Seven discourses in a single statement—­more than enough to demolish the fortress where similitude was held prisoner to the assertion of resemblance.”25 By similitude Foucault meant the explicit likening through the contrast of image and word(s) of one dissimilar thing to another. By resemblance Foucault meant the similarity between the thing seen and the thing painted. According to Foucault, by negating these affirmations in his

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Figure 7. René Magritte, The Two Mysteries, 1966. Private collection. Banque d’Images, ADAGP / Art Resource, NY. Copyright 2016 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

two pipe paintings, Magritte showed painting to be other than what it had been thought to have been, that is, a picture of what it purported to represent. Throughout his texts on Magritte, Foucault insisted that the pipe paintings reveal the fact that mimetic painting is no longer representational, that the image in the painting does not stand in for or reference the thing exterior to the painting. According to Foucault, negation is central to this perception: “negations multiply themselves,” and the inscription “sets out to name something that evidently does not need to be named (the form is too well known, the label too familiar). And at the moment when he should reveal the name, Magritte does so by denying that the object is what it is,” that is, it is not a pipe.26 The interchanges and assurances—­the

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“translations” and “affirmations,” to use Foucault’s vocabulary—­that the viewer had come to expect from painting no longer hold as a result of Magritte’s painting: “It inaugurates a play of transferences that run, proliferate, propagate, and correspond within the layout of the painting, affirming and representing nothing.”27 As Ruscha later denied, or pretended to deny: Magritte’s paintings mark “a turning point in art history.”

Negativity Ruscha had met Magritte in Venice in June 1967, only a few months before the older artist’s death on August 15, soon after which Foucault wrote his first version of “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Ruscha recalled: “He was photographing scenes that he had painted before—­you know, a canvas on an easel with somebody in front of the painting and the scene continues behind the easel. Talk about irony—­there it was.”28 For Ruscha, Magritte’s irony lay not in the word and image paintings but in the repetition of an illusionistic effect easily obtained in photography, where depth of field allows a figure positioned in the foreground of the composition and the actual view in the background to appear as adjacent and infinite. This visual effect can be found throughout Magritte’s painted oeuvre, and along with the pipe paintings it plays a major role in Foucault’s judgment concerning the negations offered by Magritte’s work. Foucault observed that the device of the canvas on the easel propped in front of a landscape, such as that found in The Human Condition (La Condition Humaine) (1933, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art) demonstrated the fallacy of the belief in “representative affirmation.” In so doing, it also refused the “affirmation that would imply a distance, a divergence, a disjuncture between the canvas and what it is supposed to mimic.”29 Using the 1935 version of The Human Condition (La Condition Humaine) as his example, Foucault meant that Magritte’s device of the framed painting within the painting (i.e., le tableau in le tableau) exposed not itself or its essential condition as painting (i.e., la peinture) but as “a perfect continuity of scene, a linearity, a continuous overflowing of one into the other.”30 Foucault understood the doubling of the painted scene within the canvas as “infinite games of purified similitude that never overflow the painting.”31 Contained by the frame, the picture is always within the picture and refers to nothing outside it. These extreme cases of visual infinity, which Magritte repeated in photography for Ruscha’s

Figure 8. René Magritte, The Human Condition, 1933. National Gallery of Art,

Washington, D.C. Copyright 2016 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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benefit, negated the very foundation on which traditional visual representation had rested; indeed, as Foucault indicated with his fusion of le tableau-­objet and la peinture-­objet at the end of the Manet essay, they were “object painting” itself. Importantly, in 1962 and prior to his thinking about the operations of the negativity of painting in Magritte’s art, Foucault had explored negativity and language in the context of the family romance in the essay “Le ‘Non’ du père” (“The Father’s ‘No’”).32 This phrase makes sonic play on words, a pun, between the negative “non” and “le nom” (name). Both of these words sound virtually the same when spoken. The play between the authority of the father, invoked by the name of the Father, and the preeminent authority of the father’s “no” or prohibition, comes up in Foucault’s essay on Magritte. There, the issue of authority can be found in the language that insists that this is not a pipe and in the person of the “baffled Schoolmaster” whose lesson about the pipes falls into a meaningless mise-­en-­abîme: “Negations multiply themselves, the voice is confused and choked.”33 The profitability of this trope of the “ignorant Schoolmaster” for the acquisition of knowledge had a history in French intellectual and political history, as the philosopher Jacques Rancière later expanded in a famous essay, “The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation.”34 In Foucault’s writing, however, both the artist and the philosopher assume the ironic position of authority in order to emphasize through doubling the significance of the lessons learned from the words and images together. Foucault observed: “this naive handwriting, neither precisely the work’s title nor one of its pictorial elements.”35 The complexity of this viewing and reading situation in word and image paintings attracted the philosopher, just as the child caught in the family romance had, because the situation of simultaneity between two existing positions could enable new understandings and possible transformations. In “The Father’s ‘No,’” Foucault likened the crucial position of “being in-­ between” the parents to “the grammatical posture of the ‘and.’” Like the conjunction, the position of the child cannot be taken as ambivalent precisely because it joins and separates. The position is simultaneously two opposite ones: partisan and divided. The position of the “and” can be analogized in the book on Magritte to the subject positions ensnared by the genre of word and image painting.36 Foucault’s interpretation of Magritte’s paintings made it clear that the artist inhabits the position of both the painter and the writer/speaker, and that the viewer inhabits the position of viewer and reader/addressee in the word and image paintings. The word

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and image paintings question the idea of the subject through their demonstrations of pictorial and linguistic negativity: neither one nor the other but both.

An Earlier Model Magritte had initiated contact with Foucault as a result of having read Les Mots et les choses, as he stated in a letter written soon after the book appeared.37 A correspondence between the artist and the philosopher ensued. Foucault had not mentioned Magritte in his book, and Magritte wanted the author to know that the issue of words and images in painting had long occupied him. In the first letter, the artist cited Foucault’s recently published book using a strange écriture: the title was written using only lowercase letters and followed by an elision (i.e., “‘les mots et les choses. . .’”).38 With his usual self-­assurance, Magritte suggested the precedence of his own picture-­essay on language and images for Foucault’s just-­published book: “Les Mots et les images,” a picture-­essay, had originally appeared in the periodical La Révolution Surréaliste in 1929, not long after the artist had completed the first version of La Trahison des images (Los Angeles, LACMA).39 It is quite possible that Foucault may not have known this picture-­essay prior to his receipt of Magritte’s letter. However, when Foucault came to write about the artist just after his death in August 1967, he followed Magritte’s epistolary advice on whom to consult in regard to it: Foucault turned to the recently published book on the artist by the Englishman Patrick Waldberg, which had reproduced an illustration of a variant of “Les Mots et les images.”40 When Foucault cited from Waldberg’s version of Magritte’s picture-­essay in “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” he reordered and conflated five—­out of eighteen in the original version—­statements without their accompanying illustrations, which had formed an integral part of the essay in the original version. When the American critic Roger Shattuck wrote about Magritte’s picture-­ essay around the same time as Foucault, he said: “The cartoons annotate the slippery relations between objects, images, words—­and by implication the mind which entertains them.”41 For his interpretation, Foucault did not appear to be interested in the illustrations of Magritte’s original essay, some of which had been sent to him by the artist. He discussed, instead, the essay’s aphorisms together with the painted oeuvre of the artist. In this manner, Foucault stressed the larger lessons to be learned from painting as a specific discipline or area of knowledge, to which he alluded in The Archaeology of Knowledge: “whether the knowledge that this discursive practice

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gives rise to was not embodied perhaps in theories and speculations, in forms of teaching and codes of practice, but also in processes, techniques, and even in the very gesture of the painter.”42 Revising Magritte’s picture-­essay, Foucault deliberately chose to emphasize the stated relationships between words, objects, and images and the ways they operate in paintings by grouping them in three clusters according to his own lights: (1) “Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life”; (2) “Sometimes the name of an object takes the place of an image. A word can take the place of an object in reality. An image can take the place of a word in a proposition”; (3) “In a painting, words are of the same substance as images. Thus, one sees images and words differently in a painting.”43 Foucault’s choice and rearrangement of specific aphorisms from the picture-­essay indicate the precise nature of his interest in these works. The aphorisms found in the first two groups relate to the philosopher’s goals as stated in The Archaeology of Knowledge: I would like to show that “discourses,” in the form in which they can be heard or read, are not as one might expect, a mere intersection of things and words; I would like to show that discourse is not a slender surface of contact, or confrontation, between a reality and a language (langue), the imbrication of a lexicon and an experience; I would like to show with precise examples that in analyzing discourses themselves, one sees the loosening of the embrace, apparently so tight of words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules proper to discursive practice. These rules define not the dumb existence of a reality, nor the canonical use of a vocabulary, but the ordering of objects.44

According to Foucault, the “discursive facts” of words and objects change when they are together in Magritte’s paintings. They therefore demonstrate what Foucault sought in The Archaeology of Knowledge. The “rules” concerning substitution, or equivalencies between words and things and words and images, could be questioned using Magritte’s paintings. In the essay on Magritte, Foucault said that this lack of equivalency represented a change from classical painting: “Hence the fact that classical painting spoke—­and spoke constantly—­while constituting itself entirely outside language; hence the fact that it rested silently in a discursive space; hence the fact that it provided, beneath itself, a kind of common ground where it could restore the bonds of signs and the image.”45 Foucault purposely condensed the

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aspects of image/word theory formulated by Magritte’s picture-­essay as he found it in Waldberg: word and image paintings make us reflect on “the canonical vocabulary” of representation and to see it as having been “ordered” for the conveyance of a certain kind of knowledge. We should remember that in Merleau-­Ponty’s essay “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” the philosopher insisted on “equivalencies” in language. He wrote: “Language is not just the replacement of one meaning by another, but the substitution of equivalent meanings.”46 Transposing this observation into his thinking about word and image painting, Foucault called this “equivalence of resemblance and affirmation” in older painting “isotopism,” meaning that word and image could be considered equivalent and corresponding when they were found in the traditional painting.47 Foucault understood that Magritte’s word and image paintings radically revised this agreement between resemblance and affirmation. In his writings on word and image painting, Foucault wanted to understand the pressure that the image put on the word when found together in painting: word and image cannot substitute for each other when they are together in a painting, contrary to Merleau-­Ponty’s observation. The negative proposition about what is seen in the painting demonstrates that there exists no equivalence between words and images. This overturning of isotopism brings us to the third aphorism that Foucault took from Magritte’s picture-­essay: it refers specifically to the visual discourse of painting. “In a painting, words are of the same substance as images. Thus, one sees images and words differently in a painting.”48 Here Foucault meant to signal the change that painting itself makes when word and image are in its framed and institutionalized—­as in the museum where Ruscha saw it—­visual field. With word and image paintings, the field is no longer le tableau or la peinture because painting assumes the characteristics of “a disoriented volume and an unmapped space.”49 The processes and principles theorized for painting over the long history of art had transformed because of word and image painting: Magritte liberated the image to perform and be performed on independently of the given discourse and practices of the traditional institutions and theories of painting.

Art Historical Considerations In This Is Not a Pipe, Foucault called Magritte’s pipe paintings the “ironic remains” of the attempt to join language and painting, image and word by focusing on their

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effects on the viewer that had already been noted by the French Surrealist André Breton.50 Breton had claimed that Magritte’s paintings transcended and liberated all painting; they were a major intervention in the history of art, a judgment corroborated by Foucault. Although the significance of Magritte’s word and image paintings had long been ensured in the Dada and Surrealist canon, the revised edition in 1965 of Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la peinture (originally published in 1928) gave further authority to Magritte. This edition is useful for locating Foucault’s thinking in This Is Not a Pipe in the mainstream of French art history and for understanding the historical dimensions of his contribution in the book. In the newer edition, Breton called Magritte’s work the most “exemplary” of any contemporary artist, whereas he had barely mentioned the artist in the first edition. The newer Breton focused on the word and image paintings. He assessed their dual use of “concrete figuration” (la figuration concrete) together with “word figures” (mots-­figures) or “figures of thought or knowledge” (la figuration du savoir).51 This view of painting, particularly paintings with “figures” and “word figures,” such as Magritte’s word and image paintings, recalls Foucault’s understanding of painting as knowledge (savoir), articulated in The Archaeology of Knowledge: “In this sense, the painting [un tableau] is not a pure vision that must then be transcribed into the materiality of space; nor is it a naked gesture whose silent and eternally empty meanings must be freed from subsequent interpretations. It is shot through—­and independently of scientific knowledge [connaissance] and philosophical themes—­ with the positivity of a knowledge [savoir].”52 In his revised book, Breton did not illustrate The Treachery of Images (La Trahison des images), which would so concern Foucault as the first of the pipe paintings he examined. Instead, Breton showed a related word and image painting of around the same date, The Phantom Landscape (Le Paysage fantôme) (Paris, private collection). This painting depicts the portrait bust of a young woman placed against a monochromatic background. Diagonally inscribed in script across the center of the face is the word “montagne” (mountain). Without the indefinite article “a” (une) or definite article “the” (la), “mountain” remains ambiguous and belongs uniquely to the painted representation of the woman, perhaps designating her nose allegorically, as “the mountain” on the landscape of her face, or her portrayal as equal to “a mountain.” In his 1965 book, Breton said that the subversion of the visual field in painting had occurred first in the work of the Dada artist Francis Picabia. Breton argued

Figure 9. René Magritte, The Phantom Landscape, 1928. Private collection. Banque

d’Images, ADAGP / Art Resource, NY. Copyright 2016 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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that by being “surprisingly new,” Picabia’s 1915 watercolor painting Voilà la femme (Paris, private collection) inserted the present into the future (Plate 7).53 The phrase in Picabia’s picture served as its title from the beginning, emphasizing the allusion to immediacy, that is, Breton’s “present into the future,” of the word voilà, often translated in this case as “behold.” Ten years later, the repetition of the gesture of a similar phrase—­its reinscription as ceci—­in Magritte’s painting indicates the significance of this genealogy for word and image paintings, as Foucault surely realized. Further, in his painting Magritte “corrected” Picabia by forming a complete sentence with the full stop or period. Picabia had painted a realistically depicted chocolate grinder, with a phrase in the affirmative floating above it. Magritte had painted a realistically depicted pipe with a sentence in the negative above. Both paintings show an inscription that is a written directive: it accompanies and designates a realistically depicted “everyday” or utilitarian object. The directive—­k nown in rhetoric as a “deictic,” meaning a word that points or shows, such as voilà or ceci—­c alls the viewer into the action of looking referentially from the word to the image. Breton had already noted that deictic words, or words possessing a “designating power,” transform objects represented in paintings.54 They also transform the viewer. In philosophical terms, sentences that propose by pointing—­Here is a woman; This is not a pipe—­enunciate propositions, or “truth statements.” Magritte’s assertion in his picture-­essay that “an image can take the place of a word in the proposition” refers to this fact by proposing that philosophical “truths” are given and/or transformed by word and image painting. The differences in the use of the deictic between the paintings by Picabia and Magritte pertain to my understanding of Foucault’s interpretation. In the Picabia picture, the referent voilà is disjunctive with the noun, causing at least some of the “surprise” that Breton noted; whereas in the Magritte the referent ceci represents both the word and the object, causing the immediate recognition in the viewer of the pitfalls in assuming resemblance between word and image in painting. Picabia’s coffee grinder is surmounted by words that connoted by using the ambiguous preposition voilà, meaning “behold” either here or there, and the equally ambiguous noun la femme, meaning either “woman” or “wife.” So, too, “Behold here (or there) is the woman (or the wife).” But there is no punctuation to conclude the statement. Magritte’s sentence “This is not a pipe.” also contains a double meaning or pun: in French faire la pipe is slang for a blowjob. The ambiguity in the meaning of a pipe functions in the painting to further elaborate on the problems encountered with

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words and images. In Picabia we read, “Behold here (or there) is the woman (or wife)”; in Magritte, “This is not the thing used for a blow job (or pipe).” The fact that the image in Picabia’s picture does not look like a woman or a wife makes the message about equivalencies between language and image a stark one. Magritte’s pipe looks like a pipe (and not a phallus), but the point, while subtler, is the same: it is not the thing designating itself, merely a representation. In a book on word and image paintings published in 1969, Les Mots dans la peinture, the French art critic Michel Butor said that even if one might not want to privilege the words in the painting by Picabia as its title, it would be impossible not to do so. Presumably, Butor here recalled the focus in Foucault’s earlier essay on the role of the title in destroying our earlier assumptions about images.55 Similar to Breton, Butor was “surprised” by the disjunction between the words and the image, where the “figuration” through the words could change what was represented by calling to the mind of the viewer, so he said, multiple images of women.56 Previously, Breton had made observations about “the image in the mind” conjured up by the disjunction between word and image—­between the portrait of a woman and the word montagne (mountain) in The Phantom Landscape by Magritte; for him, the insertion of the misnomer “mountain” on the nose meant that in looking at the portrait, any woman could be conjured up by the viewer.57 “Mountain” literally disfigured the particularity of the woman portrayed. The mislabeled women in The Phantom Landscape and Voilà la femme underline the issue of gender and sexuality in Foucault’s choice of pipe paintings. Magritte’s pipe painting of 1936, La Lampe philosophique (The Philosopher’s Lamp) (Brussels, private collection) further enhances the pun in The Treachery of Images and provides more insights into the doubling of meanings Foucault found in Magritte’s pipe paintings. The Philosopher’s Lamp portrays a bust of a man in three-­quarters pose, possibly the artist, whose vastly elongated proboscis falls into the bowl of the self-­ same pipe depicted in The Treachery of Images. The nose resembles nothing so much as a flaccid penis filling the pipe. The woman’s nose was mislabeled as mountain, but the philosopher’s nose makes the mistake of falling into the bowl of the pipe, like the unraveled calligram in Foucault’s interpretation of Magritte. In French, the word for nose, le nez, makes another pun: when pronounced, it sounds like “nay” or “the no.” Is this the “No” or the name of the Father? In The Philosopher’s Lamp the nose functions as a kind of visual negative; it is a negative, the “nay,” visualized.

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Figure 10. René Magritte, The Philosopher’s Lamp, 1936. Private collection. Banque

d’Images, ADAGP / Art Resource, NY. Copyright 2016 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Next to the man depicted in The Philosopher’s Lamp is a stand on which a candle simultaneously melts—­mimicking the nose—­and stands erect—­as a penis would in an erection. Pipe-­phallus, nose-­penis, nose-­mountain: associations enhanced by punning proliferate in Foucault’s essay and relate directly to Magritte’s oeuvre. Further, the sexualized aspects between language and the image in the paintings of pipes, including the portrait of a so-­called philosopher inferred by the title, refract on the transformation of the subject as viewer by the paintings. The correspondence between Breton’s view of Magritte in the new edition of Le Surréalisme et la peinture and Foucault’s slightly later texts can also be found

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in the phrase “une leçon de choses” (a lesson about things), which appears prominently in both. Breton stated that Magritte’s originality lay in making it possible—­ through their juxtaposition—­that “everyday objects” (entre tous les plus familiers) and landscape sites, such as “fields, woodlands, clouds, seascapes or mountains” (champêtres, boisés, nuageux, maritimes ou montagneux) conveyed to the viewer an apparently innocent image, such as one might find in an elementary school lesson about things.58 Breton maintained that through this simple juxtaposition profound insights about the “relativity of reality” could be gained from painting. We have already seen that in the beginning of his essay, Foucault underlined the equation of the innocent image and the primary school “object lesson” created by Magritte’s inscription. When Foucault extended Breton’s formulation of the object lesson for the schoolchild, he framed it with analogies to the effects of the schoolroom setting to painting: the blackboard’s relationship to the canvas, the chalk to the paintbrush, and the childish script to the artist’s hand, which he also found in the “last” version of the pipe painting, called Les Deux Mystères (1966).59

Other Theories, Other Pictures Foucault’s conclusions regarding word and image paintings relate closely to the contemporaneous work of the younger scholar of literature Louis Marin, whose work on semiotics is central to Foucault’s idea of painting.60 A number of Marin’s early essays and one of his first books explored at length the Port-­Royal Logic, a French seventeenth-­century philosophy of language that had occupied Foucault in Les Mots et les choses because it addressed the dual function of the sign and established a modern system of thought in regard to it.61 Foucault had observed: “It is characteristic that the first example of a sign given by the Logique de Port-­Royal is not the word, nor the cry, nor the symbol, but the spatial and graphic representation—­the drawing as map or picture. This is because the picture has no other content in fact than that which it represents, and yet that content is made visible only because it is represented by a representation . . . and this new binary arrangement presupposes that the sign is a duplicated representation doubled over upon itself.”62 Here is the classical relationship between word and image that Magritte’s paintings sought to undermine. Magritte addressed this point in his initial correspondence reminding the philosopher of his precedent picture-­essay. Throughout his early writings on the semiology of painting, Marin recognized

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the “double problem” of the refraction of the image in painting brought about by language.63 Just as he had stressed the duality of the sign in the Port-­Royal Logic, Foucault also signaled this “multiplication by two” in the first version of his pipe essay.64 In his writing on pictorial semiology, as he called it, Marin extended the historical reach of Foucault’s more focused investigation into the writings on Magritte, contemplating the history of words, and even letters, in painting and other forms of representation, such as maps, from the early modern period to the present. The titles of these contemporaneous essays are explanatory of this scope: “The Discourse of the Figure,” “Texts in Representation,” “How to Read a Painting,” “Maps and Paintings.” Marin explored what he called “the two great regions of the world of signs, “the visible and the readable,” starting in the mid-­1960s, just as Foucault undertook his two versions of the essay on Magritte. Although barely noted by Foucault scholars, there were mutual influences between the two after the publication of Les Mots et les choses and during Foucault’s investigations of Manet and Magritte. Like Foucault, Marin recognized that the region of the visible consisted of objects, but that when present in art they were subject to the specific rules of the particular practice, or discourse, in which they might appear, oil painting being the preeminent exemplar of this proposition.65 Using the specificity of painting in contrast to language, Marin settled on the operation of “the figure” in text and painting. He called a painting (le tableau) “the figurative object” (l’objet figurative) and opposed it to “the figure in the text” (la figure dans le texte).66 He used a similar approach to the one Foucault employed for his discussion of Manet’s “object painting.” Marin said that a meta-­concept of la peinture was required in order to assess how pictorial semiology works in the particular painting object (le tableau), where a semiotic approach appeared to lend itself to analyzing the specificities of an individual canvas. Starting from the idea of semiology established earlier by Roland Barthes, Marin proposed that painting was something special in the category of the work of art.67 He thought of it as the place where a “pictorial semiology” could best be applied and understood, and where the problem of the differences between writing or language and the painting as figure could best be explored.68 Expanding on Foucault’s reading of Las Meninas, Marin articulated that a semiotic analysis of painting would correct on two counts Merleau-­Ponty’s foundational proposition that every painting (le tableau) exists as “an image of the world.”69 Marin’s critiques of painting as “an image of the world” concerned the status of the

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referent. First, “the painting has no referent other than itself, in its figures,” which transforms the referent into the signified.70 He also put it: “The referent is not the objective referent from the world. That which is referred to is not the world but the painting (le tableau) itself. The painting is a referent in which the referred to is the pictorial instance itself, a designee in which the designated is the pictorial instance that contains it.”71 Paintings refer to paintings themselves, not to something outside them. The second corollary concerning the referent follows from the first. According to Marin, the simultaneous associative and discursive operations required of reading and looking at figuration in painting cause the signified to disappear. In other words, to use Foucault’s example of the pipe in Magritte’s painting, the pipe is not a pipe inasmuch as it is the figure of a pipe in the painting, which we would choose to forget as a representation of the world were it not for the directive negative sentence. Foucault wrote of his second exemplar, Les Deux Mystères, in a way that recalls Marin: “All this litter on the ground, while above, the large pipe without measure or reference point will linger in its inaccessible, balloon-­like immobility?”72 Breton’s earlier emphasis on the figurative aspects in Magritte’s work also influenced Marin, who insisted on the double nature of an individual painting: “The painting is a figurative text and a system of reading: in order to understand the first part of this affirmation the terms of the text and of the reading are not at all metaphorical, the figurative text only grabs hold of the metaphor so often used by the reading.”73 In the second part of this statement lies the substance of the rules of resemblance and affirmation in painting that Foucault had expressed using Magritte’s aphorisms and which he argued Magritte’s paintings illustrated. A significant aspect of Marin’s writing for Foucault’s thinking about Magritte concerns the painter Paul Klee, whom Foucault thought of as having paved the way for Magritte’s word and image paintings by abolishing the hierarchy of the ordering of visual and linguistic discourse found in classical painting, whether “running from the figure to the discourse or from the discourse to the figure.” 74 Klee’s paintings served Marin as paradigms of the operation of figures and words in pictures, and Marin’s interpretation helped explain how words and signs, such as arrows, operate in painting.75 Foucault’s interpretation of Klee’s contributions to the problems posed by word and image paintings was delineated by Marin’s investigations into the semiology of painting. Marin’s work explains Foucault’s emphasis on the precedence of Klee and Kandinsky for Magritte’s work, a point not found in Breton.

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Photography in the Mix At this juncture in my exploration of the contemporary correspondences between Foucault’s interpretation of Magritte’s word and image paintings and the theory of the image explored by his contemporaries, the issue of photography arises. When Ruscha pointed out the irony of the canvas duplicated within the scene behind it that Magritte made in his 1967 photograph taken in Venice, he emphasized the motif of the framed image within the frame in paintings that had so fascinated Foucault. But Ruscha could also have been recalling the famous series of black-­and white photographs taken by the American photographer Duane Michals when he visited the artist at his home in Brussels in August 1965.76 Michals’s photographs were not published until 1981, in a book consisting mostly of compositions containing the doubled images of Magritte in the bowler hat. The photographs taken by Michals appeared in the book in the apparent chronological order of the daylong visit, beginning with the doorbell and the adjacent printed name of “MAGRITTE” seen at a slight distance and then in close-­up in the first pages and concluding with the house receding from view in the final photographs. In the intervening pages, Michals finds in Magritte’s home the objects, artworks, and the woman that resemble so closely and reference so consistently the visual trompe l’oeils, puns, and compositions of over fifty years’ worth of the artist’s painted oeuvre. For example, in the photograph of Magritte at the open entrance to his home, we see the doorway framed by windows of the same form and proportion as those seen in Magritte’s paintings The Interpretation of Dreams (1930 and 1936, New York, private collection). Magritte’s windows shown in Michals’s photographs also recall the so-­called object (objet) titled Fresh Window, made by Marcel Duchamp in 1920.77 The doubling of windows in situ in the photographs of Magritte’s home and in his paintings, and of the windows in Magritte’s paintings and in Duchamp’s “object,” emphasizes their significant innovations as paintings in the history of art.78 Or, as Foucault asserted near the end of This Is Not a Pipe: “To verify clearly, at the end of the operation, that the precipitate has changed color, that it has gone from black to white, that the ‘This is a pipe’ silently hidden in mimetic representation has become the ‘This is not a pipe’ of circulating similitudes.”79 For the historian Foucault, these circulating similitudes constituted the discourse on art into which he too sought to intervene. Many of Michals’s photographs of Magritte repeat the person of the artist doubled or redoubled (put into circulation by photography) and cast as an image or a portrait on his paintings propped on an easel: here the significance in

Figure 11. Duane Michals, Magritte, circa 1965. Copyright Duane Michals. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York.

Figure 12. René Magritte, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1930. Private collection. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. Copyright 2016 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 13. Marcel Duchamp, Fresh Window, New York, 1920. Miniature French window, painted wood frame, and panes of glass covered with black leather, 30½ × 17⅝ inches, on wood sill ¾ × 21 × 4 inches. The Museum of Modern Art, Katherine S. Dreier Bequest. Copyright 2016 Succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image copyright The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

Figure 14. Duane Michals, René Magritte, circa 1965. Copyright Duane Michals. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York.

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the interaction between la peinture and le tableau that we encountered beginning with Foucault’s analysis of Las Meninas culminates in the Magritte essay. Further thoughts on the impact of the circulation of the image through photography come up in Foucault’s later essay on Fromanger.

Concluding with Words and Images In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault made the distinction between a linguistic system or langue, as “a system for possible statements,” and discursive events, which are “finite and limited” to the given historical situation, or context.80 It is in this important distinction that Foucault explored Saussure’s views of language as “both an established system and an evolution.”81 Canguilhem argued in his review of Les Mots et les choses that Foucault’s “essential rupture” from the doxa of Saussure allowed him to examine preexisting concepts and to see them as historically constructed.82 By historically constructed, Canguilhem meant a distinctive and new model of historical method called “genealogy,” which Foucault had adapted from Nietzsche.83 A genealogy of words and images contrasted the essentializing historicity of language that began in the classical age, as Marin and Foucault had argued: When the Logique de Port-­Royal states that a sign can be inherent in what it designates or separate from it, it is demonstrating that the sign, in the Classical age is charged no longer with the task of keeping the world closer to itself and inherent in its own forms, but on the contrary, with that of spreading it out, of juxtaposing it over an indefinitely open surface, and of taking up from that point the endless deployment of the substitutes in which we conceive of it. And it is by this means that it is offered simultaneously to analysis and to combination, and can be ordered from beginning to end.84

In the writing on Magritte, Foucault attempted to delineate how this classical ordering—­so implicated with the idea of painting beginning in the seventeenth century, as Marin later conclusively established—­came to be “undone” (défait) by and overcome in the word and image paintings. If Magritte had called Foucault’s attention to the priority of his own 1928 picture-­essay on this subject, and if, as I have suggested, that caused Foucault to consider the importance of situating the problems presented by the larger history of word and image in paintings in his own writings on painting, it did not result in a conventional art history. This Is Not a Pipe

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attempts a balancing act between philosophy and art history. In so doing, it takes its distance from both while forging a method that relies on multiple viewpoints, multiple disciplinary transgressions, and the necessity of a reader/viewer/subject open to the transformation of the image released from painting that ensued. In the genealogical and predictive tone of his essay, Foucault remains unique among twentieth-­century artists (Duchamp, Picabia, Klee, Kandinsky, Magritte) and philosophers (Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Charles S. Peirce) who had investigated the nature of language and visual representation. As I turn to Foucault’s interpretation of the paintings by his contemporary and comrade Gérard Fromanger in the next chapter, we find the result of the image liberated from words and from painting (la peinture), as Foucault had hoped for.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Painting in the Light of Photography Fromanger’s Methods

In the series of eight monumental paintings dated 1965 and titled Live and Let Die; or, the Tragic End of Marcel Duchamp (Vivre et laisser mourir ou la fin tragique de Marcel Duchamp) (Reina Sofia, Madrid) (Plate 8), leading members of the art movement known as narrative figuration—­Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo, and Antonio Recalcati—­stressed the significance of the “death of art” that had begun in the early twentieth century with Dada and Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. The artists used the methods and means of traditional oil painting, such as figuration, portraiture, and the format of a sequential narrative series, to ironically memorialize Duchamp, who had pronounced oil painting dead.1 They declared: “To assassinate an old man is an ugly thing and, appearances to the contrary, one doesn’t do it light-­heartedly. But misery forbids luxury, and today, not by accident, Marcel Duchamp embodies a manner so excessive; that we want to give to humanity what it most lacks: the sense of adventure, the freedom of invention, the sense of anticipation, the power to overcome. We aim to intervene here.”2 In France in the mid-­1960s, the symbolic death of the father of antipainting at the hands of the narrative figuration painters marked a second life for oil painting in its traditional mode of sequential narrative and in its purpose as “history painting,” that is, painting that told the story of the past with a moral for the present. These artists intended a monumental painting of relevance for the present. Closely associated with the narrative figuration movement since the mid-­1960s, the painter Gérard Fromanger insisted on the political necessity of an activist engagement with the events of his time in his figurative painting.3 The current events painted by Fromanger referenced the turbulent radical politics—­including the politics of art—­of Paris in the late 1960s and 1970s. When he looked back on his early years, Fromanger avowed that narrative figuration painters were also conceptual artists because they sought to “re-­think the real in order to see it better.”4 Thus Fromanger claimed the mantle of both Duchamp’s conceptualism and

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history painting. For Fromanger and the others, painting had a particular role to play in the understanding of “cultural production”—­a term they borrowed from the Frankfurt School—­because it actively intervened in the present using the authority and traditional means of production of the history of art.5 Like his older narrative figuration colleagues, Fromanger used a figurative mode and worked in series, but in the 1970s his paintings differed in technique and process from theirs: he used projected photographic slides of “current events,” most of which he had photographed himself, as the bases for his compositions. These photographs were of a documentary kind and often not concerned with major news stories or events seen as news. He photographed life on the street or street scenes in which his own figure could later be implied in the painting with the trace of a silhouette or shadow in a contrasting color. For Fromanger, “seeing it better” meant photographing the motif and expanding it into a slide projection with his own presence at the scene part of the painting process. When Fromanger exhibited together with the narrative figurationists in 1977 in the exhibition The Guillotine and Painting (Guillotine et peinture), their curator Alain Jouffroy claimed that they had created “a new history painting.” This new history painting did not mean to serve either wealthy patrons or an academic elite, as painting had done in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nor did it seek a complacent bourgeoisie, as it had in the nineteenth century. Instead, “The new history painting of which I speak has something completely different from that of David and Topino, which is that it does not confuse history with the mise-­en-­scène of a tragedy. . . . But at the same time it does not eliminate history, it does not mix it up in the name of I do not know what nostalgic resurgence of ‘art for art’ or aestheticism. The new history painting simply enlarges the definition of history. It shows us that history is made everywhere, like love: with violence, but also with despair that also laughs at itself.”6 This new history painting and the rhetoric associated with it closely resembles Foucault’s explanation of “the living openness of history” found in The Archaeology of Knowledge.7 The philosopher described the characteristics of this new history as follows: A history that would be not division, but development [devenir]; not an interplay of relations, but an internal dynamic; not a system, but the hard work of freedom; not form, but the unceasing effort of a consciousness turned upon itself, trying to grasp itself in its deepest conditions: a history that would be both

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an act of long, uninterrupted patience and the vivacity of a movement, which in the end, breaks all bounds.8

Foucault’s vision of another kind of history—­a history that exhibited itself in all its contradictions and with a force equal to life itself—­converged with many of the goals and aims of the narrative figuration movement, but it was truly fulfilled, at least in a visual sense, in the paintings by Fromanger that were exhibited in 1975 in the exhibition Desire Is Everywhere (Le Désir est partout) at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris.

An Art Historical Transition In 2007 when Jouffroy looked back on the narrative figuration movement that he had earlier championed, he declared it a “transition between one epoch to another.”9 By this, Jouffroy meant that painting in the mode of figuration and narrative bridged the older era of the domination of painterly abstraction with pure form and no narrative content, and the coming one of the art image based in mass media, where form and content were completely malleable and unmoored from any referent. Jouffroy said: “The dogma of all of the artists and defenders of abstract art, which was so triumphant and omnipotent, was in effect to say: ‘It is finished, figuration is dead.’ This was in contradiction with what I could see.”10 Jouffroy’s perspective on the meaning of figurative oil painting at the dawn of the age of the image speaks to his desire to rectify the dominant art historical judgment that has tended over many decades to ignore or minimize the work of these Parisian artists, including Fromanger’s paintings from the 1970s. In this regard, Foucault’s essay on Fromanger, written at the artist’s request in 1975 for the catalog of the Desire Is Everywhere exhibition, is both an important document and a correction to the negative assessment of painting in that era (Plate 9).11 The negative assessment of painting in the 1960s and 1970s has functioned as a trope in the criticism of contemporary art and photography, with particular significance in the U.S. context.12 Jouffroy’s remarks indicated an important caveat for the French situation in that critical trajectory. He explicitly linked the strength of painting as a medium to its figuration, and in this mode Fromanger’s paintings remain even today securely situated. Foucault’s assessment of Fromanger, however, resists in many regards, although by no means completely, the elevation of figuration

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as the means by which to judge the paintings. Foucault engaged instead with the issues raised by photography in the work of the artist at this time. For this reason, Foucault’s essay on the artist intersects with another side of the argument against oil painting in the canon of 1970s art, that is, the relationship of painting to the discourse on photography. In this sense, Foucault’s essay should also be considered specifically in the context of the discussion of photographic theory, which began to emerge in the United States and France at the same time as his essay, and which flourished in the 1980s. According to Damisch, the attention to photographic theory at this time signaled a turn away from the enfolding of the history of photography into the history of art, where he thought it had been for too long: “Painting did not open the way for photography,” as he put it in 1990.13 Instead, the new attention to photographic theory that developed in the 1970s showed that photography had changed “the system of representation,” requiring another kind of theory of the image.14 Although Foucault’s essay on Fromanger has not been considered significant in this discussion of photography until now, his points converge with many of those found in French and American criticism at this time.15 The crisscrossings between the French and American criticism of photography should be expected from Foucault, whose presence in U.S. academic circles in the 1970s and early 1980s is well known. In addition, and no less importantly, Damisch and his alliances with the October writers Rosalind Krauss, Yve-­A lain Bois, and others should also be cited here, but my point should not be taken as biographical. The elevation of painting in France in the 1960s and 1970s including on the part of Foucault and Damisch, the attempted destruction of the Duchampian lessons of the readymade and the death of painting by the narrative figuration group, the insistence on a figurative painting as a new history painting—­a ll of these indicate that Foucault’s judgment of Fromanger should be seen as based in a specific cultural situation with political and critical resonance. Foucault’s essay took up the theme of the significance of oil painting for the representation of current events together with the ubiquity of the photographic image in contemporary culture. The tone that Foucault used to address these topics resembled that of an avant-­garde artist writing a manifesto for a movement: he embraced the first-­person plural using a rhetorical voice of repetition and hyperbole intended to question the status quo and exhort change. The most striking of these passages is the following:

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How can we recover the games of the past? How can we relearn, not just to decipher [déchiffrer] or to appropriate [détourner] the images imposed on us, but to create new images of every kind? Not just other films or better photographs, not simply to rediscover the figurative in painting, but to put images into circulation, to convey them, disguise them, deform them, heat them red hot, freeze them, multiply them. To banish the boredom of Writing, to suspend the privileges of the signifier, give notice to the formalism of the non-­image, to unfreeze content, and to play—­with all science and pleasure [plaisir]—­in, with, and against the powers of the image.16

This mode of address indicates that Foucault approached Fromanger’s work from a partisan position: the two were fellow activists in the Prison Reform Movement called Groupe Information Prison (GIP), founded in 1971 by Daniel Defert and his partner, Foucault.17 In 1973, just before his essay on Fromanger, Foucault wrote the preface to a book by Serge Livrozet, a member of the Comité d’action des prisonniers. In the introduction to the account of Livrozet’s imprisonment, Foucault asserted that this biography presented an entirely original form of discourse on prisons. Foucault said this new genre was neither a crime novel nor a psychologizing autobiography about the separation of the author from the normative society of his or her time. Foucault’s interest lay in what he termed “the white space” (l’espace blanc) of the forbidden discourse on prisons onto which Livrozet had projected a new form with his book.18 The analogy between Foucault’s understanding of the change in form or genre of Livrozet’s biography and Fromanger’s paintings emerges clearly. In the catalog essay, Foucault’s absorption in Fromanger’s process using the projection of photographic images onto the blank wall of the studio or onto the white canvas is striking.19 According to Foucault, Fromanger’s paintings exposed what could not be seen in any prior representation, just as Livrozet revealed the forbidden discourse of the prisoner. Fromanger’s paintings—­by virtue of their relationship to photography in the form of slide projection—­constructed a new genre of painting for history. Foucault wrote with the voice of a collaborator in the representation of current events in Fromanger’s painting. However, the artist had fully absorbed the political views on art of his colleagues in the narrative figuration movement before he met Foucault. When we find those same views on the reinvigoration of painting surfacing in Foucault’s essay, we may presume that their presence owes much to the artist.

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Moreover, Foucault gave Fromanger his own voice in the essay, paraphrasing him at the key point in his process when the slide projector is turned off and the picture becomes painting (la peinture): “He says it himself: for him the most intense and disturbing moment is when, having finished work, he turns off the projector, causing the photograph he has just painted to disappear and leaving his canvas to exist ‘all by itself.’”20 When the art historian Sarah Wilson recently judged Fromanger “the political artist of 1968 and its aftermath,” we should understand that important aspects of this judgment owe a great deal to Fromanger’s conception of history painting as expressed in Foucault’s essay on the artist.21 Critical assessments of Fromanger invariably mention the essay on the artist by Gilles Deleuze, written in 1973, a year before Foucault’s.22 The differences between their approaches to the artist were significant and reflect on Foucault’s archaeological method as it pertained to the history of art. Foucault’s expressive and partisan essay compresses a history of painting’s relationship to photography, including the technical innovations presented by Fromanger’s process, in order to pursue the meaning of the image transformed in contemporary society. Deleuze wrote in the more measured tones of the art critic, without the rhetorical address found in Foucault. He focused on the painterly aspects of the compositions in order to refer to the role of the image in individual paintings.23 In this regard, Deleuze’s thinking about the nature of the image in his essay on Fromanger had little to do with the extensive contemplation of the actions of the cinematic image in his later books.24 In contrast, Foucault’s essay incorporates a short history of photography together with a revision of the theory of the photographic image in order to champion Fromanger’s painting as a new method meant for contemporary times. In so doing, Foucault situates Fromanger’s contribution in the narrative of the development of modern art—­from the turning point of Las Meninas to the painting object critiques of Manet to the revisions of words with images of Magritte—­as I have argued in prior chapters.

Ut Pictura Photo? In the essay on Fromanger, Foucault took up painting and photography in light of the so-­called Paragone, a classical art theoretical topos that originated in the Renaissance and compared the relative merits of the arts to each other: painting to poetry, painting to sculpture, painting to architecture.25 Painting usually came out ahead in this

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rivalry, just as it does in Foucault’s comparison of Fromanger’s painting-­as-­image with other uses of photography by contemporary artists. According to Foucault, the hyperrealists Richard Estes (b. 1932) and Robert Cottingham (b. 1935) and the photorealists John Salt (b. 1937) and Ralph Goings (b. 1928) slavishly copied the effects of the photograph and fell under its commoditized and mass-­mediated spell. Foucault questioned these figurative practices and the even more contemporary pop art on the grounds of their similar uses of the photographic image: “Pop Art and hyperrealism have re-­taught us the love of images. Not by a return to figuration, not by a rediscovery of the object and its real density, but by plugging us in to the endless circulation of images. This rediscovery of the uses of photography is not a way of painting a star, a motorcycle, a shop, or the modeling of a tyre; but a way of painting their image, and exploiting it, in a painting, as an image.”26 Compressed into one sentence, Foucault here addressed the post–­World War II figurative painting that had employed the preexistent photographic image as part of the finished picture, apparently naming Warhol’s series on Marilyn Monroe and the silkscreens of the Mineola Motorcycle; Richard Hamilton’s interiors; and either Robert Rauschenberg’s “combine,” First Landing Jump, or his collaboration with John Cage called the Automobile Tire Print. For Foucault, to be merely “an image” meant not to be a painting, as he had demonstrated in his essay on Magritte’s word and image paintings, which concluded with the same criticism he found later in pop art: reference to “the endless circulation” of “the image itself,” that is, “Campbell, Campbell, Campbell,” as a form of exploitation.27 Similar criticisms of pop art in France could be found among the narrative figurationists a decade earlier. In the catalog of the major exhibition devoted to narrative figuration held at the Galerie Creuze in 1965, the critic Gérald Gassiot-­Talabot explained: “The immutable Marilyn of Warhol repeats itself indefinitely as a mirror trick. The Icon has devoured and immobilized space.”28 The point of painting was not to offer another icon to the history of art. Foucault’s criticism of this use of the photographic image in other contemporary painting practice contained a caveat. He said that these very artists “re-­taught us the love of images.” Pop and hyperrealist painters did something original, according to Foucault: in “the new painting” (la nouvelle peinture), they used photographs in two ways, both of which transformed the essential characteristic of the image as “endless circulation.”29 Foucault explained: “Firstly, as when we speak of painting a tree, or painting a face; whether they use a negative, a transparency, a printed photograph, or a silhouette, it doesn’t matter; they are not looking behind the image for what

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it represents, which perhaps they have never seen; they capture an image, not anything else. But they also paint images, as when an end is not a painting based on a photograph, nor a photograph made up to look like a painting, but an image caught in its trajectory from photograph to painting.”30 Fromanger’s paintings differed from these realist artists because they did not capture or arrest an empty image. His canvases had something like a surplus value in relation to the photograph, something “that goes further, and faster.”31 In addition, Foucault understood the uncaptured or liberated image in Fromanger’s work to be a significant conceptual shift in the history of the photographic image because the actual visible presence of the photograph no longer remained in the representation: “The paintings no longer need represent the street; they are streets, roads, paths across the continents, to the very heart of China or Africa.”32 The result of the liberated image, according to Foucault, pertains to painting’s temporality in relationship to history and to its global extension. History is visibly accelerated into the future in the paintings of the African-­French street-­cleaner series in the Desire Is Everywhere exhibition: “This is painting as a sling-­shot of images, a sling-­shot which with time shoots faster and faster.”33 For both Foucault and Fromanger, history’s forward movement in the paintings signaled social and political change. Thus, according to Foucault, the artist’s use of the photograph and the resultant projected image in his process went deeper than “the new painting” of the photorealists and pop artists because Fromanger represented not “an event which is taking place” but an event “which continues endlessly to take place in the image, by virtue of the image.”34 Foucault’s view of the persistence of history in Fromanger’s painting—­gained as a result of the forward-­moving image—­structures the argument of his essay and allows him to join the history of painting and the history of photography in an assessment of the painter’s revolutionary contribution to the history of art. Foucault moved chronologically through a short history of photography based on the comparison with painting. He began with Dominique Ingres, the nineteenth-­ century French painter of portraits and odalisques who, Foucault said, had regarded photography as a manual technology and therefore not permissible in an aesthetic of the beautiful: “Photography is very beautiful, but one cannot admit it.”35 According to Foucault, Ingres spoke at the very moment in the mid-­nineteenth century that “witnessed a new frenzy for images,” one in which painters and photographers happily mixed up the techniques and methods of their disciplines, without com-

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petition between them.36 This “insolent freedom that accompanied the birth of photography” affected photographers, painters, and printmakers ecumenically. This “golden age” of the image, as Foucault called it, came to an end circa 1900 with the professionalization of the photographer and the industrialization of photography.37 Foucault’s historical account continued: in response to the commercial turn in photography, painting “committed itself to the destruction of the image, while claiming to have freed itself from it.”38 By this Foucault meant that modernist abstraction took over in painting, with a distancing from resemblance and narrative. As the histories of painting and photography diverged at this crucial moment in the early twentieth century, the photographic image began to proliferate and gain power, without the accompanying pleasure formerly associated with figurative painting and art photography, as Ingres had suggested. Foucault argued that the magnitude of Fromanger’s contribution lay in his ability to bring the image back to a state of significance in relation to painting, and that, by so doing, he showed the continuing power of painting to manifest meaningful content based on contemporary events. Seeing the negation of the industrialized photographic image as a strength in his painting, Foucault also said that Fromanger’s use of the photographic image to generate the painting had nothing to do with the specific paintings it produced: “His images are innocent of any complicity with the future painting.”39 Below I discuss Fromanger’s technique of projecting slide images that “disappear” in the finished canvas. I said that Foucault’s essay began with a short history of photography. The specifics of his references and the subsequent understanding of the silhouette as central to Fromanger’s innovation reveal the importance of Gisèle Freund’s book Photography and Society, first published in French in 1974, the year before the Desire Is Everywhere exhibition.40 Much of Foucault’s thinking about the meaning of photography for contemporary painting relied on both the structure and the method of Freund’s book. By the time Foucault wrote on photography, it was perhaps not so new to consider it a “social” medium, particularly in France. But Freund’s understanding of the social and the political together in photography was seen through the lens of Frankfurt School cultural materialism: “Photography is a concrete example of how artistic expression and social forms continually influence and reshape each other.”41 It is a short step from this statement to Foucault’s view that Fromanger’s paintings of current events shaped and surpassed the social form of news photographs and snapshots taken on the street. The views of Freund and Foucault on photography

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emerge as even more consonant when contrasted with another contemporaneous approach to the medium in France: Pierre Bourdieu’s Photography: A Middle Brow Art (Un art moyen: Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie). This study examined the underlying “psychological conditions” for understanding the “photographic unconscious,” using an approach oriented to the individual.42 Bourdieu rejected the social imperative and the dialectical thinking found in Freund’s work on photography, which had been known since her Sorbonne dissertation of 1936. His psychological and individualistic approach to the photographic image differed greatly from Foucault’s and Fromanger’s orientation toward contemporary events and social situations. In Photography and Society, Freund had moved chronologically, basing her historical research and her argument on the early years of photography. It is worthwhile following the details of her argument on the origin of photography, to better understand Foucault’s shorthand version of the same history. Freund declared that photography was invented in order to make art, particularly portraiture, “accessible to everyone.”43 Protophotographic techniques using cast shadows and photogenic drawings assumed an important place in this account, because they evolved from the mid-­eighteenth-­century paper silhouette cutout, which Freund presumed had been the first “popular” art form in France. Importantly, Freund contended that the popular and historical significance of shadow and silhouette drawings continued to affect the terminology of all visual media: “To this day, anything as insubstantial as a shadow is called a silhouette.”44 Freund combined her discussion of these protophotographic techniques with the role of the physionotrace machine in it; she called it the “ideological predecessor” of photography. By this she meant that body was literally entailed in and shaped by photographic techniques and the resultant image from its beginnings. Freund moved directly from the physionotrace to the liberatory and democratic possibilities that the new medium of photography offered to French society in the 1820s and 1830s. She criticized the later industrialization of photography as “an all-­powerful industry that has penetrated every aspect of society.”45 From the beginning of Foucault’s essay, he took up and celebrated the possibilities of photography’s democratic origins, like Freund.46 At the same time, he disparaged the limited vision of nineteenth-­century painters, such as Ingres, who did not see the liberatory potential in photography. Foucault explained that Fromanger’s paintings intervened in the history of the photographic image by returning it to its

Figure 15. Edme Quenedey, drawing of a physionotrace, 1788. Bibliothèque nationale

de France.

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democratic possibilities. In his version of the history of the image, contemporary painting retrospectively gave back to photography the future it might have had: How might we recover this madness, this insolent freedom that accompanied the birth of photography? In those days images travelled the world under false identities. To them there was nothing more hateful than to remain captive, self-­identical, in one painting, one photograph, one engraving, under the aegis of one author. No medium, no language, no stable syntax could contain them; from birth to their last resting place, they could always escape through new techniques of transposition. These migrations and the vicissitudes they entailed offended no-­one, except perhaps some jealous painters or some bitter critic.47

Foucault argued that Fromanger’s paintings in series could follow the behavior of the image in preindustrialized photography, in what he termed its “combination,” “alternation,” “superimposition,” and “intertwining.” Painting could again achieve “a new freedom of transposition, displacement, and transformation, of resemblance and dissimulation, of reproduction, duplication and trickery of effect.”48 When Foucault asked, “How might we recover this madness, this insolent freedom that accompanied the birth of photography?,” the answer lay in Fromanger’s paintings.49

“Photogenic Painting” Foucault used the title La Peinture photogénique (Photogenic Painting) for his essay on Fromanger’s solo exhibition at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in order to make a pun on the term photogenic drawing (le dessin photogénique), a protophotographic technique also important to Freund’s history of photography. William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–­ 1877) coined the term photogenic drawing to refer to the results of his first, camera-­less photographic process on treated paper, derived from experiments announced in 1839: One of Talbot’s earliest images which, like his other photogenic drawings, was little more than the trace of a simple pattern or object. These are objects on paper and lack any sense of a three-­dimensional world basic to the spatial illusion of the photograph proper.50

Fox Talbot produced photographic “drawings” by placing objects on prepared white paper and exposing them to light.51 The results were flat silhouettes, or shadow images, in which only the outlines referred to the original object.

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Figure 16. William Henry Fox Talbot, Leaves of Orchidea, 1839. Photogenic drawing negative. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Foucault coined the punning term photogenic painting in order to link the so-­ called first photographic image produced as a silhouette with Fromanger’s process of projecting slide images of “pictures taken in the street, random photos, taken almost blindly,” that led to finished oil paintings.52 Fromanger’s paintings were no more realistic or “representational”—­no more like the photographic projections that engendered them—­than Fox Talbot’s photogenic drawings had been like their object or scene. The photographic “shadow” in Fromanger’s process produced another kind of image, “a painting left to exist ‘all by itself’” (laisse la toile exister “toute seule”).53 As such, the painted image unmoored from its ephemeral slide projection did not function as an index, which Rosalind Krauss in her influential theorization

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of the photographic image defined as “that type of sign which arises as the physical manifestation of a cause, of which traces, imprints, and clues are examples.”54 Pursuing Krauss’s theory of the photographic image further, we can state that in their status as images Fromanger’s paintings were not created according to means “internal to the photograph” alone “through a set of signs that are purely the functions of light.”55 The lights are off, as Foucault says, and the painted canvas exists on its own. Thus the painting neither retained its iconicity as a traditional painting nor could be considered like other images inextricably tied to a photograph. If Foucault had argued that Fromanger’s originality lay in his use of the projected slide image as the preparatory process for painting, it was because the artist had already understood its visual and transitory significance. Around the time that Foucault was preparing his catalog essay, the painter memorialized his studio process in two large self-­portraits, both of which explain in visual terms the method on which the philosopher relied for his critique. The first, a large canvas titled How To Make the Portrait of a Painting (Comment faire le portrait d’un tableau?) (Paris, Coll. Martine et Michel Brossard) was part of a series of ten other paintings with the same title used for the Desire Is Everywhere exhibition (Plate 10). Executed mainly in dark red and white—­perhaps an allusion to an older black-­and-­white photography adapted to the red tonalities produced by the technology of Kodachrome slide film—­the artist depicted himself in the darkened studio in front of the monumental projected image of a Parisian street scene. The light from the slide projector glows in the foreground on the left of the composition. Fromanger shows the small canvas that he is painting on the wall superimposed on the projected image. It has exactly the same grisaille ground on bright green found in the nine other canvases in the series. In his essay, Foucault noted that Fromanger painted alla prima—­the Italian Renaissance term for the technique of painting directly on the canvas without any underlying preparatory drawing. Foucault’s point was that the artist manipulated the projected image with his paint and brush, without it being directly produced by light, as a photograph. This separation from the replication techniques of photography gave the image an immediacy that signaled its political intensity to the viewer. The absence of the shadow cast by the artist’s body on the canvas in the Desire Is Everywhere exhibition struck Foucault as very different from Fromanger’s earlier work (ca. 1969–­71) in the Boulevard des Italiens and The Painter and the Model (Le Peintre et le modèle) series. There, the black shadow or red cutout images cast on the canvas by the artist’s silhouette or by those of passersby on the street were the

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very visible remains of the process of projection. These red and black silhouettes referenced both eighteenth-­century profile portraiture and protophotographic techniques. Foucault said that Fromanger maintained the integrity of the projected shadow or silhouette in the Desire Is Everywhere series, but without imitating it exactly: “Fromanger, however, elides the drawing stage. He applies the paint directly to the canvas screen [Il appliqué directement la peinture sur l’ écran de projection], without giving the colour any other support than a shadow—­this fragile pattern without line, on the verge of disappearance.”56 Here, Foucault described the very moment in the process that Fromanger represented in How To Make the Portrait of a Painting (Plate 10). In the earlier paintings where Fromanger had depicted himself as a black shadow or silhouette, he superimposed it on the surface of the picture, or he cut its shape out of the street scenes that he had painted in strong hues, as seen in Egyptian Violet (Violet d’Égypte) (Paris, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris) (Plate 11). Foucault called these shadow images “way-­marks or reference-­points.”57 They were also signs of the artist’s presence on the street where the photograph was taken. They were the literal marks, not photographic traces, of the artist’s presence in the process of projecting an image on the wall and applying paint to the canvas. In the later self-­portraits, Foucault surmises that the disappearance inherent to the process of turning off the slide projector “is incorporated in some way in the technique,” but that once off, the painting lost its “photographic substrate.”58 In the eight paintings of the Desire Is Everywhere series, the artist is absent, but the figure of a French African street cleaner became incorporated in the series as a silhouette of many hues. The black skin of the figure in the painting provides an indexical link to the black silhouettes used earlier by Fromanger. In these paintings, the figure of the street cleaner assumes monumentality because of the repetition of the source figure and its scale in relationship to the overall composition of each identically sized canvas. Fromanger used abstract lozenges of color, or color fields, to enhance the sense of the repetition of the original photographic composition, made singular through the variation in the paint colors. In a self-­portrait of 1975–­77, The Life of the Artist (La vie d’artiste) (Paris, private collection), Fromanger’s representation of his process becomes more complicated (Plate 12).59 Fromanger inserts himself into the picture of what Foucault termed his “photo-­event”: a painting of the revolt at Charles III Prison, Nancy, in which Foucault, Deleuze, and Fromanger had attempted to intervene as negotiators.60 In

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this canvas, colored silhouettes of the prisoners on the rooftop allude to similar figures in the earlier 1974 paintings of Toul Prison, about which Foucault had written: “Rebellious prisoners on a roof: a press photograph reproduced everywhere. But who has seen what is happening in it? What commentary has ever articulated the unique and multiple event which circulates in it?”61 Reminiscent of a scene from the film Dr. Strangelove (1964), the enormous prison painting on the wall of the studio in The Life of the Artist looms behind the seated figure of the artist in the foreground, who controls the large and almost comically complex projection apparatus. Like a figure caught in the physionotrace, Fromanger is visually entangled with the lines of bold colors that move out to the shadows projected on the wall. Here the monochromatic colors of green and white grisaille refer to the dominant tonality of Ektachrome slides. I have said that Foucault used the pun la peinture photogénique to indicate the double meaning that photography played in his essay on Fromanger’s paintings. The term not only described Fromanger’s signature method of composition—­his projection of slides of contemporary scenes on the studio wall, the application of paint directly on the canvas, and the completed painting that bears traces of shadows and silhouettes—­it also positioned the reader in the history of the medium to which Fromanger’s paintings refer and which they transform: photography. Fromanger’s process of slide projection raised for Foucault the central theoretical question of his inquiry into painting in this essay: if a photograph is, at its most basic level, “a picture, likeness, or facsimile obtained by photography,” then what is a painting if it is “obtained by photography?”62

Theories of the Image By making the analogy between painting and protophotographic processes, as he does throughout his essay, Foucault inserted the contemporary painter in the history and theory of photography and the image. In “Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image” (1963), Hubert Damisch warned that photogenic drawings provoked a dangerous impulse to theorize about the essential nature of the image qua image by using a phenomenological method.63 Damisch maintained that every photographic image had a history, which meant that a photograph—­even a protophotograph—­could not be understood only phenomenologically, no matter how attractive the “naked” image might appear to be for such an investigation. He

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argued that “the photographic situation cannot be defined a priori, the division of its fundamental components from its merely contingent aspects cannot be undertaken in the absolute.”64 Foucault’s view of photography took up this important insight offered by Damisch into the status of the image, that is, the photograph’s imbrication with the events and figures it depicts in the time of its making. Damisch’s proposition concerning the necessity of a historically situated photographic image recalls the words of Heinrich Wölfflin, who famously declared in his book on the principles of art history that vision has a history and that the revelation of the visual strata that make up this history constitutes the primary task of art history.65 He found the formal components of the artwork to be associative to contingent circumstances and counter to strict historicist methods. I have suggested in an earlier chapter that Wölfflin’s visual strata relate to Foucault’s use of material objects in the explanation of his archaeological method as a formal and historical process. Foucault said that in Fromanger’s paintings the visual and photographic “substrate” plays an important role that must be factored into the final painting. The “substrate” announced the situation of contemporary painting caught between photography and the social referent. Foucault wrote: “In the movement by which the painter removes the photographic substrate from the painting [le peintre ôte à son tableau son support photographié], the event slips through his hands, spreads out in a sheaf, gaining infinite speed, instantaneously joining and multiplying points and times, generating a population of gestures and looks, tracing a thousand possible paths between them. A painting peopled by a thousand present and future exteriors.”66 By removing what Damisch had termed the “fundamental component” of the “naked image,” Fromanger’s paintings revealed the contingent histories of the image on the canvas. Here again, as in the chapter on Las Meninas, Foucault is attracted to the dichotomy between invisibility and visibility. Damisch’s warning against the absolute idea of the image echoed for Foucault in his consideration of the aims of contemporary minimalism and color-­field painting. In his essay on Fromanger, Foucault denigrated the kind of painting that sought “to ‘purify’ itself, to sharpen and intensify itself as art.” In contrast, he claimed that “photogenic painting” allowed painting “to laugh at that part of itself which sought the intransitive gesture, the pure sign, the ‘trace.’”67 We have seen that throughout the Fromanger essay, Foucault situated contemporary painting in the context of the history of photography in order to explain the role that painting played in the contemporary discourse on the image. It was as if photography in the mid-­1970s

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needed painting to reveal the true nature of the contemporary image. Foucault asserted the purpose of Fromanger’s method in the following way: “To create a painting-­event on [sur] the photo-­event. To generate an event that transmits and amplifies the other, which combines with it and gives rise, for all those who come to look at it, and for every particular gaze that comes to rest on it, to an infinite series of new passages [pathways]. To create through the photograph-­colour short-­ circuit, not the fake identity of the old photo-­painting, but the source of a myriad surging images.”68 In some important sense, we should also recognize that Foucault sought to understand Fromanger’s paintings and their subsequent contribution to the theory of the image as a response to Roland Barthes’s famous 1964 essay, “Rhetoric of the Image.” Barthes considered the image in light of what he saw as a need “to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs.”69 Following Foucault’s argument, Fromanger’s paintings do not arrest Barthes’s mobile image of photography because they are made with a projection of a photograph on the studio wall, which in the process of painting disappears into another image, that is, the painting itself. For Foucault, the projection process used by Fromanger created a solution to the “question of meaning” presented by the image, which Barthes thought always emerged as a “dysfunction.” 70 In Barthes’s later theory of photography, the “dysfunctional sign” manifested as a deep melancholy at the center of the photographic image, a theory for the image distinct from the liberatory one created by Fromanger’s paintings, according to Foucault.71 Fromanger’s paintings allowed the image to be understood as something in surplus to the photographic image: they behaved neither as their image projections nor as earlier paintings. As such, they resolved a conceptual problem identified by Barthes as inherent to the image, that is, its inability to explain or reflect on itself. Foucault wrote: “Is there some depth in the photograph from which the painter wrests unknown secrets? No. This is rather the opening up of the photograph by painting, which itself evokes and communicates these unlimited images.” 72 In the new image proposed by contemporary painting, Foucault found a liberation from the earlier problems that a semiology of the image had posed when he investigated language in Les Mots et les choses and The Archaeology of Knowledge. In the latter, he had written of a method that allowed results in the analysis of discourse similar to the effect he saw in Fromanger’s paintings: “Instead of giving a ‘meaning’ to these units, this function relates them to a field of objects; instead of

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providing them with a subject, it opens up for them a number of possible subjective positions; instead of fixing their limits, it places them in a domain of coordination and coexistence; instead of determining their identity, it places them in a space in which they are used and repeated.” 73

The Image in Painting Foucault’s essay probing the significance of painting in relationship to the history of photography provides an alternative, and perhaps utopian, possibility for the contemporary image, which increasingly came to be considered with suspicion beginning in the 1970s. The narrative figuration artists had suggested that art, particularly painting, offered a way to counter the power of the image in contemporary society and to provide its critique: “Isn’t art also itself the saving power that we have sought with such urgency and a voice so weak? Art’s capacity to intervene in history is limited to the power of indicating. But in this it is not absolutely dead, it is not simply an area among all the others of cultural production.” 74 Deleuze commented in 1978 that Fromanger’s painting explicitly showed “art’s ability to extract lively differentiation from within consumerist repetition” and that, in so doing, it also functioned to expose its essential character as commodity.75 However, Foucault’s essay veered away from this Marxist-­inflected view of art as commodity to focus on the theoretical significance of painting for the understanding of the contemporary image. My interpretations of Foucault’s writings on painting in the earlier chapters of this book have revealed his keen and long-­lasting interest in the history of painting and art theory. “Photogenic Painting” brings that interest into the present—­the period covered in the essay extends from the mid-­nineteenth century to 1975—­and locates it together with the history of photography. Foucault mentioned photography and painting not infrequently from 1968 to 1976.76 Defert has explained the importance of contemporary art in Foucault’s life in the 1970s. Further, and as I have already noted, Defert and Foucault’s colleague Fromanger had been closely associated since the mid-­1960s with a movement that understood the history of photography to be intimately connected to the state of narrative oil paintings in the age of the image.77 Yet outside this critical milieu, Foucault’s essay on Fromanger has not previously been considered important to the central question in art criticism of the late 1970s and 1980s: the significance and status of painting in the age of the photographic image.78 Thus Foucault’s distinctive approach to Fromanger’s use of

116  Painting in the Light of Photography

Figure 17. Gérard Fromanger, In Hu-­Xian, China, 1974. Photograph by Philippe

Migeat. Musée National d’Art Moderne. Copyright CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-­ Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

photography in his essay might be seen as resisting analogy with contemporaneous American art criticism, just at the very moment when he came to know its culture best as a visiting scholar and lecturer. In the important Pictures exhibition of 1977, the American curator and art historian Douglas Crimp asked: “How did this shift to a new kind of representation come about?” 79 According to Crimp, the photographers in the exhibition upheld the “radical aspirations” of modernist art.80 Crimp argued that in these new kinds of photographs—­many of them achieved as a result of performances—­images exist as separate from the events they depict and ultimately refer to themselves mainly through associations made by viewers to their own experience. He wrote: “These artists seek the possibility in their work that the picture does not have to answer for its existence in the name of any signification whatever.”81 This view of “the picture” contradicts the ethical gloss that Foucault had consistently given painting and his-

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tory according to his methods. Since Les Mots et les choses, Foucault had maintained his view of painting as a privileged form of signification, which increasingly referred to its own meaning as knowledge. The essay on Fromanger intertwines that view with the possibilities offered by painting to photography. Foucault’s essay on Fromanger concludes with paintings of the artist’s trip to China with the documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens. Fromanger transcribed in paint the journalistic photographs of the unknown aspects of a hitherto-­unrepresented China. Both Fromanger and Ivens had projected—­one using slide apparatus, the other using cinematic apparatus—­images of major contemporary events of their time in order to make them understandable as politically and historically significant.82 According to Foucault, the success of Fromanger’s pictures, and by extension Ivens’s films, depended on the alignment of political content, artistic form, and the potential of image projection as a democratic method at the dawn of the age of the image. In In Hu-­Xian, China (1974) and the other paintings from this series, Foucault could even discern “the seven hundred millionth humble amateur,” that is, the democratic promise of early photography offered in Freund’s account.83 In Fromanger’s canvases, Foucault found a painting capable of true cultural détournement: it moved the viewer away from a worn-­out photographic aesthetic and from mass-­mediated imagery, toward an understanding of the image in its fullest possible historical existence for the present and a utopian future.

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CONCLUSION My interpretation of Michel Foucault on painting has followed the chronological approach taken by the philosopher to the questions raised by painting in both its historical and its philosophical dimensions.1 My analysis reveals the foundational significance of the first chapter on Las Meninas in Les Mots et les choses for his subsequent thinking about painting. The exemplarity of this canvas for Foucault lay not only in its canonical status in the history of European art but also in its historical position at the cusp of the classical age, when, according to the book’s larger argument, language, or prose, moved from integrating the given and the perceived to establishing the separation of subjective experience from things in the world. Foucault’s teacher Maurice Merleau-­Ponty had made exactly the same point about painting before the modern age: “Classical painting wants to be as convincing as things and does not think that it can reach us except as things do—­by imposing an unimpeachable spectacle upon our senses. It relies in principle upon the perceptual apparatus, considered as a natural, given means of communication between human beings.”2 Foucault’s remarkable reliance on the descriptive mode of writing familiar to art historians as formal analysis furthers the exemplarity of Las Meninas for the points he wanted to make about representation in language that were to follow the first chapter, for it provides the reader-­viewer with a way to understand the interpreter’s visual perceptions of the painting while stressing the impact of the “spectacle upon our senses.” This style of writing used by Foucault contrasted with the rhetorical structure of the other chapters of the book, which could be termed more “scientific” in that they employed a more historical, empirically driven style. As I have shown, Foucault first attempted a formal analysis of painting in his earlier book Folie et déraison. Although he was to use it extensively in the writings on art that followed Les Mots et les choses, he never again elaborated at such length about any painting using this mode of formal analysis, a hallmark of the discipline of art history. In fact, Foucault, in the character of historian just after the publication of Les Mots et les choses, maintained that his discursive style had been determined by the chronological period of the works he examined: “But I can define the modern age in its singularity only by contrasting it with the seventeenth century on the

120  Conclusion

one hand, and with us, on the other hand; so, in order to effect this transition it is necessary to bring out in all our statements the difference that separates us from it. It is a matter of pulling oneself free of that modern age which begins around 1790 to 1810 and goes up to about 1950, whereas for the Classical age it’s only a matter of describing it.”3 The importance of Merleau-­Ponty for Foucault on painting has come up consistently in this study. In this, Foucault differed little from his French contemporaries in art and architectural history, Hubert Damisch, and literature and art history, Louis Marin, both of whom explored theoretical aspects of painting and the image of consequence to Foucault, as I have argued. In “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” Merleau-­Ponty began with an homage to Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of linguistics: “What we have learned from Saussure is that, taken singly, signs do not signify anything, and that each one of them does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence of meaning between itself and other signs.”4 In an interview, Foucault acknowledged that Saussure had been a major influence in his exploration of “the relation between meaning and the sign” in Les Mots et les choses.5 I have found the same influence of Saussure as seen through the lens of Merleau-­Ponty in Foucault’s examination of the semiosis of René Magritte’s word and image paintings. Foucault’s focus on oil painting and the art historical canon—­seen as early as Folie et déraison—­as a primary means to explore visual signs and their characteristics derives also from “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.” Merleau-­Ponty wrote: “To begin with, oil painting seems to enjoy a special privilege. For more than any other kind of painting it permits us to attribute a distinct pictorial representation to each element of the object or of the human face and to look for signs which can give the illusion of depth or volume, of movement, of forms, of tactile qualities or of different kinds of material. . . . These processes, these secrets augmented by each generation, seem to be elements of a general technique of representation which ultimately should reach the thing itself (or the person himself), which cannot be imagined capable of containing any element of chance or vagueness, and whose sovereign function painting should try to equal.”6 In this passage, Merleau-­Ponty emphasized the importance of the strength of the bond between painting and the things in the world that it represents: its very “techniques and effects,” as Foucault termed them, had been determined by this requirement for the representation of reality and that reality determined the history of painting in the European tradi-

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tion.7 While Foucault accepted and studied this history of art, he did not find these determinants of visual discourse sufficient to an understanding of how painting operated as a system of thought. It is in this sense that his criticism of hyperrealism and pop in the essay on Fromanger should be understood. As with language, Foucault attempted—­first in the chapter on Las Meninas and then in his later writing—­to go beyond the givens of oil painting in order to better assess its larger philosophical significance for culture in modern and contemporary times. Foucault’s arguments concerning the pitfalls of the assumption of equivalence between words, images, and things in Magritte’s work perhaps reveal best the philosopher’s approach to one aspect of the system of painting that kept it from being understood as something more than a means for the representation of reality. Accepting Foucault on painting means, then, to question the very reality of a world that comes so beautifully represented in the scene before our eyes. As I have argued throughout this book, painting provided not only a field on which to test the limits of the representation of reality in a given historical period but also a ground on which to explore the limits of skepticism regarding that reality. In Foucault’s aesthetics, the pleasures of painting affirmed the depth of thinking required to truly understand its representation of the world. According to Foucault, the consequence of the separation of man from the world found in modern painting (and which began in the classical period) ultimately led to the estrangement of the modern social subject from his environment, from other humans and the social institutions erected for his benefit in modernity, and from his own subjectivity. These are the themes that Foucault pursued in his seminars at the Collège de France beginning in 1971 and that he tried increasingly to resolve by proposing a unique aesthetics of the self as a means of resistance to the contemporary dilemmas of subjectivity and existence. Paintings by his close contemporaries gave Foucault access to a similar critical approach to late twentieth-­century subjectivity, a point also suggested by Merleau-­Ponty, who had proposed: “Consequently, classical painting cannot be defined by its representation of nature or by its reference to ‘our senses,’ nor modern painting by its reference to the subjective.”8 Foucault’s argument in Les Mots et les choses was—­by his own lights at the very least—­mainly a historical one: how and when did modernity emerge? In the later writings on painting, Foucault became more and more interested in painting and its relationship to issues prevalent in the field of philosophy, including as I have shown, language theory in his study of Édouard Manet and early theories of the image coming out

122  Conclusion

of the history of photography in the essay on Gérard Fromanger. Even in these later writings, painting could be considered using methods proper to it alone and yielding topics and insights not seen or known anywhere else. My historiographical approach to Foucault’s texts has relied on and benefited from the perspective that retrospection allows for the interpretation of the texts in the context of Foucault’s larger body of writing. Retrospection has also allowed me to relate the writings on painting to the areas of art history and aesthetics that directly concerned Foucault, and with which his contributions must be reckoned, in order to assess their significance to thinking about art and images today. Despite a certain number of protestations to the contrary—­some of them his own—­Foucault’s thinking about painting should not be viewed only through a historical or even a historiographical lens. In establishing the significance of the scene of painting in the classical and modern periods—­in his chapter on Las Meninas and in his larger work on Manet—­Foucault discovered the value of painting for thinking about the situation of the subject in his own times, the late twentieth century. As any political theorist would, Foucault recognized himself in the contemporary subject, but he sought both to understand and to resist his situation. In this regard, the attitudes and techniques of artists themselves—­which are explored in all the writings examined here—­figured large in the philosopher’s administration of aesthetics to the exploration of the self, especially in the work on sexuality. The essays on Paul Rebeyrolle and Fromanger bear out the deep connection that Foucault found between the politics of the artist and his pictures, but so do many other remarks Foucault made on painting in interviews and essays during the latter part of his life. According to Foucault, the framing of the tableau, including its attendant formal and technical properties, within the larger field of a theory of painting, or peinture, reinforced the possibility of irony for the artist of the picture and for the philosopher-­viewer alike. This ironic approach also relates Foucault’s contribution in his writings on painting to an extension of the possibilities of what they and his interpretations of them might offer to a historiographical approach to art history, including my own. A historiographical approach of this kind might be said to provide an optic that stands above the texts that interpret paintings. It attempts to place its manner of writing in a context with other historical writing, such that the historian’s own approach or theory can be identified and understood as part of what his or her historical interpretation offers to thought. In the chapter on Las Meninas, for example, irony was figured by the painter who simultaneously stands back and

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away from his painting, the mirror that both conceals and reveals the power of the sovereigns in the field of representation, and the partially depicted window on the right side of the composition that lets in the light to reveal the scene of painting, otherwise obscured. Foucault’s examination and highlighting of self-­portraiture in the chapter on Las Meninas, the lecture on Manet, and the review of Fromanger’s exhibition Le Désir est partout corroborates my understanding of the significance of ironic self-­critique in painting for Foucault. Paintings “masked by the self”—­a conceptualization Foucault took from Friedrich Nietzsche—­called for the interpreter-­philosopher to examine the significance of his own position and how it operated in his knowledge system by examining that of the artist.9 The relationship of the artist to his painting as himself, suggested by the genre of self-­portraiture, proved fecund for Foucault’s own philosophical project, particularly those areas of it focused on the aesthetics of the self and on issues related to subjectivity. The consistent interest that Foucault found in the ironic possibilities of the identification of the artist with his picture should also be seen as part of his larger undertaking to dissemble the given of painting and to find in painting a visual philosophy. Taken together with his identification with the art critic Charles Baudelaire, found in his last essay “What Is Enlightenment?,” and the simultaneous skepticism he projected onto a Kantian aesthetics, we find that Foucault grapples with the significance of painting and the painter-­creator for his own philosophical project throughout his work. Foucault used irony to do more than simply historicize painting—­“to play the old off against the new,” to use Richard Rorty’s words.10 In this essential sense, Foucault did not work as a traditional or “liberal” art historian. Rather, the aspects he explored of painting understood as a historical system of visual knowledge with the artist-­ creator at the center of it allowed him to see the potential of the incongruities in what is depicted and what may be seen. These incongruities in the scene of painting could be used to explain the impact of the system to others and to understand the role of the interpreter in relation to it in ways that consistently referred back to the radical project of philosophy itself.

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NOTES Preface 1. There is a substantial literature in art history on this issue. See especially Frank Zöllner, “‘Ogni pittore dipinge sè’: Leonardo da Vinci and ‘automimesis,’” in Der Künstler über sich in seinem Werk, Internationales Symposium der Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rom 1989, edited by Matthias Winner (Weinheim: VCH, 1992), 137–­60, http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/artdok/161/1/Zoellner_Kuesisw_92. 2. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), 134. 3. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question concerning Technology, translated by William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977), 115–­54. 4. Michel Foucault, “Une interview de Michel Foucault par Stephen Riggens,” in Dits et Écrits II: 1976–­1988, edited by Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jean Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1355. 5. Most immediately, I have in mind Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies: Homo Sacer IV, 2, translated by Adam Kotsko (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015), but there are of course many other citations that could be made here. 6. I cite here from the publicity for the conference “Painting beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-­Medium Condition,” held at the Sackler Museum, Harvard University, April 12–­13, 2013, http:// paintingbeyonditself.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do. Most important for an understanding of the critical background and historical foundations of painting in this period, see Yve-­A lain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). 7. I owe this insight to my correspondence with Mathew Barr, whose dissertation on Foucault at the Courtauld Institute, University of London, I have not consulted. 8. Thomas Hirschhorn, “Philosophical Battery,” Flash Art, no. 238 (October 2004), http://www .papercoffin.com/writing/articles/hirschhorn.html. This is an interview given as a result of the installation by Hirschhorn called 24h Foucault at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, celebrating Foucault on the twentieth anniversary of his death. 9. Michel Foucault, “The Force of Flight,” translated by Gerald Moore, in Space, Knowledge, and Power: Foucault and Geography, edited by Stuart Elden and Jeremy Crampton (Abingdon, U.K.: Ashgate, 2007), 169; Foucault, “La Force de fuir,” in Dits et Écrits I: 1954–­1975, edited by Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jacques Legrange (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1269: “Vous êtes entré. Vous voici cerné par dix tableaux, qui entourent une pièce dont toutes les fenêtres ont été soigneusement fermées. [paragraph break] En prison, á votre tour, comme les chiens que vous voyez se dresser et buter contre les grillages?” 10. Foucault, “Force of Flight,” 169; Foucault, “La Force de fuir,” 1269. 11. Foucault, “Force of Flight,” 172; Foucault, “La Force de fuir,” 1272. 12. Michel Foucault, “La Peinture photogénique / Photogenic Painting,” in Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, Gérard Fromanger: Photogenic Painting / La Peinture photogénique, edited by Sarah Wilson (London: Black Dog, 1999), 102.

126  Notes to preface 13. Gary Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 14. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, edited and translated by Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), first published in French in 1986. For a longer discussion of Deleuze on Foucault and painting, see Catherine M. Soussloff, “Deleuze on Foucault: The Recourse to Painting,” in Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the Twenty-­First Century, edited by Catherine M. Soussloff (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 149–­64. 15. Stefano Catucci, “La Pensée picturale,” in Michel Foucault, la littérature et les arts: Actes du Colloque de Cerisy-­Juin 2001 (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2004), 127–­4 4. 16. Joseph J. Tanke, Foucault’s Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity (London: Continuum, 2009). 17. Ibid., 12. 18. See my more extensive arguments concerning Merleau-­Ponty and Foucault in Catherine M. Soussloff, “Michel Foucault and the Point of Painting,” Art History 32 (September 2009): 734–­54. Republished in Art History: Contemporary Perspectives in Method, edited by Dana Arnold (London: John Wiley and Sons, 2010), 78–­98. 19. Michael Kelly, “Foucault on Critical Agency in Painting and the Aesthetics of Existence,” in A Companion to Foucault, edited by Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki (Hoboken, N.J.: Blackwell, 2013), 246.

Introduction 1. Daniel Arasse, “Éloge paradoxal de Michel Foucault à travers Les Ménines,” in Michel Foucault, edited by Philippe Artières et al. (Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 2011), 265. This essay first appeared as a radio transmission for France Culture in 2003 under the title Histoires de peintures, now available in text format: Arasse, Histoires de peintures (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 2004). 2. See Foucault’s lengthy introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s book Dream and Existence, which was translated and published in French by Jacqueline Verdeaux in 1954. For the English edition, see Forrest Williams, ed., “Dream, Imagination, and Existence,” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 19 (1984–­85): 29–­85. 3. Georges Bataille, Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art (Lausanne: Skira, 1955). 4. Arasse, “Éloge paradoxal,” 267. 5. Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 19–­31. The book was first published in English as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), with the addition of a foreword, different pagination, and in the case of chapter 1, a different title; see pp. 3–­16. See my chapter 1 for further discussion of the matters concerning the descriptive bibliography of this book. For reasons related to the points made in this chapter concerning date of publication and significance of title, henceforth this book is called out in the text under the French title, but citations are given in the English edition. 6. An illuminating discussion of the meaning of norms and normativity for Foucault’s historical method may be found in François Ewald, “Michel Foucault et la norme,” in Michel Foucault: Lire l’oeuvre, edited by Luce Giard (Grenoble: Editions Jérome Million, 1992), 201–­21. 7. Daniel Defert’s chronology of Foucault’s life and writings gives many indications of Foucault’s long-­standing interest in painting. See Defert, “Chronologie,” in Foucault, Dits et Écrits I, 13–­90. See

Notes to introduction  127 also Defert, “Sehen und Sprechen für Foucault,” in Foucault und die Künste, edited by Peter Gente (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 58–­77. The author remains grateful to Daniel Defert for conversation on this topic. Although neither scholar explicitly addresses Foucault on painting, I have found the following studies of Foucault’s significance for the history of thought most significant to my own thinking about the place of the visual arts in Foucault’s larger body of work: Paul Rabinow, introduction to The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 3–­29; and Paul Veyne, Foucault: Sa pensée, sa personne (Paris: Albin Michel, 2008). 8. Michel Foucault, History of Madness, edited by Jean Khalfa, translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), 16. 9. Ibid., 21. 10. In 1937 the French art historian Charles de Tolnay characterized the central panel as a “resumé of the universe” (Hieronymus Bosch [Baden-­Baden: Reynal and Company, 1966], 357). In 1960 Ludwig von Baldass asserted that Bosch had studied insane persons for the figures in the central panel (Hieronymus Bosch [New York: Abrams, 1960], 47). 11. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Random House, 1975), xi. Dominick LaCapra discusses the belatedness of language in regard to the visibility of painting in “Rereading Foucault’s ‘History of Madness,’” in History and Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 123–­68. 12. Arasse, “Éloge paradoxal,” 267. 13. Ibid.: “Elle [la peinture] n’est pas obligée de représenter les concepts du temps; elle le peut, mais comme elle n’est pas verbalisée, elle peut figurer autre chose que ce qui se conceptualise à l’époque.” In a recent essay Joseph Tanke has addressed the issue of what painting does both to the history of painting and to the viewer in relation to Foucault’s distinctive archaeological method, with conclusions rather different than Arasse (who is not cited). See Tanke, “On the Powers of the False: Foucault’s Engagements with the Arts,” in A Companion to Foucault, edited by Christopher Falzon et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), 122–­36. 14. For a general idea of what art historical methods consisted of at this time, see W. Eugene Kleinbauer, Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of Twentieth-­Century Writings on the Visual Arts (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971). 15. Veyne, Foucault, 14. 16. Deleuze, Foucault. See also Soussloff, “Deleuze on Foucault.” 17. In “The Prose of the World,” the chapter that follows the analysis of Las Meninas, Foucault unravels the very notion of similitude in language as the preamble to his discussion of the representational function of language (Order of Things, 45). 18. I have discussed at length the issue of savoir in regard to Las Meninas in my essay “Michel Foucault and the Point of Painting,” 78–­98. First published in Art History 32 (September 2009): 734–­54. 19. The issue of art history as a particularly humanistic discipline has been discussed extensively, but the foundational text is Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 1–­25. Foucault’s books on madness, the clinic, and language have all been seen as critiques of humanism and the anthropocentrism he associated with it. See, for example, LaCapra, “Rereading Foucault’s ‘History of Madness,’” 123–­68. 20. Paul Valéry, “Léonard et les philosophes (1929),” in Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 119–­67: “Je ne vois pas pourquoi les uns et les autres n’adopteraient pas notre

128  Notes to introduction Léonard auquel la peinture tenait lieu de philosophie?” (167). For a discussion of and bibliography on Valéry’s studies of Leonardo da Vinci in regard to the knowledge in painting, see my article “The Trouble with Painting: Image (less) Text,” Journal of Visual Culture 4 (Summer 2005): 203–­36. 21. I have in mind here the 1981 essay by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression,” in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, edited by Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992), 107–­34, where painting is called “the perfect mirage,” “shop windows decorated with fragments and quotations of history,” “an obsolete mode.” 22. Foucault, Order of Things, 387. 23. Foucault, “La Peinture photogénique / Photogenic Painting,” 83–­104, 102. 24. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, translated by Robert Hurley et al. (New York: New Press, 1997), 319. Also published in a slightly different translation in Rabinow, Foucault Reader, 32–­50. This essay is from an unpublished manuscript dated 1984. For the complex issues around the dating of the manuscripts of Foucault’s lecture and for a discussion of the idea of the present in the lecture, albeit without reference to art or painting, see especially Judith Revel, “‘What Are We at the Present Time?’: Foucault and the Question of the Present,” in Foucault and the History of Our Present, edited by Sophie Fuggle et al. (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 13–­25. 25. In 1972 Foucault explained his attempts to “detach” history “from the ideological system in which it originated and developed” in these terms. See Foucault, “Return to History,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, by Michel Foucault, edited by James D. Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley et al. (New York: New Press, 1998), 423. 26. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 305. 27. Ibid. 28. Sima Godfrey, “Foucault’s Baudelaire,” in Soussloff, Foucault on the Arts and Letters, 105–­19. 29. For Benjamin on Baudelaire, see Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, edited by Michael W. Jennings, translated by Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). 30. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 310. 31. Foucault, Order of Things, 5. 32. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 311. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Paul Veyne, “The Final Foucault and His Ethics,” translated by Catherine Porter and Arnold Davidson, Critical Inquiry 20 (Autumn 1993): 7. 36. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Random House, 1972), 192–­95. 37. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1985), 10–­11. 38. Arnold Davidson, “Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought,” in Foucault and the Writing of History, edited by Jan Goldstein (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994), 66–­67. In conversation with me in 2009, Davidson underlined his view that Foucault’s views on ethics and aesthetics pertained particularly to the books on sexuality. That Foucault’s entire later philosophical project is concerned with the “aesthetics of existence” is a view expressed today by many of his French interpreters and translators. See especially Frédéric Gros, “The Aesthetics of Bios,” translated

Notes to introduction  129 by Sima Godfrey, in Soussloff, Foucault on the Arts and Letters, 199–­2 06. See also Frédéric Gros, “De Borges à Magritte,” in Michel Foucault, la littérature et les arts, 15–­22. 39. Davidson, “Ethics as Ascetics,” 63. 40. Michel Foucault, “À quoi rêvent les philosophes?,” in Dits et Écrits I, 1574: “Ce qui me plaît justement dans la peinture, c’est qu’on est vraiment obligé de regarder. Alors là, c’est mon repos. C’est l’une des rares choses sur lesquelles j’écrive avec plaisir et sans me battre avec qui que ce soit.” 41. See Catucci, “La Pensée Picturale,” 129. Shapiro uses Foucault’s remarks on painting in this interview at the beginning of a long chapter on the interrelationships between Foucault’s approach to painting, dreams, and literature. See Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, 193–­216. 42. Foucault, “À quoi rêvent les philosophes?,” 1574: “Je crois n’avoir aucun rapport tactique or stratégique avec la peinture.” 43. Michel Foucault, An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), 57. 44. Ibid. 45. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 35. 46. Ibid., 38. 47. Ibid., 42. 48. For this understanding of painting, see first and foremost Hubert Damisch, The Judgment of Paris, translated by John Goodman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 49. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 40. On this point and the important aspects of Foucault’s idea of pleasure that follow here, jouissance, as in his contemporary Roland Barthes, and Lust (pleasure and unpleasure), as in Sigmund Freud’s theories, have little bearing other than as concepts of pleasure against which Foucault thought his own. See Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975). Barthes briefly mentions painting, relates it to fleeting desire, and calls it precocious (52). On Freud’s meanings, see Jean Laplanche and Jean-­Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-­Analysis, translated by Donald Nicholson-­Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 322–­25. 50. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 66. 51. Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846,” in Art in Paris, 1842–­1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions, edited and translated by Jonathan Mayne (Oxford: Phaidon, 1965), 41. 52. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, vol. 3 of The History of Sexuality, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1986), 139. 53. Ibid. 54. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 139. 55. Ibid., 37. 56. I take my definition of the meaning of aesthetics today from Michael Kelly, “Preface to the Second Edition,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1:xxi. 57. Kelly, “Foucault on Critical Agency in Painting,” 243–­63. Kelly’s points in this essay intersect with many of mine regarding the role of painting in Foucault’s later philosophy, which Kelly and I have discussed. Kelly argues for Foucault’s conception of critical agency as related to the aesthetics of existence (ethics) and to painting as a place where many of his views about these issues converge. 58. Deleuze, Foucault, 80. 59. Louis Marin, “Description of the Image: Concerning a Landscape by Poussin,” in Sublime Poussin,

130  Notes to introduction translated by Catherine Porter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 33. The article first appeared in Communications 15 (1970): 186–­208. 60. Ibid., 43. 61. Ibid., 61. 62. Foucault, “À quoi rêvent les philosophes?,” 1574. 63. When the two had discussed the issue of power in 1972, their differing positions on desire had already been obvious. See Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power,” in Language, Counter-­Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, by Michel Foucault, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 205–­17. In a later interview, Foucault explicitly stated that he had no kinship with Deleuze’s concept of desire. See Michel Foucault, “Structuralism and Post-­Structuralism,” in Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 446. 64. Gilles Deleuze, “Desire and Pleasure,” translated by Daniel W. Smith in Foucault and His Interlocutors, edited by Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 188. 65. Arnold Davidson, “Structures and Strategies of Discourse: Remarks towards a History of Foucault’s Philosophy of Language,” in Davidson, Foucault and His Interlocutors, 1–­17. 66. The quotation is from Douglas Fogle, The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960–­1982 (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 10–­11, referring to Debord and “the society of the spectacle.” In art theory and history, the compression of the period between ca. 1965 and ca. 1983 in the study of “the image” in contemporary criticism makes it all the more challenging to discern Foucault’s role in it, and there is much work to be done on this important period. See my chapter 5. 67. Image-­thinking is a term I have previously used and defined in order to understand the predominant issues of visuality in contemporary culture. See Soussloff, “Image-­times, Image-­histories, Image-­t hinking,” in Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context, edited by Tyrus Miller (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), 145–­70.

1. Systems of Art Historical and Philosophical Thought 1. Michel Foucault, “Les Suivantes,” in Dits et Écrits I, 492–­506. 2. Steven Z. Levine’s recent analysis of Lacan’s response to Foucault’s article is extremely helpful in regard to the latter’s views. See Levine, Lacan Reframed: A Guide for the Arts Student (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), 91–­110. 3. Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, translated by John Goodman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), xiii–­x iv. For later French analyses of the painting concerned with Foucault, see especially Victor Stoichita, L’Instauration du tableau: Métapeinture à l’aube des temps modernes, 2nd ed. (Geneva: Droz S. A., 1999); Daniel Arasse, “L’oeil du maître (Les Ménines de Velázquez),” in On n’y voit rien: Descriptions (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 2000), 177–­216; and my introduction and chapter 2 here. 4. Damisch, Origin of Perspective, 422–­47. On Damisch and the “theoretical object,” see my essay “Ultimo Bagaglio par Hubert Damisch et Ken Lum: L’objet théoretique et la pensée en peinture,” in Hubert Damisch, l’art au travail, edited by Giovanni Careri and Georges Didi-­Huberman (Paris: Mimésis, 2016), 169–­87. 5. On the controversies surrounding the book, see Paul Veyne, “Foucault Revolutionizes History,” translated by Catherine Porter, in Foucault and His Interlocutors, 146–­82. This essay originally appeared

Notes to Chapter 1  131 in French in 1978. More recently, scholars continue to see the book as a rupture in both the methods used to analyze history and the conclusions drawn about the nature of visual and textual representation. See Philippe Sabot, Lire “Les mots et les choses” de Michel Foucault (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006). For the best summary in English of Foucault’s contributions in the book to philosophy, with relevant bibliography from Foucault’s own remarks, see Davidson, “Structures and Strategies of Discourse,” 1–­17. See also Gary Gutting, “Michel Foucault: A User’s Manual,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, edited by Gary Gutting, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–­28. 6. I cite here in chronological order the most significant American responses to Foucault’s chapter on Las Meninas: John Searle, “Las Meninas and the Paradoxes of Pictorial Representation,” Critical Inquiry 6 (Spring 1980): 447–­88; Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen, “Las Meninas: Paradox Lost,” Critical Inquiry 7 (Winter 1980): 429–­47; Leo Steinberg, “Velázquez’ ‘Las Meninas,’” October 19 (Winter 1981): 45–­54; Svetlana Alpers, “Interpretation without Representation, or, The Viewing of Las Meninas,” Representations 1 (February 1983): 30–­4 2; Joel Snyder, “Las Meninas and the Mirror of the Prince,” Critical Inquiry 11 (June 1985): 539–­72; Geoffrey Waite, “Lenin in Las Meninas: An Essay in Historical–­Materialist Vision,” History and Theory 25 (October 1986): 248–­85; W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Amy M. Schmitter, “Picturing Power: Representation and Las Meninas,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54 (Summer 1996): 255–­68; Byron Ellsworth Hamann, “The Mirrors of Las Meninas: Cochineal, Silver, and Clay,” and “Responses” by Adam Herring, Walter D. Mignolo, Felipe Pereda, Suzanne L. Stratton-­Pruitt, Emily Umbergere, Francesca Bavuso, and Hamann, Art Bulletin 92 (March–­June 2010): 6–­60. 7. A key exception was the 1966 review of the book by Foucault’s mentor, Georges Canguilhem, now published in English. See “The Death of Man, or Exhaustion of the Cogito?,” translated by Catherine Porter, in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 74–­94: “Les Mots et les choses took a text by Borges as its starting point (xv), and it looked to Velasquez and Cervantes for the keys to a reading of the Classical philosophers. The year it appeared, a printed invitation to the Fourth World Congress of Psychiatry was adorned with the effigy of Don Quixote, and a Picasso exhibit in Paris recalled the still contemporary enigma of the message entrusted to Las Meninas. Let us utilize Henri Brulard’s term espagnolisme, then, to characterize the philosophical cast of Foucault’s mind. For Stendhal, who detested Racine in his youth and trusted no one but Cervantes and Ariosto, espagnolisme meant hatred for preachiness and platitudes. To judge by the moralizing reproaches, the outrage, and the indignation aroused in many quarters by Foucault’s work, he seems to take direct, if not always deliberate, aim at a type of mind that is as flourishing today as it was during the Bourbon Restoration” (75). For a quantitative and somewhat limited narrative account of the early receptions of Foucault’s major books in France and the Anglo-­A merican contexts, see Alan Megill, “The Reception of Foucault by Historians,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (January–­March 1987): 117–­4 1. Megill’s narrow definition of the discipline of history restricted him from discussing Foucault’s reception in art history, although he mentions it on pp. 119–­20. 8. See Stefan Gronert, “Alternative Pictures: Conceptual Art and the Artistic Emancipation of Photography in Europe,” translated by Jeanne Haunschild, in Fogle, Last Picture Show, 86–­96. 9. For the date and occasion of Foucault’s first visit to the United States, see the annotated Bibliography and Acknowledgements in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–­1984, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, translated by Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 475. The

132  Notes to Chapter 1 argument that follows here on the significance of Foucault’s chapter on Las Meninas for American art history has not generally been observed by specialists on Velázquez, who focus on the interpretation of the painting, rather than on the meaning of Foucault’s chapter for the history of art. See, for example, Suzanne L. Stratton-­Pruitt, “Introduction: A Brief History of the Literature on Velázquez,” in The Cambridge Companion to Velázquez, edited by Suzanne L. Stratton-­Pruitt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–­10. 10. Colin Gordon, preface to Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–­1977, by Michel Foucault, edited by Colin Gordon, translated by Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Random House, 1980), vii. Gordon’s preface, written in 1980, is an excellent source of information on the reception of Foucault in the United States in the 1970s. 11. I am quoting here from Canguilhem’s assessment of the meaning of Foucault’s concept of archaeology for history (“Death of Man,” 78). 12. “In this way I tried to describe the combination of corresponding transformations that characterized the appearance of biology, political economy, philology, a number of human sciences, and a new type of philosophy, at the threshold of the nineteenth century”; and “In this work, then, I left the problem of causes to one side; I chose instead to confine myself to describing the transformations themselves, thinking that this would be an indispensable step if, one day, a theory of scientific change and epistemological causality was to be constructed” (Foucault, Order of Things, xii, xiii). 13. See, for example, W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 60, who called the painting a “metapicture” and said that Foucault’s chapter was responsible for its changed status in the historiography of art: “Like Wittgenstein, Foucault sprung his metapicture loose from a professional discourse where it had an assured status and meaning into another way of speaking.” 14. I list here the most often cited of these earlier discussions of the painting, in their English-­ language versions: Antonio Palomino, Lives of the Eminent Spanish Painters and Sculptors, translated by Nina Ayla Mallory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Carl Justi, Diego Velázquez and His Times, translated by A. H. Keane (London: H. Grevel, 1889); Charles de Tolnay, “Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas and Las Meninas (an Interpretation),” Gazette des Beaux-­Arts, 6th ser., 35 (1949): 21–­38; George Kubler, “Three Remarks on the Meninas,” Art Bulletin 48 (1966): 212–­1 4. See also the later essay by Jonathan Brown, “On the Meaning of Las Meninas,” in Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-­Century Spanish Painting (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 87–­110. 15. In the Foreword to the English edition, Foucault explicitly stated that his book had nothing to do with structuralism (Order of Things, xiv). He was correct. The American art historians who have referred to his interpretation of the painting as “structuralist” have done so in error. The French critics of the book had seized on the antistructuralist approach to history used by Foucault, on which they based some of the harshest criticism. See Canguilhem, “Death of Man.” There are serious disagreements over “the moment of French theory” in art history: see Philip Armstrong, “Impossibilities: Painting between Jean-­François Lyotard and Philippe Lacoue-­L abarthe,” and John Rajchman, “How to Do the History of French Theory in the Visual Arts: A New York Story,” both in French Theory and American Art, edited by Anaël Lejeune et al. (Brussels: (SIC); Berlin: Sternberg, 2013), 268–­83, 244–­65. Armstrong sees the early 1980s as the beginning of French theory in contemporary Anglo-­ American art history. Rajchman understands the “preliminary encounter” of French theory and the visual arts to have occurred in 1975–­76 and the fact of its institutionalization as a foregone conclusion by 1980. In a brilliant and complex analysis of the place of Foucault’s theory in contemporary

Notes to Chapter 1  133 art of the 1970s, Rajchman focuses on the first English publication of Foucault’s essay “This Is Not a Pipe,” in the first issue of October (Spring 1976), but he concludes that Foucault’s real influence redounds to his subsequent essays on subjectivization and sovereignty and not on art. For Rajchman, the influence of Foucault’s pipe essay must first be traced back to France through Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster (not published in English until 1991) and “in his works on contemporary art practices and debates surrounding the ideal of ‘the common’” (“How to Do the History of French Theory,” 261). For my arguments on the historiography of Foucault’s “This Is Not a Pipe,” see chapter 4 here. 16. Given the strength of the concept and period of the baroque in arts and humanities today, it is all too easy to miss the significance of the introduction of a “good” baroque into the discipline beginning circa 1950 with the work of Roberto Longhi on Caravaggio, Il Caravaggio (Milan: A. Martello, 1952). The recent exhibition in Paris, Longhi’s Baroque, situated the importance of this art historian for the reception of the period style in the discipline of art history. See De Giotto à Caravage: Les Passions de Roberto Longhi (Paris: Musée de Jacquemart André, 2015). On the significance of the baroque period and its art theory in Anglo-­A merican art history, the work of Denis Mahon is seminal: see Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1947). Realism and naturalism played a major role in the emergence of the significance of the baroque in art history after World War II, which explains, in part, the early establishment of Velázquez in that canon. For a discussion of this issue in the Italian context, see Charles Dempsey, Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style (Glückstadt: Augustin, 1977). 17. The chronological priority of Searle’s philosophy of language approach to Las Meninas, as well as his refusal to engage with any of the earlier literature on the painting, including not acknowledging Foucault, could be seen as provocation to the art historical analyses that followed. See Searle, “Las Meninas and the Paradoxes of Pictorial Representation,” 447–­88. 18. Alpers, “Interpretation without Representation,” 36. 19. Shapiro remarks on the differences between Foucault’s method of reading visual images and Panofsky’s (Archaeologies of Vision, 209). 20. On Panofsky’s view of “symbolic language,” see Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984); and Karen Lang, Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006). See also Illaria Fornacciari, “The Complexity and Stark [sic] of Pictorial Knowledge: About Foucault Reading Panofsky,” Images: Journal for Visual Studies 2 (n.d.), www.visual-studies.com/images/no2/fornacciari, who provides a useful intellectual background to Panofsky’s reception in France, but whose conclusions on Foucault’s assessment of him differ significantly from mine. 21. Foucault, “Les Mots et les images,” in Dits et Écrits I, 649. This essay was originally published as “Les Mots et les images,” Le Nouvel Observateur 154 (October 1967): 49–­50. 22. Foucault, “Les Mots et les images,” 649. 23. Ibid., 651. 24. Foucault, Order of Things, xi. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Steinberg, “Velázquez’ ‘Las Meninas,’” 52. On the significance of Foucault’s approach to the problem of “vision” and to visual issues, see the influential account of Martin Jay, “From the Empire of the Gaze to the Society of the Spectacle: Foucault and Debord,” in Downcast Eyes: The Denigration

134  Notes to Chapter 1 of Vision in Twentieth-­Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 381–­434, where Steinberg on Foucault is not mentioned. 28. On the historiography of “visual culture studies” in the discipline of art history, see Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011). For an exemplary visual culture approach to Las Meninas, see Hamann, “Mirrors of Las Meninas.” 29. Foucault, “Return to History,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 427–­28. 30. See Defert, “Chronologie,” in Dits et Écrits I, 41–­53. Also called Le noir et la surface. 31. Michel Foucault, Michel Foucault: La Peinture de Manet, edited by Maryvonne Saison (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004), 21–­47; Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, translated by Matthew Barr (London: Tate, 2009). For the Manet lecture, see “Le Noir et la surface” (Foucault’s notes transcribed and annotated) in Artières et al., Michel Foucault, 379–­95. 32. The picture essay by Magritte and its publication history are found in Écrits complets, edited by André Blavier (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 61–­63. The essay with pictures by Magritte was published in English in Patrick Waldberg, Magritte (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), 172. See chapter 4 here, where I argue that Foucault knew this book. 33. Foucault, “Les Mots et les images,” in Dits et Écrits I, 648–­51. 34. Michel Foucault, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” Les Cahiers du chemin, January 15, 1968, 79–­105. For a more extended descriptive bibliography of this essay and the book of the same title (see below), particularly in regard to the English translations, see chapter 4 here. 35. Michel Foucault, “This Is Not a Pipe,” translated by Richard Howard, October 1 (Spring 1976): 6–­21. 36. Michel Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1973). Published in English as Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, edited and translated by James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 37. Foucault, Order of Things, viii. 38. I am grateful to Daniel Defert for this information. 39. See Mitchell, Picture Theory, 58–­76, who, during the course of his analysis of Foucault’s interpretations of Las Meninas and Magritte’s pipe paintings, makes reference to the philosopher’s attention to his own linguistic expression. 40. For the conference called “Schizo-­Culture,” held at Columbia University, November 13–­16, 1975, see Rajchman, “How to Do the History of French Theory,” 251. 41. See Fromanger: Le Désir et partout (Paris: Galerie Jeanne Bucher, 1975). 42. See Michel Foucault, “Photogenic Painting,” translated by Dayfydd Roberts, in Deleuze and Foucault, Gérard Fromanger, 81–­104. 43. A good history of that era may be found in Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,” in Fogle, Last Picture Show, 2–­4 4. 44. See, for example, Michel Foucault, Speech Begins after Death, translated by Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 45. Michel Foucault, “La pensée, l’émotion,” in Duane Michals: Photographies de 1958–­1982 (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1982), iii–­vii. See now the PhD dissertation-­in-­progress on Michals by my student Anton Lee (University of British Columbia). 46. The term dematerialization was famously coined in 1968 by Lucy Lippard and John Chandler. See Art International 12 (February 1968): 31–­36. See also Fogle, Last Picture Show, 10.

Notes to Chapter 1  135 47. This point is made without reservation in the catalog: Alison N. Gingeras, ed., “Dear Painter: paint me . . .”: Painting the Figure since Late Picabia (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2002). 48. See Sarah Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010). 49. Deleuze, Foucault. For a similar conclusion concerning the priority of Deleuze over Foucault in Anglo-­A merican art criticism, see Rajchman, “How to Do the History of French Theory,” 256–­62. 50. Foucault, Order of Things, 3; Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, 19. In this section of the chapter, in which the French vocabulary on painting is intrinsic to the argument, I have adjusted the translation. 51. Foucault, Order of Things, 3; Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, 19. 52. Michel Foucault, “The Father’s ‘No,’” in Language, Counter-­Memory, Practice, 72. For an extensive discussion of this and other early modern views of the artist and the myth of the artist, see Catherine M. Soussloff, The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 53. Foucault, “Father’s ‘No,’” 74. 54. Ibid., 75. 55. Ibid. 56. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in The Merleau-­Ponty Reader: Philosophy and Painting, edited by Galen Johnson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 84. First published in 1952 in the journal Les Temps Modernes and again in Signes in 1960, this essay has had a major influence on the criticism of contemporary art, particularly minimalism. See Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). For a recent and even more radical version of the view of the occulted contemporary image, with interesting allusions to the historiography of the image in the late twentieth century, see the exhibition catalog by Charles Stankievech, CounterIntelligence (Toronto: Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto, 2014). 57. Foucault, Order of Things, 3; Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, 19: “A ce même spectateur, le tableau tourne le dos: on ne peut en percevoir que l’envers, avec l’immense chassis qui le soutient.” 58. Foucault, Order of Things, 4; Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, 20: “Le haut rectangle monotone qui figure l’envers de la toile représentée, restitue sous les espèces d’une surface l’invisibilité en profondeur de ce que l’artiste contemple: cet espace où nous sommes, que nous sommes.” 59. Hubert Damisch, “The Trickery of the Picture,” in Painting at the Edge of the World, edited by Douglas Fogle (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2001), 166. Elisabeth Lebovici acknowledges the importance of this essay in understanding the difference in what she calls the Anglo-­Saxon use of the term picture for painting, and the two French terms, la peinture and le tableau, in “Untitled (painting) 2010,” in Painting the Implicit Horizon (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie, n.d.), 126–­27. 60. Damisch, “Trickery of the Picture,” 166. 61. See, for example, Foucault, Order of Things, 5. 62. Ibid.; Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, 21: “Au moment où ils placent le spectateur dans le champ de leur regard, les yeux du peintre le saisissnet, le contraignent à entrer dans le tableau, lui assignent un lieu à la fois privilégié et obligatoire, prélèvent sur lui sa lumineuse et visible espèce, et la projettent sur la surface inaccessible de la toile retournée.” 63. Foucault, Order of Things, 3; Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, 19. 64. Foucault, “Father’s ‘No,’” 75. 65. Foucault, Order of Things, 3–­4; Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, 19–­20.

136  Notes to Chapter 1 66. See, for example, the essays in Painting at the Edge of the World and in “Dear Painter, paint me . . .” 67. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, translated by Cecil Grayson (London: Penguin, 1972), 89. 68. The different dedications to the two versions of Alberti’s book make this point clearly. 69. For an excellent, albeit brief intellectual biography of Marin, see Giovanni Careri, “Biographie de Louis Marin,” in Marin, Louis Marin: Le Pouvoir dans ses représentations (Paris: INHA, 2008), 77. 70. Both of these essays appear in Louis Marin, Études sémiologiques: Écritures, peintures (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971). “Pour une sémiologie picturale” was first published as “Eléments de sémiologie picturale,” in Bernard Teyssèdre, Les Sciences humaines et l’oeuvre d’art (Brussels: La Connaissance, 1969); and “Comment lire un tableau” first appeared in the journal Noroit (May 1969). 71. Marin, “Elements pour une sémiologie picturale,” in Études sémiologiques, 34–­35: “Le monde et la culture sont dans ce tableau et toute la peinture, et par la s’affirme l’absolue autonomie de l’ordre pictural dans ce tableau.” 72. Marin, “Elements pour une sémiologie picturale,” 21–­22. 73. Pierre Francastel, Art et technique aux XIXe et XXe siècle (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1956), 265: “Dans l’art, il y a, nécessairement, des techniques—­matérielles et intellectuelles—­et on n’observe, en effet, aucune opposition entre la forme particulière des techniques actuelles de l’art et la forme également particulière des autres techniques humaines, qui’il s’agisse des techniques productrices de ces objets innombrables qui transforment entièrement le domaine de nos activités ou des techniques de la pensée ordonnatrice de notre experience en vue d’une comprehension et d’une intervention active de l’homme sur la matière.” 74. Marin, “Elements pour une sémiologie picturale,” 17. 75. Ibid., 19: “L’objet pictural est, dès lors, ce texte figurative dans lequel le visible et le lisible se nouent l’un à l’autre, selon une trame continue dans laquelle l’analyses devra distinguer et compter les fils, repérer les noeuds et leur nature spécifique, bref articuler, grace au langage, le tapis sans déchirure du tableau.” 76. Ibid., 10. 77. Hubert Damisch, Théorie du nuage: Pour une histoire de la peinture (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972). 78. For what follows here, see Marin, “Elements pour une sémiologie picturale,” 34–­35. 79. See Damisch, “Trickery of the Picture.” 80. See Pierre Francastel, Études de sociologie de l’art (Paris: Denoël, 1970), 213–­1 4. 81. Francastel, Art et technique, 13: “C’est-­à-­dire allusive ou productrice de signes plus ou moin arbitraries constituant un système purement intellectuel et imaginaire de repère à l’égard d’une réalité extérieure à l’homme, immuable dans ses principes et dans ses lois.”

2. The Place of Painting 1. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 194. See Soussloff, “Michel Foucault and the Point of Painting,” 734–­54; and Soussloff, “Foucault on Painting,” History of the Human Sciences 24 (2011): 113–­23, both with extensive bibliography on the earlier literature. 2. Palomino, Lives of the Eminent Spanish Painters and Sculptors, 166. This book was first published in Spanish in 1724. There is evidence in the chapter on Las Meninas that Foucault knew it. 3. Ibid.

Notes to Chapter 2  137 4. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 194. 5. Ibid. 6. Deleuze, Foucault, 50. 7. Ibid., 63. For Deleuze’s understanding of “concept,” see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), some of which relates to his assessment of Foucault’s visibilities. 8. Foucault, Order of Things, xxi. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., xxiii. 13. Ibid., xxii. 14. Ibid., xxiii. 15. Ibid., xv. 16. Ibid., xxiii. 17. Ibid., 16. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 4. 20. Ibid., 19, 20. 21. Ibid., 3. 22. Ibid. 23. Foucault, Order of Things, 9–­10. 24. Michel Foucault “What Is an Author?,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley et al. (New York: New Press, 1998), 216. In this 1969 article, Foucault admitted that he left the artist out of the discussion because he wanted to focus on discourse. Although Foucault does not mention paintings in this essay, over the years art history has often used the essay to inflect the ideological meaning of the artist according to Foucault’s critique of the author. Strictly speaking, this would not be an accurate use of Foucault’s author argument because, according to him, language is not like visibilities. 25. Foucault, Order of Things, xiv. 26. The terminology of an “art history without names” comes from the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–­1945); see Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, translated by M. D. Hottinger (New York: Holt, 1932). Aspects of the approach taken by Foucault in his analysis of Las Meninas beg the question of his familiarity with Wölfflin’s work, which I think must be assumed. 27. Foucault, Order of Things, 4. 28. Ibid., 3. 29. Ibid., 4. 30. Ibid., 7. 31. Ibid., 6. 32. Ibid., 7. 33. On Foucault’s rejection of psychology at this time and his regard for psychoanalysis, see the 1965 interview “Philosophy and Psychology,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 249–­59. On Lacan and Foucault in regard to painting, see Levine, Lacan Reframed, 67–­90. For his understanding

138  Notes to Chapter 2 of anamorphosis, Lacan relied on the art historian Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Anamorphoses ou Thaumaturgus Opticus: Les Perspectives Dépravées-­II (Paris: Flammarion, 1996). First published in 1955, Foucault would also have known this book. Interesting for the coincident discussion of the mirror by Foucault, Baltrusaitis also wrote Le Miroir: Essai sur une légende scientifique: Révélations, science-­fiction et fallacies (Paris: Le Seuil, 1978). The literature in art history on anamorphosis is by now quite large: see Lyle Massey, Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). I have found particularly valuable here the discussion in Jon Snyder, “The Culture of Defiguration: Anamorphosis, Then and Now,” Ars Aeterna 2 (2010): 16–­27. 34. Jacques Lacan, Les Quatre Concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, 1964 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973), 94. Compare this with Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 75: “The procedure that allows us to discern the structural inconsistency of an ideological edifice is that of the anamorphic reading.” 35. Foucault, Order of Things, 6. 36. Lacan, Les Quatre Concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, 92. 37. Ibid., 94. 38. Ibid. See David Carrier, “Art and Its Spectators,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45, no. 1 (1986): 5–­17, whose discussion of the significance of the mirror for the interpreter of paintings in general, and for Foucault’s analysis of Las Meninas in particular, has been extremely useful here. 39. Foucault, Order of Things, 8. 40. Ibid. 41. I have benefited a great deal from Kaja Silverman’s analysis of the work that aesthetics does in my thinking here about the function of the mirror in Foucault’s argument. See Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), especially p. 2, where the phrase “that which is culturally disprized” is used to speak about work that makes us aware or conscious of our political choices. I also have in mind here Hal Foster, The Anti-­Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay, 1983), xv–­x vi, which owes a good deal in its formulation to Foucault. 42. Foucault, Order of Things, 16: “As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And perhaps one nearing its end” (387). 43. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-­Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 139.

3. The Limits of Irony 1. Foucault, Order of Things, 7; Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, 23. 2. In light of the chronology of Foucault’s thinking about painting, I underline here his remarks of 1964 (reprinted in 1967) on Manet, which concerned the relationship of the artist’s paintings to the museum: “Déjeuner sur l’ herbe and Olympia were perhaps the first ‘museum paintings,’ the first paintings [les toiles] in European art that were less a response to the achievement of Giorgione, Raphael, and Velásquez than an acknowledgment (supported by this singular and obvious connection, using this legible reference to cloak its operation) of the new and substantial relationship of painting to itself. . . . Flaubert is to the library what Manet is to the museum. They both produced works in a self-­conscious relationship to earlier paintings or texts—­or rather to the aspect in painting or writing that remains indefinitely open [-­ended]” (Foucault, “Fantasia of the Library,” in Language, Counter-­Memory, Practice, 92). See the French version: Michel Foucault, “(Sans titre),” in Dits et Écrits I, 326–­27, also cited in

Notes to Chapter 3  139 Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism, or The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 512n26. 3. Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, 33. I have freely retranslated passages from the English edition of Foucault’s lecture when necessary to conform more closely with his language. An important source for Foucault’s study of Manet points out the connection between the self-­portrait in Las Meninas and the self-­portrait in Music in the Tuileries Gardens; see Nils Sandblad, Manet: Three Studies in Artistic Conception, translated by Walter Nash (Lund: Håkan Ohlsson, 1954), 56. 4. Significant for Foucault, these remarks on Manet’s appearance by his contemporaries (respectively, Antonin Proust and Stéphane Mallarmé) are quoted by Georges Bataille, Manet, translated by Austryn Wainhouse and James Emmons (New York: Rizzoli, 1983), 22. 5. Carol Armstrong, Manet Manette (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), 23. 6. Foucault examines a number of the canonical works: La Musique aux Tuileries (London, National Gallery), The Masked Ball at the Opera (Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art), The Execution of Maximilian (Mannheim, Kunsthalle), Argenteuil (Tournai, Musée des Beaux-­A rts de la Ville), In the Greenhouse (Berlin, Nationalgalerie), Saint-­Lazare Station (Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art), The Fifer (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), Luncheon on the Grass (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), Olympia (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), The Balcony (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), and A Bar at the Folies-­Bergère (London, The Courtauld Gallery). 7. Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, 28. 8. Ibid., 79; Michel Foucault, La Peinture de Manet, edited by Maryvonne Saison (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 46. The title given by the English translator to the book version of Foucault’s lecture is also misleading. See the chronology of the lecture as laid out by Defert, “Chronologie,” in Foucault, Dits et Écrits I, 41–­53. See also John Elias Nale, “Review of Michel Foucault, La Peinture de Manet,” Foucault Studies 2 (May 2005): 145–­49. 9. Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, 79, there translated as “material elements.” 10. Ibid., 31. 11. Ibid., 79. 12. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 47. 13. Ibid., 48. From the many interviews after the publication of Les Mots et les choses and The Order of Things, the importance to Foucault of Ferdinand de Saussure’s study of semiotics in theorizing “things” and “objects” emerges clearly. See Foucault, “The Order of Things,” in Foucault Live, 13–­18; Foucault, “Entretien avec Michel Foucault,” in Dits et Écrits I, 1025–­4 2; and below. By focusing here on language theory in relation to his thinking about Manet, I am also acknowledging Foucault’s comprehensive investigations into all language theories, including semiotics, linguistics, and what now would be called philosophy of language. 14. Foucault, Order of Things, xiv. 15. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 49. 16. Alfred Tarski, On the Concept of Following Logically, translated by Magda Stroinsk and David Hitchcock, www.accionfilosofica.com/misc/1158175332crs.pdf. The Polish version of this essay appeared in 1933, the German version in 1935. The recent English translation cited here revises all earlier translations and conflates the Polish and English versions. I am grateful to my colleague Adam Morton for his discussion of language theory. 17. See the important discussion of formalism in art history by Whitney Davis in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 3:78–­84.

140  Notes to Chapter 3 18. According to Foucault, Merleau-­Ponty had analyzed painting using a method called “formal thinking.” See Defert, “Chronologie,” 17. 19. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-­Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), esp. 102–­5. 20. For an extended discussion of the meaning of historicism for art historical methodologies, see Catherine M. Soussloff, “Historicism in Art History,” in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 3:333–­38. 21. Michel Foucault, “Structuralisme et poststructuralisme,” in Dits et Écrits II, 1250–­76. 22. Michel Foucault, “Réponse au Cercle d’épistémologie,” Cahiers pour l’Analyse 9 (Summer 1968), http://cahiers.kingston.ac.uk/vol09/cpa9.2.foucault.html. 23. Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, 30. 24. Ibid., 29. 25. Ibid., 68. Foucault, La Peinture de Manet, 41–­4 2: “là vous avez une fenêtre qui s’ouvre sur quelque chose qui est entièrement obscur; entièrement noir: on distingue à peine un très vague reflet d’objet métallique. . . . Et tout ce grand espace creux, ce grand espace vide qui normalement devrait ouvrir sur une profondeur, nous est rendu absolument invisible et il nous est rendu invisible pourquoi?” 26. Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, 41–­4 2. This fascination with the hidden depths of the painting’s space also recalls a portion of Foucault’s analysis of Las Meninas: “The tall, monotonous rectangle occupying the whole left portion of the real picture, and representing the back of the canvas within the picture, reconstitutes in the form of a surface the invisibility in depth [au profondeur] of what the artist is observing: that space in which we are, and which we are” (Order of Things, 4). 27. Foucault, “Qui êtes-­vous, professeur Foucault?,” in Dits et Écrits I, 640. 28. Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, 41–­4 2. 29. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1966). 30. Foucault, “Entretien avec Michel Foucault,” in Dits et Écrits I, 1039: “Mallarmé est contemporain de Saussure; j’ai été impressionné par le fait que la problématique du langage—­considéré indépendamment de ses signifies et du point de vue exclusif de ses structures internes—­soit apparue chez Saussure à la fin du XIXe siècle, à peu près au meme moment où Mallarmé fondait une literature du langage pur, qui domine encore notre époque.” 31. Bataille, Manet. In a little-­k nown study of Bataille’s essay on Manet, Youseff Ishaghpour covers the pertinent French historiography. The author also refers several times to Foucault’s thinking about Manet, which he must have known in manuscript or through conversation. See Ishaghpour, Aux origines de l’art modern: Le Manet de Bataille (Giromagny: Éditions de la Différance, 1989). James Rubin relies on Ishaghpour in his book Manet: Initial M, Hand, and Eye (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), chap. 9, and I am grateful to him for bringing that study to my attention. 32. Georges Bataille, Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art. See Anne McConnell, “Art as Transgression: Georges Bataille’s Lascaux et la naissance de l’art and ‘Manet,’” Equinoxes 3 (Spring 2004): 1–­7. Although I do not agree with much of what the author says here about Bataille on Manet, this is an important and little-­k nown attempt to integrate Bataille’s approaches in his two books published in 1955. 33. Françoise Cachin, introduction to Bataille, Manet, 5. 34. Paul Valéry, “The Triumph of Manet,” in Degas, Manet, Morisot, translated by David Paul (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), 106–­7. This essay was first published in the catalog of the centenary exhibition of Manet at the Orangerie in 1932, which would also have been important for Foucault’s study of the artist; see Exposition Manet, 1832–­1883 (Paris: Musée de l’Orangerie, 1932).

Notes to Chapter 3  141 35. Bataille, Manet, 26. 36. Ibid., 33. 37. Ibid., 57. 38. Ibid., 60–­61. Fried is incorrect to equate Bataille’s “the subject” with subject matter (Manet’s Modernism, 354). Bataille’s inclination would have oriented him toward the psychoanalytic meaning of the term le sujet and its meaning in painting, as much of his book on Manet reveals. 39. Bataille, Manet, 103. 40. Michel Foucault, “Préface à la transgression,” in Dits et Écrits I, 261–­78, first published in Critique 195–­96 (1963): 751–­70; Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 69–­87. Bataille died in July 1962. Foucault later wrote a brief note in the collected works of Bataille, where he iterated the significance of his thinking: “Présentation,” in Georges Bataille, Premiers Écrits, 1922–­1940, vol. 1 of Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 5–­6. 41. Foucault, “Preface to Transgression,” 29. 42. Ibid., 30. 43. The best known of Bataille’s explorations of transgressive sexuality is Story of the Eye by Lord Auch, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (San Francisco: City Lights, 1987). 44. Bataille, Manet, 67. 45. Ibid., 71. This is a point later expanded on by a number of feminist art historians. For some of the important feminist approaches to Olympia and to Manet’s paintings in general, see Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988); Eunice Lipton, Alias Olympia: A Woman’s Search for Manet’s Notorious Model and Her Own Desire (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992); and Armstrong, Manet Manette. 46. Bataille, Manet, 71. 47. Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, 30; Foucault, La Peinture de Manet, 23. 48. Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, 36–­37. 49. Bataille, Manet, 102. 50. Ibid., 114. 51. Ibid., 115. 52. In accordance with this logic, Bataille criticized the painting known as Nana (Hamburg, Kunsthalle) for not being subversive enough, for revealing too much of what it is: “a genre scene, tending towards the anecdote” (Manet, 104). 53. Martin Jay refers to this aspect of Bataille’s interpretation of the Lascaux paintings (Downcast Eyes, 230). 54. Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, 28–­29. The translator does not recognize that Foucault consistently used a pun on the word la profondeur throughout the essay. 55. Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, 28; Foucault, La Peinture de Manet, 22. 56. Defert, “Chronologie,” 49. Manet’s inversion of Velázquez had already occurred to Bataille, who, however, insisted on the primary significance of Francisco Goya for the artist (Manet, 49–­59). 57. Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, 78. 58. Foucault, Order of Things, e.g., 5–­6: “And as it passes through the room from right to left, this vast flood of golden light carries both the spectator towards the painter and the model towards the canvas; it is this light, too which, washing over the painter, makes him visible to the spectator and turns into golden lines, in the model’s eyes, the frame of that enigmatic canvas on which his image, once transported there, is to be imprisoned.”

142  Notes to Chapter 3 59. Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, 78. 60. Ibid., 78n21. 61. Ibid., 79; Foucault, La Peinture de Manet, 46. 62. Foucault, “De l’archéologie à la dynastique,” Dits et Écrits I, 1280: “C’est ce très curieux rapport d’enchaînements, de dépassements réciproques, d’entrelacements et de déséquilibres entre la pensée et le discours qui m’a beaucoup intéressé chez ces écrivains.” 63. Guy Debord, “The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics and Art,” in Situationist International Anthology, edited and translated by Ken Knabb (Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 318. Debord was speaking of an incident that took place in Caracas, where students made an armed attack on a van carrying some paintings intended for exhibition. 64. Jean-­Paul Sartre, quoted in Defert, “Chronologie,” 38. 65. However, according to Defert, Foucault’s admiration of the painting had been long held. He states that Foucault saw Las Meninas in the Prado in November 1963 and described it in a letter. See Defert, “Chronologie,” 32. 66. Merleau-­Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in The Merleau-­Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 85: “Classical painting wants to be as convincing as things and does not think that it can reach us except as things do—­by imposing an unimpeachable spectacle upon our senses. It relies in principle upon the perceptual apparatus, considered as a natural, given means of communication between human beings.” 67. Armstrong, Manet Manette, xii–­x vii. 68. See, for example, T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 10: “Something decisive happened in the history of art around Manet which set painting and the other arts upon a new course. Perhaps the change can be described as a kind of skepticism, or at least an unsureness, as to the nature of representation in art.” 69. Cachin, introduction, 9–­10: “Up to Manet, painting had been in the service of representation; after him, it is alleged [by Bataille] to become an end in itself. Once those ‘sovereign forms, divine or royal,’ which had made of the world an ‘intelligible whole,’ had been broken up, art could only regain its sovereignty in silence, by referring to nothing but itself, and Manet is alleged to be the first painter to make us hear this ‘voice of silence.’” The allusion to Merleau-­Ponty here is telling.

4. The Negativity of Painting 1. Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 9. The English translation of choses as “object lesson” distracts from Foucault’s own terminology and meanings. See the translator’s admission of the dimensions of the meaning of les choses in Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 60n1. Harkness explains here that leçon des choses is a play on a painting by Magritte and on a film about him made by Luc de Heusch. 2. As best as possible, and possibly for the first time in the literature, I have assembled from various sources, none of them exhaustive and often contradictory of each other, the extant versions of Magritte’s pipe paintings, with brief identifying descriptions where possible: The Treachery of Images (La Trahison des images), 1929 (or 1928–­29); Oil on canvas, 60 × 80 cm. LACMA [Ceci n’est pas une pipe. in French with black writing on off-­white background and black pipe stem. Exhibited for the first time in 1933 at Palais des Beaux-­A rts, Brussels] The Treachery of Images (La Trahison des images), 1935; Oil on canvas, 27 × 41 cm. Private collection,

Notes to Chapter 4  143 Brussels. [This is not a pipe. in English with white writing and black background (i.e., reversed from first version) and white pipe stem (reversed). Exhibited Julian Levy, 1936] The Philosopher’s Lamp (La Lampe philosophique), 1936; Oil on canvas, 18½ × 21⅝ inches. Brussels, Coll. Messens. [Man in suit a possible self-­portrait with long nose into bowl of pipe in front of candle melted like nose onto stand and illuminated] The Freedom of Worship (La liberté des cultes), 1946; Oil on board, 24 × 33 cm. Private collection [Impressionistic style showing orange pipe in the sky with a sun god] The Treachery of Images (La Trahison des images), 1952; Ink on paper, 19 × 27 cm. Private collection, London. [Drawing in black and white with false wood ground and pipe drawn on it like a table with trompe l’oeil label: “CECI CONTINUE DE NE PAS ÊTRE UNE PIPE”] The Air and the Song (L’Air et la chanson), 1965; Gouache, 35 × 54 cm. Hanover Gallery, London. [Pipe with Ceci n’est pas une pipe. with smoke and a wood frame, signed lower left] The Two Mysteries (Les Deux mystères), 1966; Oil on canvas, 65 × 80 cm. Collection Jane and Terry Semel. The Shades (Les Ombres), 1966; Oil on canvas, 65 × 81 cm. San Diego Museum of Art. [Black tree in front of gray pipe or pipe made of smoke; shadow of tree and shadow of pipe on blue ground like sky with sky shading from light to dark at top of painting] 3. The scholarly bibliography on Foucault’s essay is somewhat complex because he wrote two versions, which were translated at different times. Foucault published the book Ceci n’est pas une pipe in 1973. This book included two letters sent to Foucault by Magritte, also found in Magritte, Écrits complets, 639–­40. The first version of Foucault’s essay was published as an article in a small periodical: Les Cahiers du chemin 2 (January 15, 1968): 79–­105. This is the version that appears in Foucault, Dits et Écrits I, 663–­78. This version was not available in English until 1998: Foucault, “This Is Not a Pipe,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 187–­203. Besides the differences in the translations of these versions, the article and the book differ in some significant ways, for example, the inclusion of Magritte’s letters and the allusion to irony that occurs only in the book. Since its publication the book has become well-­k nown and translated into many languages, while the article remains in the background. 4. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 54, for example, the final words in the book: “A day will come when, by means of similitude relayed indefinitely along the length of a series, the image itself, along with the name it bears, will lose its identity. Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell.” 5. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 15; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 9. 6. The painting has been owned since 1978 by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where Ruscha could have seen it many times. In 2006 LACMA based an exhibition of Magritte’s paintings on the painting and its influence. Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images featured an installation design by Ruscha’s contemporary, the conceptual artist John Baldessari. See http://www .lacma.org/art/exhibition/magritte-and-contemporary-art-treachery-images (accessed April 27, 2014). I am assuming that Ruscha knew the widely disseminated English translation of Foucault’s book and not the earlier French version of the essay. 7. Lynn Zelevansky, “An Interview with Ed Ruscha,” in Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images, edited by Michel Draguet (Ghent: Ludion, 2006), 139. 8. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 21. 9. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 32; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 39. 10. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 34; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 42–­43.

144  Notes to Chapter 4 11. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 42; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 44, where the expression in French is “ce que c’est.” 12. The term for trap in French is une piège, and it appears in various forms throughout the analysis of the pipe paintings. See especially “The Unraveled Calligram [or The Undone Calligram],” in Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 19–­31; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 17–­45. Foucault had used “trap” in Les Mots et les choses to refer to the “marginal trap” of the window at the extreme right of Las Meninas, whose light attracts us so that we believe in the illusion of perspective that enables visibility in the picture (Order of Things, 5–­6). 13. Ruscha’s series of “word paintings” began in 1962 and continue to this day. These paintings have often been related to the influence of commercial art, just as Warhol’s pop, so the story goes, emerged from his early work in advertising design. Ruscha’s paintings and books demonstrate the importance of Magritte’s entire oeuvre. Further support for this claim comes in Ruscha’s early and ongoing interest in printmaking and book design, also the source of Magritte’s work in the early 1920s. See the important essay by Anne Umland, “This Is How Marvels Begin: Brussels 1926–­27,” in Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–­1938, edited by Anne Umland (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013), 27–­4 1. I am grateful to Anne Umland and the MoMA staff for their generosity in aiding my research on Magritte and Picabia. 14. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 28; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 33. 15. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 26, 27, 28; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 31, 32, 33. 16. See Canguilhem, “Death of Man,” 76: “For the traditional question ‘What does it mean to think?,’ Michel Foucault substitutes the question ‘What does it mean to speak?’” 17. See Suzi Gablik, Magritte (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 2000), 155: “As a result the corporate body of his work contains many versions of one idea, which evolved at length through antitypes and derivatives, originals and copies, variants and transformations.” 18. Foucault, “This Is Not a Pipe,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 196; Foucault, Dits et Écrits 1, 672. 19. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 36; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 47. The translator’s note on this page explains why he chose to translate the chapter title from “Le Sourd travail des mots” to “Burrowing Words.” I prefer to use a translation that refers directly to the instabilities between title and inscription that are the focus of this section of Foucault’s essays. The point is that enunciations cannot always be heard. 20. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 36; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 47–­48. 21. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 41; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 56. 22. This point concerning Magritte’s work may be found throughout the art historical literature. See, for example, Gablik, Magritte; and Stephanie D’Alessandro, “Mirrors That Become Paintings: Magritte’s Commissions for Edward James London, 1937–­1938,” in Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 194–­209. 23. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 15; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 10. 24. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 19–­31: “The Unraveled Calligram [or The Undone Calligram]”; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“Le Calligramme Défait”), 17–­38. 25. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 49; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 71. 26. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 30, 23–­2 4; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 37, 26. 27. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 48; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 71. 28. Quoted in Zelevansky, “Interview with Ed Ruscha,” 137.

Notes to Chapter 4  145 29. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 50; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 73. 30. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 50; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 73–­74. 31. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 49; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 71. 32. Michel Foucault, “The Father’s ‘No,’” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 3–­20; Foucault, “Le ‘Non’ du père,” in Dits et Écrits I, 217–­31. 33. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 30; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 37. 34. See Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, translated by Kristin Ross (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991). This book was first published in French in 1987. Scholars have related Rancière’s appropriation of the ignorant Schoolmaster trope based on the story of Joseph Jacotot and the lessons to be learned from it to Bourdieu. Foucault is the ultimate source for all. 35. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 15–­16; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 10–­11. 36. Foucault, “Father’s ‘No,’” 18. 37. The letter was dated May 23, 1966. Foucault’s biographer states that this letter “went straight to Foucault’s heart” (Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, 1926–­1984 [Paris: Flammarion, 1991], 198). See also Defert, “Chronologie,” 35. The letter is found in Magritte, Écrits complets, 639–­40. It was reproduced by Foucault in his book but not in the earlier article. See Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 57–­58; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 85–­87. 38. See Magritte, Écrits complets, 639. 39. The essay by Magritte and the publication history of it are found in Magritte, Écrits complets, 61–­63. 40. Patrick Waldberg, Magritte (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), 172. 41. Roger Shattuck, “On René Magritte,” Artforum 5 (September 1966): 33. This essay responds to the exhibition of Magritte’s work held at the Museum of Modern Art, where the response to Magritte’s word and image paintings differed markedly from Foucault’s, imputing a certain sensationalism onto the personality of the artist. See James Thrall Soby, Rene Magritte (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965), 11–­12: “This defiance reaches its most condensed statement in a realistic picture of a pipe inscribed, ‘This is not a pipe’ (page 24). Magritte often flaunts reality by giving it its most acceptable guise and then denying it by the old disclaimer, ‘I never said any such thing.’” 42. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 194. 43. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 38–­39; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 51–­52. I have changed the translation to better reflect the original meaning of the French. For a contemporaneous English translation of Magritte’s picture-­essay, with figures, see David Sylvester, Magritte (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1969), 28. 44. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 48–­49. 45. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 53; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 77. 46. Merleau-­Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 118. 47. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 54; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 78. 48. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 39; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 52. 49. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 53–­54; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 77–­78. 50. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 20; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 20; André Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). 51. Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, 270: “Distendre, au besoin jusqu’à les violer, ces rapports de grandeur, de position, d’éclairage, d’alternance, de substance, de mutuelle tolerance, de devenir, c’est

146  Notes to Chapter 4 nous introduire au coeur d’une figuration seconde, qui transcende la première par tous les moyens que la rhétorique énumère comme les ‘figures de mots’ et les ‘figures de pensée.’ Si la figuration concrète, au sens descriptif que réclame Magritte, n’était aussi scrupuleuse, c’en serait vait du grand pont sémantique qui permet de passer sur sens proper au sens figuré et de conjuguer d’un même regard ces deux sens en vue d’une ‘pensée parfaite,’ c’est-­à-­dire parvenue à sa complète emancipation.” 52. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 194. 53. Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, 221. Breton illustrates this canvas. 54. On the designating power of words, see Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 48; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 68–­69. 55. Michel Butor, Les Mots dans la peinture (Geneva: Skira, 1969), 78, simplifies Foucault’s argument and calls the inscription Ceci n’est pas une pipe. the “first degree of title” because it names what we see so clearly depicted, that is, the “stereotype” of a pipe, and because there is another title, The Treachery of Images, that is a “second degree of title.” Butor also states, following Foucault again, that Magritte’s point between the words that designate exactly what is depicted—­a s opposed, one presumes, to the words that name another thing, that is, woman as grinder—­is to explore resemblance. 56. Butor, Les Mots dans la peinture, 76. Much of Butor’s response to this painting replicates Breton as in note 51 above. 57. Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, 269. 58. Ibid., 269–­70. 59. Butor, Les Mots dans la peinture, 79, followed both Breton and Foucault in his characterization of this “applied inscription,” as “of the graphic type that one—­whether teacher or student—­uses to instruct about words.” 60. See http://www.louismarin.fr/spip.php?article2 (accessed April 16, 2013). 61. See Louis Marin, “Philippe de Champaigne et Port-­Royal,” in Études sémiologiques, 127–­58; and Marin, La Critique du discours: Sur la “Logique de Port-­Royal” et les Pensées de Pascal (Paris: Minuit, 1975). All of Marin’s earlier articles on painting were collected in Études sémiologiques, but many of these have not been translated into English. 62. Foucault, Order of Things, 64–­65. 63. See Marin, “Elements pour une sémiologie picturale,” in Études sémiologiques, 19. 64. Foucault, “This Is Not a Pipe,” 188. 65. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 47–­48: “To define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance.” 66. Marin, “Avant-­Propos,” in Études sémiologiques, 10. 67. I think that whatever echoes of Barthes might be found in Foucault’s writing on Magritte, they come via Marin’s understanding of pictorial semiology. 68. Marin, “Elements pour une sémiologie picturale,” 39–­43, 18. 69. Marin, “Avant-­Propos,” 11. 70. Ibid. 71. Marin, “Elements pour une sémiologie picturale,” 35. 72. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 18; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 15. 73. Marin, “Elements pour une sémiologie picturale,” 19. See Careri, Louis Marin, 6, who remarks on the related, nonallegorical understanding of semiotics for Marin’s views on the power of representations as truth bearing.

Notes to Chapter 5  147 74. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 33; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 44–­45. 75. See Marin, “Elements pour une sémiologie picturale,” 39–­43. Marin refers here to Paul Klee, Esquisses pédagogiques of 1925, without citing the specific edition used, but Marin and Foucault probably consulted the more recent French translation. See Paul Klee, Théorie de l’art moderne (Geneva: Gonthier, 1964). 76. Duane Michals, A Visit with Magritte (Providence: Matrix, 1981). 77. This is Gablik’s observation in Magritte, 97. 78. See Butor, Les Mots dans la peinture, 84–­85. 79. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 54; Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 79. 80. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 27. 81. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 8. Although he does not mention Saussure, I have found Arnold Davidson’s discussion of Foucault’s intellectual background in linguistics in the 1960s and 1970s to be extremely useful. See Davidson, “Structures and Strategies of Discourse,” 1–­17. 82. Canguilhem, “Death of Man,” 78. 83. Most useful for Foucault’s concept of genealogy: Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); and Gutting, introduction to “Michel Foucault: A User’s Manual,” 10–­16. 84. Foucault, Order of Things, 61.

5. Painting in the Light of Photography 1. Duchamp explained the death of painting in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, translated by Ron Padgett (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), 67. First published in French in 1967. There are many recent interpretations of Duchamp’s rejection of oil painting, the medium in which he had begun as an artist, but for an informed summary by a contemporary who could have been known by the narrative figuration group, Fromanger, and Foucault, see Hans Richter, DADA Art and Anti-­art, translated by David Britt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), esp. 87–­89. 2. Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo, and Antonio Recalcati, quoted in Figuration Narrative Paris, 1960–­1972 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux / Centre Pompidou, 2008), 93. 3. For Fromanger’s artistic affiliations, see the editors’ biography in Deleuze and Foucault, Gérard Fromanger, 116. 4. Jean-­Paul Ameline and Benedicte Ajac, “Interview with Gerard Fromanger 12 November 2007,” in Figuration Narrative Paris, 303: “C’était une nouvelle manière de repenser le réel pour mieux le voir. Une methode conceptuelle.” 5. Aillaud, Arroyo, and Reclacati, quoted in Figuration Narrative Paris, 93. 6. Alain Jouffroy, “Pour une nouvelle peinture d’histoire,” in Guillotine et peinture: Topino–­Lebrun et ses amis, edited by Alain Jouffroy and Philippe Bordes (Paris: Chêne, 1977), 52: “La nouvelle peinture d’histoire dont je parle a ceci de complètement different de celle de David et de Topino qu’elle ne confond plus l’histoire avec la mise en scène d’une tragédie. Mais elle n’élimine pas l’histoire pour autant, elle ne la gomme pas au nom de je ne sais quelle resurgence nostalgique de l’art pour l’art et de l’esthétisme: elle en élargit seulement la definition. Elle nous montre que l’histoire se fait partout, comme l’amour: avec violence, mais aussi avec désespoir, e pourquoi pas en riant.” 7. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 13. 8. Ibid.

148  Notes to Chapter 5 9. Jean-­Paul Ameline, “Interview with Alain Jouffroy 26 October 2007,” in Figuration Narrative Paris, 309. 10. Ibid., 305: “Le dogme de tous les artistes et défenseurs de l’art abstrait, triomphant et omnipotent, était en effet alors de dire ‘C’est fini, la figuration est morte.’ C’était en contradiction avec ce que je pouvais percevoir.” 11. Information on Fromanger and Foucault comes from a conversation with Daniel Defert, May 5, 2015, Paris. 12. Helen Molesworth has made an excellent case for the exception of feminist painting to the dominant narrative concerning the poverty or exhaustion of painting (both abstract and figurative) in the 1960s and 1970s, taking the “disavowal of painting” as a sign of art “under patriarchy.” My interpretation of Foucault’s essay on Fromanger reveals both the difference in the cultural logic of painting in France at this time and another refusal by the author, Foucault, to fall prey to the dominant critical paradigms of his society. See Molesworth, “Painting with Ambivalence,” in Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007), 429–­39. A critical interpretation of women artists working in France in the 1960s and 1970s remains to be written. 13. Hubert Damisch, “Préface: À Partir de la Photographie,” in Rosalind Krauss, Le Photographique: Pour une théorie des ecarts, translated by Marc Bloch and Jean Kempf (Paris: Macula, 1990), 10. 14. Damisch, “Préface,” 11. 15. Sarah Wilson has claimed that Foucault made in-­depth research into the history of photography preliminary to writing his essay on Fromanger. See Wilson, Visual World of French Theory, 151–­52, but she does not cover that research to the extent I do here. Eric de Chassey, “Contrepoints/Contrepeints,” in Michel Foucault, Le peintre photogénique de Michel Foucault (Paris: Le Point du Jour, 2014), 69–77, considers the impact of photography on Foucault’s idea of the image as unhistoricist and transgressive. 16. Foucault, “Photogenic Painting,” in Deleuze and Foucault, Photogenic Painting / La Peinture photogénique, 89, with some changes in the translation. 17. A useful view on GIP and Foucault may be found in Gilles Deleuze, “Foucault and Prison,” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975–­1995, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), 277–­86. Fromanger is not mentioned. 18. Michel Foucault, “Préface,” in Serge Livrozet, De la prison à la révolte: Essai-­témoignage (Paris: Mercure de France, 1973), 7–­1 4, 12: “Et c’est précisément dans l’espace blanc de ce discours explicitement interdit (et non ‘refoulé’) que la criminologie, la sociologie et la psychologie du crime on trouvé place: elles on pris en charge de faire exister à leur tour la criminalité comme phénomène d’ensemble, et de manière qu’elle s’exprime seulement comme un objet de savoir, comme un champ d’analyses, comme un thème de réflexions, menées par d’autres et pour d’autres.” 19. For more on Foucault, Fromanger, and prison reform, see Wilson, Visual World of French Theory, 145. 20. Foucault, “Photogenic Painting,” 94. 21. Sarah Wilson, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Deleuze and Foucault, Gérard Fromanger, 15; see also Adrian Rifkin, “A Space Between: On Gérard Fromanger, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Some Others,” in Deleuze and Foucault, Gérard Fromanger, 21–­59, 34: “A gathering which includes, for example, the recognition by artists and philosophers of a common project and the desire to figure it through each other in their separate modes of representation.” 22. Arguably, the distinctions between the two essays have been made difficult to appreciate

Notes to Chapter 5  149 because of their congruent translation in French and English in one publication: see Deleuze and Foucault, Gérard Fromanger. 23. For a more extensive comparison of the two essays, see Rifkin, “Space Between,” 21–­59. 24. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-­Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1986), first published in 1983; and Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-­Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), first published in 1985. 25. For the best comprehensive discussions of the Paragone, see Leatrice Mendelsohn, Paragoni: Benedetto Varchi’s “Due Lezzioni” and Cinquecento Art Theory (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982); and Claire J. Farago, Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone: A Critical Interpretation (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992). As far as I know, the use of the Paragone in contemporary art theory and criticism has not been discussed. 26. Foucault, “Photogenic Painting,” 90. 27. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 54. 28. Quoted in Figuration Narrative Paris 92: “L’immuable Marilyn de Warhol se répète indéfiniment comme dans un jeu de miroirs. L’Icône a dévoré et immobilisé l’espace.” 29. Foucault, “Photogenic Painting,” 91. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 98. 33. Ibid., 97. 34. Ibid., 92. 35. Ibid., 83. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 88. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 92. 40. Gisèle Freund, Photographie et société (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974). See Tom Huhn, “Seeing French,” Art in America (June–­July 2011): 51–­54, who sees the politics of the narrative figuration painters and Fromanger reflected in their paintings. 41. Gisèle Freund, preface to Photography and Society (Boston: David R. Godine, 1980), n.p. 42. Pierre Bourdieu, Un art moyen: Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie (Paris: Éditions Minuit, 1965), esp. 292–­322; Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle Brow Art, translated by Shaun Whiteside (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990). 43. Freund, Photography and Society, 4. 44. Ibid., 13. 45. Ibid., 217. 46. Ibid.: “As a means of reproduction, photography has democratized art by making it available to everyone; but at the same time, it has changed our view of art.” 47. Foucault, “Photogenic Painting,” 84–­85. 48. Ibid., 83. 49. Ibid., 84. 50. Gordon Baldwin, Looking at Photographs: A Guide to Technical Terms (Los Angeles: Getty, 1991), 15 (illus. no. 3). Fox Talbot’s book, The Pencil of Nature, was published in 1844. For further descriptive bibliography, see http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/feb2007.html (accessed July 6, 2016).

150  Notes to Chapter 5 51. Baldwin, Looking at Photographs, 16: “Using ferns, lace, or flowers, Talbot reproduced images of the object by simply placing it on to the sensitized paper and exposing the paper to light equivalent to wearing a wrist-­watch while sunbathing. Once again the terms in which he spoke of his discovery were typical of the period. The images, he said had ‘the utmost truth and fidelity’ and were part of a ‘natural magic’ and ‘natural chemistry’ which could do ‘in the space of a few seconds’ what it would otherwise take ‘days or weeks of labour to trace or to copy.’” 52. Foucault, “La Peinture photogénique,” in Deleuze and Foucault, Gérard Fromanger, 92. 53. Ibid., 94. Félix Guattari is particularly indebted to Foucault’s understanding of the silhouette in his later essay on Fromanger. See Guattari, “Gérard Fromanger, La Nuit, Le Jour,” in Les Années d’Hiver, 1980–­1985 (Paris: Les Prairies ordinaries, 2009), 260. This essay was first published in Eighty Magazine, no. 4 (August 1984). 54. Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part 2,” October 4 (Autumn 1977): 58–­67, 58. 55. Rosalind Krauss, “Tracing Nadar,” October 5 (Summer 1978): 46. I note that Krauss’s essays on the history and theory of photography, with the important exception of “Notes on the Index: Part 1 and Part 2,” were published in French in 1990 and have proved influential in France since that time. See Krauss, Le Photographique: Pour une théorie des ecarts, translated by Marc Bloch and Jean Kempf (Paris: Macula, 1990). There are a number of congruences between Foucault’s view of the photographic image in his essay on Fromanger and Krauss’s slightly later essays on photography, particularly “Tracing Nadar,” and “Notes on the Index: Part 1 and Part 2,” which I cannot pursue in detail here, although they have been helpful for my understanding of Krauss’s extensive critique of Roland Barthes’s The Rhetoric of the Image. Inasmuch as Foucault may have sought in the Fromanger essay to resist the pervasive influence of the theories of the image and photography of his colleague at the Collège de France, Barthes, or at least to present an alternative to them, Krauss’s reliance on a semiotic approach to the photographic image differs from Foucault. However, see Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View,” Art Journal 42 (Winter 1982): 311–­19, where The Archaeology of Knowledge plays a significant part. 56. Foucault, “Photogenic Painting,” 93. 57. Ibid., 95. 58. Ibid., 98. 59. See Bernard Ceysson, Gérard Fromanger Retrospective, 1962–­2005 (Paris: Somogy, 2005), List of works exhibited, no. 97, p. 179. 60. Wilson, Visual World of French Theory, 151. 61. Foucault, “Photogenic Painting,” 94. 62. Baldwin, Looking at Photographs, 19. 63. Hubert Damisch, “Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image,” October 5 (Summer 1978): 70–­72. First published in French in L’Arc in 1963. 64. Damisch, “Five Notes,” 70. In a conversation with the author in June 2013, Damisch affirmed that he and Foucault had been close in the 1970s. 65. Wölfflin, Principles of Style in Art History, 3–­10. 66. Foucault, “La Peinture photogénique,” 94–­95. 67. Ibid., 102. Again, on the trace, see Krauss, “Tracing Nadar,” 46: “Trace (the shadow) can double as both the subject and object of its own recording.” 68. Foucault, “La Peinture photogénique,” 93. 69. Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 39.

Notes to conclusion  151 70. Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” 39. 71. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). 72. Foucault, “La Peinture photogénique,” 99. 73. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 106. I disagree with Ceysson: “He paints directly on the projected image, and sometimes surrounds an ensemble or silhouette with a thick line, then colours the area that it delimits. In other words, he paints the shadow of the recorded reality. Drawing and painting are thus referred back to their origins, to Pliny’s fable about the daughter of the Corinthian potter Boutades, who outlined the cast shadow of her lover’s face so she could remember him when he left” (Gérard Fromanger Retrospective, 156). According to Foucault, paintings by Fromanger did not refer directly to painting itself or to its mythical origins. There was no originary moment when the reality offered by the photographic technique of projection could be obtained in a “pure” or ahistorical sense. 74. Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo, and Antonio Recalcati (1965), quoted in Figuration Narrative Paris, 93. 75. These words are found in a recent discussion of Deleuze by Martin Crowley, “Deleuze on Painting,” French Studies: A Quarterly Review 67 (July 2013): 380. See Deleuze, “Cold and Heat / Le Froid et le Chaud,” in Deleuze and Foucault, Gérard Fromanger, 61–­77. 76. See, for example, Foucault, Speech Begins after Death. Anton Lee at the University of British Columbia is writing a dissertation on photography and French theory in the 1970s and 1980s, which addresses further aspects of Foucault’s engagement with photography. 77. In the case of the history of photography and narrative figuration, the exhibition at Galerie J. in Paris in 1965, Hommage à Nicéphore Niepce, is of particular interest. See also Wilson, Visual World of French Theory, 140–­53. See also Fromanger’s account of his early relationship to the narrative figuration group in Ameline and Ajac, “Interview with Gerard Fromanger,” 299–­304. 78. A brief history of the state of photographic theory in France in the 1970s, but without any mention of the narrative figuration artists and critics, may be found in Katia Schneller, “Sur les traces de Rosalind Krauss: La reception française de la notion d’index 1977–­1990,” Études Photographiques 21 (December 2007): 125–­27. As I argue it here, the significance of Foucault’s thinking about the theory of the image is born out in the recent book by Stephen Apkon, The Age of Literacy: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). 79. Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” X-­TRA 8 (Fall 2005): 18. 80. Ibid., 30. 81. Ibid., 20, quoting Jacques Lacan, “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in Structuralism, edited by Jacques Ehrmann (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books), 106. 82. See the introduction in Wilson, Visual World of French Theory, 12–­28, for more of the political background of the time. 83. Foucault, “Photogenic Painting,” 104.

Conclusion 1. After writing Foucault on Painting, I discovered that Foucault’s unpublished notes and manuscripts on painting had been obtained by the Bibliothèque National de France (INHA) in 2013. Although the descriptive inventory has not yet been published in the BN catalog, Manuscrits de Michel Foucault NAF28730, Boîte 53 may now be consulted, and I am grateful to Laurence Le Bras in the department of manuscripts for the opportunity to examine it.

152  Notes to conclusion 2. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in The Merleau-­Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 85. 3. Michel Foucault, “On the Ways of Writing History,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: New Press, 1998), 2:293. Interview conducted by Raymond Bellours in Les Lettres Françaises, June 15–­21, 1967, 6–­9. 4. Merleau-­Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 76. 5. Michel Foucault, “The Order of Things,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 2:263. Interview conducted by Raymond Bellours in Les Lettres Françaises, March 31–­April 6, 1966, 3–­4. 6. Merleau-­Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 85. 7. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 194. 8. Merleau-­Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 85. 9. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 369–91, where the theme of masking and unmasking relates to the task of the historian. 10. Richard Rorty, “Private Irony and Liberal Hope,” in The Rorty Reader, edited by Christopher J. Vorparil and Richard J. Bernstein (West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), 279–­95.

INDEX abstraction, 28, 33, 40, 41, 99, 105, 113. See also antipainting movements and rhetoric; figuration aesthetics: defined, 21–22, 129n56; and ethics, 3, 22, 24, 38; and existence, 19–20, 121–23, 128n38, 129n57 Africa, 104 Aillaud, Gilles, 97; Live and Let Die (Vivre et laisser mourir), 97, Plate 8. See also narrative figuration Alberti, Leon Battista, 38, 136n68 alla prima, 110 Alpers, Svetlana, 27, 29, 34 anachronicity, 15, 16, 17, 20, 24, 29. See also painting as historical object anamorphosis, 48–49, 137–38nn33–34 Anglo-­A merican art history and criticism: and the baroque, 27, 133n16; compared with French, 5, 25–26, 27, 32–33, 40–41; and French theory, 132n15; and Manet, 68; and photographic theory, 33, 100; reception of Foucault, 25–26, 30; and semiology, 39. See also French art history and criticism; German art history and criticism / Germanic tradition; Italian art history and criticism; Spanish art history and criticism Anthropocene, 17 antipainting movements and rhetoric, 5, 17, 32, 33; in Anglo-­A merican context, 40–41, 99–100, 128n21; in France, 67, 68, 142n63, 147n1; responses to, 97, 99, 100, 115, 148n12 aphrodisia, 21. See also pleasure; sexuality apophasis, 74 Arasse, Daniel: on anachronicity, 15, 17, 20, 24; on painting as knowledge, 15, 16; on significance of Foucault’s “Las Meninas,” 13–14, 23, 25, 27–28 arbitrary sign, 41, 61

archaeological method: in The Archaeology of Knowledge, 57; for art history and criticism, 6, 26, 29, 43, 45, 47, 51, 102, 127n13; Canguilhem on, 26, 131n7, 132n11; critiques of, 4; Foucault on, 29, 45; and Fromanger, 102, 114–15; in Les Mots et les choses, 5–6, 19, 26; and objects, 113; Shapiro on, 133n19; Tanke on, 127n13; and Velázquez’s Las Meninas, 26, 43 Archaeology of Knowledge, The (Foucault), 19, 57, 70, 94; “The Formation of Objects,” 55; and “new history,” 98–99; and objects, 55, 81, 146n65; and painting as knowledge, 43, 80–81, 83. See also archaeological method Armstrong, Carol, 53, 68 Armstrong, Philip, 132n15 Arroyo, Eduardo, 97; Live and Let Die (Vivre et laisser mourir), 97, Plate 8. See also narrative figuration art historical methods and approaches, 13, 27, 54; chronological analysis, 6, 7, 15, 45, 46, 53–54, 61, 69, 104, 106; formal/descriptive analysis, 27, 34, 44, 45, 54, 57, 62, 113, 119; iconographic analysis, 27, 28, 39, 41; Marxist art history, 27, 115; monographic treatment, 29; “new art history,” 27; phenomenology, 35, 47, 49, 112; semiological analysis, 22, 39–41, 88–90, 114; social art history, 27. See also archaeological method “art history without names,” 47, 137n24 artist, conception of: changes in 34–35; as dandy (Baudelaire), 18, 35; as genius/hero, 19, 35; as isolated/separate, 35, 37–38; as revealer of truth, 35; as teacher, 70 Baldass, Ludwig von, 127n10 Baldessari, John, 143n6 Baltrusaitis, Jurgis, 137–38n33

154  index baroque period, 4, 27, 133n16 Barthes, Roland: influence on Foucault, 114, 146n67, 150n55; influence on Marin, 89; on pleasure (jouissance), 129n49; “Rhetoric of the Image,” 114 Bataille, Georges: death, 141n40; on destruction of the subject, 62; influence on Foucault, 13, 61–65, 141n40; influence on Greenberg, 68; on Lascaux cave paintings, 61, 65, 140n32, 141n53; and literary tradition, 61; on Manet and Goya, 141n56; on Manet and modernity, 61–62; on Manet’s depiction of women, 65; and Merleau-­Ponty, 67; on self-­referentiality in Manet, 142n69; on transgression and sexuality, 63–65, 67, 141n43, 141n52 Baudelaire, Charles: Benjamin on, 128n29; influence on Foucault, 7, 18–21, 22, 61, 123; on modernity, 18–21; “The Painter of Modern Life,” 18; “The Salon of 1846,” 18, 21 beauty, 17 Benjamin, Walter, 18 Birth of the Clinic, The (Foucault), 14, 15 body, the, 2, 21, 63 Bois, Yve-­A lain, 100 Bosch, Hieronymus: The Temptations of St. Anthony, 14–15, 46, 127n10, Plate 3 Bourdieu, Pierre, 106, 145n34; Photography (Un art moyen), 106 Breton, André, 82–86, 87–88, 90; Le Surréalisme et la peinture, 83, 87 Brown, Roger William, 31 Brussels, 91 Bryson, Norman, 1 Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., 128n21 Butor, Michel, 86, 146n55, 146n59; Les Mots dans la peinture, 86 Cachin, Françoise, 61, 142n69 Cage, John: Automobile Tire Print, 103 calligrams, 7, 73, 75, 86 Canguilhem, Georges, 26, 94, 131n7, 132n11 Caracas, 142n63 Care of the Self, The (Foucault), 3, 19, 21. See also History of Sexuality, The

Catucci, Stefano, 9 Chandler, John, 134n46 Charles III Prison, 111 China, 104, 117 Clark, T. J., 68, 142n68 classical age, 26, 27, 39, 40, 46, 94, 119, 120 classical painting, 75, 81, 90, 119, 121, 142n66 Collège de France seminars (Foucault) 9, 121 color-­field painting, 113 Columbia University, 32 Comité d’action des prisonniers, 101. See also Prison Reform Movement concealing and revealing: in Manet, 64–65, 66, 67; in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, 35–36, 48, 53, 123. See also visibility and invisibility conceptualism, 33, 41, 97, 143n6 consciousness. See psychoanalysis Cottingham, Robert, 103 Crimp, Douglas, 116 Dada, 33, 83, 97 Damisch, Hubert: on abstraction, 40; “Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image,” 112, 150n63; on Foucault’s “Las Meninas,” 25, 34; influence of Merleau-­Ponty on, 120; on Lacan, 25; and October circle, 100; The Origin of Perspective, 25; on painting as theoretical object, 25; and photographic theory, 100, 112–13; on relationship with Foucault, 150n64; on the terminology of painting, 36–37, 38, 55; on visuality, 41 dandy, 18, 19; Manet self-­represented as, 53 David, Jacques-­L ouis, 98 Davidson, Arnold, 19–20, 23, 128n38 da Vinci, Leonardo, 17 “death of painting.” See antipainting movements and rhetoric Debord, Guy, 67, 130n66, 142n63 Defert, Daniel, 8, 101, 115 Deleuze, Gilles: on desire, 23, 130n63; on Foucault’s recourse to painting, 24; on Fromanger, 5, 33–34, 102, 115, 149n22; influence of Marin on, 22; and Prison Reform

index  155 Movement, 33, 111; on visibilities, 9, 16, 22, 33, 43, 44 dematerialization of art, 33, 134n46 Descartes, René, 56 diagrams, 7, 73 Dr. Strangelove (film), 112 Duchamp, Marcel, 95, 97, 100, 147n1; Fresh Window, 91, 93 Ektachrome/Kodachrome slide film, 110, 112 Enlightenment, 18, 61 Estes, Richard, 103 ethics: and aesthetics, 3, 22, 24; defined, 3; and existence, 1, 2, 3, 4, 19–23, 128n38, 129n57; and painting, 4, 19–20, 50, 116, 129n57 “Ethics of Pleasure, An” (Foucault), 1 Eurocentrism, 5 European tradition, 5, 16–17, 33, 64, 138n2 figuration, 2, 15, 17, 28, 33, 34, 40–41. See also abstraction figurative object (l’objet figurative): versus figure in the text (la figure dans le texte), 40, 89 Flaubert, Gustave, 53, 138n2 “Force of Flight, The” (“La Force de fuir”) (Foucault), 6, 7, 8 Foucault, Michel: birth/death, 4, 19; painterly sensibilities of, 22; and Prison Reform Movement, 8, 32, 101, 111, 148n17, 148n19; travels, 26, 30, 32, 67. See also specific works Fox Talbot, William Henry, 108–9, 149–50n51; Leaves of Orchidea, 109; The Pencil of Nature, 149n50 frames/framing, 15, 18, 36; in Magritte, 75, 77, 91; in Manet, 53, 58; in Velázquez, 36, 141n58; in word and image paintings, 82 Francastel, Pierre, 39, 41 Frankfurt School, 98, 105 French art history and criticism, 3, 41; compared with Anglo-­A merican, 5, 25–26, 27, 32–33, 40–41, 132n15; compared with German, 28, 41; and the defense of painting, 97, 99, 100, 115; and photographic theory, 33, 100; reception of Foucault, 25, 27, 67–68, 83, 132n15.

See also Anglo-­A merican art history and criticism; German art history and criticism / Germanic tradition; Italian art history and criticism; Spanish art history and criticism Freud, Sigmund, 129n49 Freund, Gisèle: on history of photography, 105–6, 108, 117; influence on Foucault, 105; Photography and Society, 105, 106 Fried, Michael, 68, 141n38 Fromanger, Gérard, 97–117; and antipainting movements and rhetoric, 97, 99; and archaeological method, 102, 114–15; birth, 4; Boulevard des Italiens, 110; compared with pop and hyperrealism, 104; Deleuze on, 5, 33, 102, 115; Desire Is Everywhere (Le Désir est partout), 99, 104, 105, 110, 111, 123, Plate 9, Plate 10; Egyptian Violet (Violet d’Égypte), 111, Plate 11; exclusion from art historical canon, 5; exhibitions, 98, 99, 104, 110; formal qualities, 98, 110, 111, 112; How to Make the Portrait of a Painting (Comment faire le portrait d’un tableau?), 110, 111, Plate 10; and image theory, 112–13; In Hu-­Xian, China, 116, 117; The Life of the Artist (La vie d’artiste), 111, Plate 12; and “new history painting,” 98, 100, 102, 104; The Painter and the Model (Le Peintre et le modèle), 110; on painting and politics, 97–98, 101, 104; painting process, 8, 98, 101, 102, 110–12, 114, 151n73; paintings versus photographic “substrate,” 102, 109, 111, 113, 114; and Prison Reform Movement, 32, 33, 101, 111–12; and qualities of preindustrial photography, 108; Rue de la mer, Plate 9; self-­portraits of, 110, 111, 112; series format, 16, 97, 98, 104, 108, 110, 111, 117; significance for Foucault, 5, 8; slide projections, 8, 98, 101, 105, 109, 110, 112, 117. See also narrative figuration Galerie Creuzevault, 103 Galerie Jeanne Bucher, 32, 99, 108 Gassiot-­Talabot, Gérald, 103 gazes: in Fromanger, 114; Velázquez’s Las Meninas, 18, 34, 37, 38, 48, 49, 53, 66, 141n58

156  index Gellner, Ernest, 31 genealogical historical method, 94–95 Gentileschi, Artemisia, 37; La Pittura, 37, Plate 5 German art history and criticism / Germanic tradition, 27, 113; compared with French, 28, 41. See also Anglo-­A merican art history and criticism; French art history and criticism; Italian art history and criticism; Spanish art history and criticism Giordano, Luca, 43 globalization, 5, 24 Goings, Ralph, 103 Goya, Francisco, 141n56 Great Britain, 27, 41 Greenberg, Clement, 68 grisaille, 110, 112 Groupe Information Prison (GIP). See Prison Reform Movement Guattari, Félix, 150n53 Guillotine and Painting, The (Guillotine et peinture) (exhibition), 98 Guys, Constantin, 19 Hamilton, Richard, 103 Heidegger, Martin, 2 Heusch, Luc de, 142n1 Hirschhorn, Thomas, 7, 125n8 History of Madness (Folie et déraison) (Foucault), 6, 14, 18, 119, 120 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault), 3, 9; The Care of the Self, 3, 19, 21; The Use of Pleasure, 3, 21, 129n49 Hommage à Nicéphore Niepce (exhibition), 151n77 humanism, 16, 17, 127n9 hyperrealism, 103–4, 121 image theory, 4, 17, 23–24, 100, 103–5, 108, 112–17, 121–22, 130n67, 150n55 “image-­t hinking,” 24, 130n67 Impressionism, 29, 54, 57, 61 Imprévu, L’ (journal), 20 influences on Foucault: Barthes, 114, 146n67, 150n55; Bataille, 13, 61–67, 141n40;

Baudelaire, 7, 18–21, 22, 61, 123; Freund, 105; Lacan, 48–49; Magritte, 30, 32, 80–81; Marin, 22, 38–39, 88, 89; Merleau-­Ponty, 9, 10, 39, 51, 120; Nietzsche, 9, 94, 123; Saussure, 58–61, 94, 95, 120, 139n13; from Spain, 131n7; Tarski, 56–57; Wölfflin, 137n26 Ingres, Dominique, 104, 105, 106 irony: in Foucault’s approach, 53, 67, 79, 122, 123; in Foucault’s titles, 32, 56; in French terminology of painting, 36, 41, 65; in Live and Let Die (Vivre et laisser mourir), 97; in Magritte, 77, 82, 91; in Manet, 64, 65–66; in Merleau-­Ponty, 35; in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, 48, 53, 122–23. See also puns and wordplay isotopism, 82 Italian art history and criticism, 1, 37, 38, 41, 110, 133n16. See also Anglo-­A merican art history and criticism; French art history and criticism; German art history and criticism / Germanic tradition; Paragone; Spanish art history and criticism Italy, 1, 30 Ivens, Joris, 117 Jacotot, Joseph, 145n34 Japan, 30 Jouffroy, Alain, 98, 99 jouissance, 129n49 Kandinsky, Wassily, 71, 74, 90, 95 Kant, Immanuel, 2–3, 18, 123 Kelly, Michael, 11, 22, 129n57 Klee, Paul, 40, 71, 74, 90, 95; Esquisses pédagogiques, 147n75; Villa R, 71, 72 knowledge, painting as, 2, 16, 17, 46–47, 80, 117, 121, 123; in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50, 53; in word and image paintings, 82, 83 Kodachrome/Ektachrome slide film, 110, 112 Krauss, Rosalind, 100, 109–10, 150n55 Lacan, Jacques, 25, 30, 48–49, 137–38n33; The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 48; influence on Foucault, 48–49

index  157 landscape painting, 22; motif in Magritte, 83, 84, 86, 88 language theory, 56, 57, 58–60, 67, 139n13 Lascaux cave paintings, 13, 61, 65, 141n53 Las Meninas, 43–51, Plate 2; anachronicity of, 16; canonical status of, 25, 27, 43, 119, 133n16; concealing and revealing in, 35–36, 48, 53, 123; early reception of, 9, 26, 27; Foucault’s admiration of, 142n65; frames and framing in, 36, 141n58; gazes in, 18, 34, 37, 38, 48, 49, 53, 66, 141n58; irony in, 48, 53, 122–23; as knowledge, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50, 53; light in, 37, 48, 123, 141n58, 144n12; mirror in, 26, 29, 45, 49–50, 66, 75, 123; Mitchell on, 132n13; the painter in, 15, 34, 37, 38, 46, 48, 53; perspective in, 45, 48, 49, 51, 144n12; portrait of Spanish royals in, 15, 26, 49, 68, 75, 123; reception in Anglo-­A merican context, 27; Searle on, 133n17; self-­portrait in, 15, 46, 53, 56; at threshold between classical age and modern age, 26, 45, 46, 119; “traps” in, 37, 66, 141n58, 144n12; viewer’s position in, 18, 36, 37, 38, 49, 66; visibility and invisibility in, 36, 37, 38, 45, 48–50; vision in, 45, 48, 49. See also Velázquez, Diego Lebovici, Elisabeth, 135n59 linguistic theory: of Saussure, 58–61, 94, 95, 120, 139n13 Lippard, Lucy, 134n46 literary criticism: American, 27 Livrozet, Serge, 101 London, 33 Longhi, Roberto, 133n16 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 70, 143n6 Lust, 129n49 madness, 6, 14, 127n10, 127n19 Magritte, René, 69–95; The Air and the Song (L’Air et la chanson), 142–43n2; birth/death, 4, 77; Breton on, 83; correspondence with Foucault, 30, 80, 145n37; frames and framing in, 75, 77, 91; The Freedom of Worship (La liberté des cultes), 142–43n2; The Human

Condition (La Condition Humaine), 77, 78; illusionistic effects in, 77, 91; influence on Foucault, 30, 32, 80–81; The Interpretation of Dreams, 91, 92; irony in, 77, 82, 91; Lacan’s interest in, 30; landscape motifs in, 83, 84, 86, 88; on Les Mots et les choses, 7, 30; negation of word/image equivalencies, 82, 88, 121; The Phantom Landscape, 83, 84, 86; The Philosopher’s Lamp (La Lampe philosophique), 86–87, 142–43n2; photography of, 77; precedent of Kandinsky for, 71, 90; precedent of Klee for, 71, 90; precedent of Picabia for, 85; puns and wordplay in, 86–87, 91; reception in 1960s, 30, 83; repetition of images, titles in, 16, 32, 69, 73, 75; representation of women, 86; and Ruscha, 70, 73, 77–79, 82, 91; The Shades (Les Ombres), 142–43n2; self-­portrait in, 86–87; sexuality in, 86–87; This Is Not a Pipe. (Ceci n’est pas une pipe.), 69; “traps” in, 144n12; The Two Mysteries (Les Deux Mystères), 75, 76, 88, 90, 142–43n2; The Use of Words I (L’usage de la parole I), 69; “Words and Things” (“Les Mots et les images”), 30, 80–82, 85, 88, 94. See also Treachery of Images, The; word and image paintings Magritte and Contemporary Art (exhibition), 143n6 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 61, 139n4 Malraux, André, 62 Manet, Édouard, 53–68; The Balcony, 58, 59, 64; A Bar at the Folies-­Bergère, 65–66, 75; birth and death, 4; concealing and revealing in, 64–65, 66, 67; Déjeuner sur l’ herbe, 138n2; and destruction of the subject, 62; The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, 58, 60, 61, 62; formal innovation of, 62, 65, 75; Foucault’s formal analysis of, 57, 65; Foucault’s sustained interest in, 30; frames and framing in, 53, 58; irony in, 64, 65–66; The Masked Ball at the Opera, 64; and modernity, 58, 61–62, 65, 68, 69, 142n68; and the museum, 138n2; Music in the Tuileries Gardens, 53–54, Plate 6; Nana, 141n52; Olympia, 62, 63, 64, 65,

158  index 138n2; as precedent for contemporary art, 54; as precedent for Impressionism 57, 61; profondeur (depth) of works, 57–58, 62, 65; representation of women, 64–65, 67; self-­ portrait of, 53, 56; self-­referentiality of works, 53–54, 65, 66, 138n2, 142n69; sexuality and transgression in, 63–65, 67 Manet and the Object of Painting (La Peinture de Manet) (Foucault), 53–68; chronological analysis in, 53, 54, 61; formal analysis in, 57, 65; influence of Bataille on, 61–65; influence of language theory and linguistics on, 56–60, 61; invented terminology in, 54–56, 60; lecture, 6, 30, 134n31; puns and wordplay in, 57–58, 65, 141n54; on profondeur (depth), 57–58, 62, 65; on sexuality and transgression, 63–65, 67; translation, 54, 139n8, 141n54 Marin, Louis: birth/death, 38; Careri on, 146n73; on descriptive discourse and the self, 22; “The Discourse of the Figure,” 89; early essays of, 146n61; “Elements of a Pictorial Semiology” (“Eléments de sémiologie picturale”), 39; figurative object (l’objet figurative) versus the figure in the text (la figure dans le texte), 40, 89; “How to Read a Painting” (“Comment lire un tableau?”), 39, 89; influence of Barthes on, 89, 146n67; influence of Breton on, 90; influence of Foucault on, 89; influence of Merleau-­ Ponty on, 39, 120; influence on Deleuze, 22; influence on Foucault, 22, 38–39, 88, 89; on Klee, 40, 90, 147n75; “Maps and Paintings,” 89; on Merleau-­Ponty, 89; on Panofsky, 39; pictorial semiology, 22, 39–41, 88–90, 114; on the Port-­Royal Logic, 39, 88–89, 94; “Texts in Representation,” 89 Marxism, 27, 115 masking. See concealing and revealing medicine, 14, 15 “Meninas, Las” (“Les Suivantes”), 6, 34; impact on art history, 13, 23, 27–28, 29, 132n13; puns and wordplay in, 34, 36; reception of, 25, 26, 27, 28, 131n9; translation, 26, 56, 73. See also Order of Things, The

Mercure de France, Le (journal), 25 Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice: and Bataille, 67; “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 51; “Eye and Mind,” 51; “formal thinking,” 140n18; “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 35, 51, 120, 135n56; influence on Foucault, 9, 10, 39, 51, 120; influence on French art history, 41; influence on Marin, 39; on material integrity of painting, 41; and the phenomenology of painting, 35, 119; on Saussure, 120; on visibility and invisibility, 36, 67; The Visible and the Invisible, 51 methods. See art historical methods and approaches Michals, Duane, 33, 91; Magritte, 91, 92; René Magritte, 93 “middle region,” 44, 45 minimalism, 113, 135n56 mirrors and reflection: in Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-­Bergère, 66, 75; as metaphor for Magritte’s oeuvre, 75; as metaphor for the unconscious, 29; as pictorial device, 50, 75, 138n38; in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, 26, 29, 45, 49–50, 66, 75, 123. See also repetition and multiplicity Mitchell, W. J. T., 132n13, 134n39 modern age: Baudelaire on, 18; Benjamin on, 18; and breaks with other eras, 26, 45, 119–20; characteristics of, 2, 18, 46, 61–62; and Manet as teleological origin, 61, 68 modern painting: and conception of artist, 34–35; as “ethical labor,” 10; and Manet, 58, 61–62, 65, 68, 69, 142n68; and self-­referentiality, 53; and transformation of the subject, 64 modern subject, 2, 19, 50–51, 64, 121, 122 Molesworth, Helen, 148n12 Montreal, 30 Morisot, Berthe, 64 “Mots et les images, Les” (Foucault review), 30 Musée de l’Orangerie, 140n34 Museum of Modern Art, 5, 145n41 “Name of the Father, The” (“Le ‘Non’ du père”) (Foucault), 34, 35, 79

index  159 Nancy, France, 111 narrative figuration, 32, 33; and antipainting movements and rhetoric, 97, 100, 115; compared with pop and hyperrealism, 103–4; exclusion from art historical canon, 99; exhibitions, 98; formal qualities of, 98; goals of, 97, 98, 115; and “new history painting,” 97–98, 100, 102; on threshold between abstraction and the mass-­mediated image, 99. See also Fromanger, Gérard “new history painting,” 97–98, 100, 102 New York, 33 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 9, 94, 123 Noir et la couleur, Le (Black and Color) (Foucault, uncompleted), 29 nonrepresentational painting. See abstraction “object painting,” 54–58, 60–61, 62, 67, 75, 79, 89 objects. See things October (journal), 30, 31, 100, 132–33n15 oil painting: in the age of the image, 99, 115; rejection of, 67, 68, 97, 100, 147n1; and semiology, 89, 120 Order of Things, The (Les Mots et les choses) (Foucault), 10, 17, 20, 28, 44, 55, 121; archaeological method, 5–6, 19, 26, 29; Canguilhem on, 26, 94, 131n7; discursive style of, 119–20; and linguistic theory, 88, 120, 139n13; Magritte on, 7, 30, 80; “The Prose of the World,” 38, 127n17; reception in Anglo-­ American context, 25–26, 30–31, 130–31n5, 132n15; reception in French context, 25, 67–68, 130–31n5, 132n15; translation, 31–32, 126n5. See also “Meninas, Las” painting as historical object, 4, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18. See also anachronicity painting as knowledge, 2, 16, 17, 46–47, 80, 117, 121, 123; in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50, 53; in word and image paintings, 82, 83 painting object, 16, 29, 45, 54, 65, 89, 102 Palomino, Antonio, 43

Panofsky, Erwin: Foucault on, 28, 30, 31–32, 40; Marin on, 39; methods of, 27, 39; Studies in Iconology, 28 Paragone, 102, 149n25 Paris, 30, 67, 97, 110; galleries and exhibitions in, 32, 99, 131n7, 133n16, 151n77 peinture, la: versus le tableau, 34, 36–38, 39–40, 54–55, 60, 77, 82, 94, 122 peinture-­objet, la: versus le tableau-­objet, 54–56, 65, 69, 79 Peirce, Charles S., 95 perception, 2, 48–49, 55, 58, 119, 121 performance art, 33, 116 perspective: and anamorphosis, 48–49; Damisch on, 25, 41; Lacan on, 49; rupture of, 75; as system of thought, 25; in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, 45, 48, 49, 51, 144n12 phenomenology, 35, 47, 49, 112 photogenic drawing, 106, 108, 112, 149–50n51 photogenic painting, 108–9, 113 “Photogenic Painting” (“La Peinture photogénique”) (Foucault), 6, 32, 99; as manifesto, 100–101; puns and wordplay in, 109; reception of, 115–16 photographic theory: of Barthes, 114; of Bourdieu, 106; of Crimp, 116; of Damisch, 100, 112–13; emergence of, 33, 100; and the Frankfurt School, 105; of Freund, 105, 106, 117; of Krauss, 109–10, 150n55 photography: commercialization/ industrialization of, 105, 106; as democratic medium, 106–8, 117, 149n46; early reception of, 104–5; fine art tradition, 33; of Fox Talbot, 108–9, 149–50n51; of Fromanger, 98, 101–2, 104, 105, 109–12, 113–14, 116; history of, 102–3, 104–5, 106–8, 115; of Magritte, 77; of Michals, 33, 91; and painting, 32, 33, 103, 104; and proliferation and circulation of the image, 103, 105; as “social” medium, 105–6. See also protophotographic techniques; slide projections physionotrace machines, 106, 107 Picabia, Francis, 83–86, 95; Voilà la femme, 85–86, Plate 7

160  index pictorial semiology, 22, 39–41, 88–90, 114 picture object, 54 Pictures (exhibition), 116 pigment, 21, 35, 64, 65 pipe paintings. See Magritte, René; Treachery of Images, The pleasure: and aesthetics of existence, 19–20; Barthes on, as jouissance, 129n49; Deleuze on, as desire, 22–23; Freud on, as Lust, 129n49; and painting, 20–21, 23, 34, 105, 121; and perception, 20, 21. See also sexuality pop art, 33, 69, 103, 104, 121 portraiture, 15, 111; of Magritte (Michals), 91, 93; of Marilyn Monroe (Warhol), 103; of Berthe Morisot (Manet), 59, 64; of Spanish royals (Velázquez), 15, 26, 49, 68, 75, 123, Plate 2. See also self-­portraiture Port-­Royal Logic (Logique de Port-­Royal), 39, 88–89, 94 post-­structuralism, 27 Poussin, Nicolas, 22 Prado, 15, 142n65 “Preface to Transgression, A” (Foucault), 63 Prison Reform Movement: Deleuze in, 33, 111; Foucault in, 8, 32, 101, 111, 148n17, 148n19; Fromanger in, 32, 33, 101, 111–12, 148n19; and Rebeyrolle’s The Dungeon, Plate 1 prisons/imprisonment, 8, 22, 101; Charles III Prison, 111; Toul Prison, 112 profondeur (depth), 57–58, 62, 65, 140n26, 141n54 proprioception, 2 protophotographic techniques: photogenic drawing, 106, 108, 112, 149–50n51; physionotrace machines, 106, 107; shadow casting and silhouette, 98, 106, 108–112 Proust, Antonin, 139n4 Proust, Marcel, 61 psychoanalysis: and Bataille, 141n38; and Lacan, 25, 48–49, 137n33; and pleasure, 20, 129n49; and the unconscious, 28–29, 63, 106 puns and wordplay: in Foucault’s La Peinture de Manet, 57–58, 65, 141n54; in Foucault’s “Les Suivantes,” 34, 36; in Foucault’s titles, 31, 32,

37, 79, 108–9; in Magritte’s The Philosopher’s Lamp, 86–87; in Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, 85, 86; in Picabia’s Voilà la femme, 85. See also irony quattrocento. See Renaissance Quenedey, Edme: drawing of a physionotrace machine, 107. See also protophotographic techniques Rajchman, John, 132n15 Rancière, Jacques: The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 79, 132–33n15, 145n34 Rauschenberg, Robert: Automobile Tire Print, 103; First Landing Jump, 103 readymades, 97, 100 realism. See figuration Rebeyrolle, Paul: birth/death, 4; The Dungeon, 8, Plate 1; impact of artwork on Foucault, 5; series format, 16 Recalcati, Antonio, 97; Live and Let Die (Vivre et laisser mourir), 97, Plate 8. See also narrative figuration Renaissance: artists, 18; art theory, 17, 38, 102, 110; representational modes, 14, 46; Venus, 65 repetition and multiplicity: in Fromanger, 16, 111, 115; in Magritte, 16, 32, 69, 73, 75; in pop art, 103. See also mirrors and reflection “Réponse au Cercle d’épistémologie” (Foucault), 57 representational painting. See figuration Révolution Surréaliste, La (journal), 30, 31, 80 Rorty, Richard, 123 rupture: in classical perspective, 75; in Manet, 57, 58, 62, 65; Les Mots et les choses as, 28, 94, 130–31n5 Ruscha, Ed: influence of Magritte on, 144n13; on Magritte’s illusionistic effects, 91; on Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, 70, 73, 77; meeting with Magritte, 77 Salt, John, 103 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 67

index  161 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 58–61, 94, 95, 120, 139n13 Schoolmaster trope, 7, 70, 79, 132–33n15, 145n34 self: aesthetics of the, 121–23; -­consciousness, 1; -­criticism, 27, 123; -­definition, 22, 29; -­exploration, 9, 122; philosophy of, 11, 21; -­transformation, 1, 17, 19 self-­portraiture, 1, 15, 37, 123; by Fromanger, 110, 111, 112, Plate 10, Plate 11, Plate 12; by Gentileschi, Plate 5; by Magritte, 86–87; by Manet, 53, 56; by Velázquez, 15, 46, 53, 56. See also portraiture self-­referentiality, of painting, 90; in Manet, 53–54, 65, 66, 138n2, 142n69 semiology: and Barthes, 89, 146n67; and Krauss, 150n55; and Marin, 22, 39–41, 88–90, 114; and Saussure, 120, 139n13 series format: in Fromanger, 16, 97, 98, 104, 108, 110, 111, 117; in pop art, 69; in Rebeyrolle, 16. See also repetition and multiplicity sexuality, 19, 20–21, 24; Greek conception of, 21; in Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, 85–86; and transgression in Manet’s Olympia, 63–65. See also pleasure shadow casting and silhouette, 98, 106, 108–12 Shapiro, Gary, 9, 10, 129n41, 133n19 Shattuck, Roger, 80 slide projections, 8, 98, 101, 105, 109, 110, 112, 117 Spanish art history and criticism, 43. See also Anglo-­A merican art history and criticism; French art history and criticism; German art history and criticism / Germanic tradition; Italian art history and criticism Spanish royals, 15, 26, 49, 68, 75, 123 Steinberg, Leo, 28–29, 34 structuralism, 132n15 subject, the: alienation of, 119, 121; coexistence of multiple positions for, 45, 51, 79, 114–15; destruction of, 50–51, 58, 62; formation of, 19, 21–22, 70; in modernity, 2, 19, 50–51, 64, 121, 122; transformation of, 2, 4, 51, 64, 87, 95; as viewer, 2, 4, 22, 37, 44–45, 47–48, 49, 51, 79–80

Surrealism, 4, 69, 74, 83; La Révolution Surréaliste, 31, 32, 80 tableau, le: versus la peinture, 34, 36–38, 39–40, 54–55, 60, 77, 82, 94, 122 tableau-­objet, le: versus la peinture-­objet, 54–56, 65, 69, 79 tacitness of painting, 23, 35, 36, 38 Tanke, Joseph, 9–10; Foucault’s Philosophy of Art, 9–10 Tarski, Alfred, 56; “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages,” 56, 139n16 terminology for painting: Foucault’s invention, 7, 38, 54, 55, 56, 60, 65; French versus English, 36–38, 54, 55; gendering of, 37; Italian, 37, 110 things: lesson about, 70, 88; and objects, 37, 44, 55–56, 139n13, 146n65; and words, 30, 37, 56, 81, 121 “This Is Not a Pipe” (“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”) (Foucault essay): on the artist’s “lesson,” 73, 88; and Magritte’s “Les Mots et les images,” 80, 81; and multiplicity of versions, 77, 89; publication history of, 6, 30, 143n3; reception in Anglo-­A merican context, 30–31, 132–33n15; titling of, 30, 32, 73–74; translation, 30–31, 132–33n15, 143n3. See also This Is Not a Pipe. This Is Not a Pipe. (Ceci n’est pas une pipe.) (Foucault illustrated book): on the artist’s “lesson,” 69–70, 73, 79; “The Deaf Work of Words” (“Le Sourd travail des mots”), 74, 144n19; “Here Are Two Pipes” (“Voici deux pipes”), 74; illustrations in, 73, 75; on irony, 82; publication history of, 6, 30, 143n3; “Seven Seals of Affirmation,” 75; on similitudes, 91, 75, 143n4; titling of, 30, 32, 73–74; translation, 132n15, 142n1, 144n19. See also “This Is Not a Pipe” threshold(s), 44–46 Tolnay, Charles de, 127n10 Topino-­L ebrun, François, 98 Toul Prison, 112 transformative effects of painting, 18, 37; on the

162  index artist, 1–4; on the past and present, 17, 18, 19; on the viewing subject, 1–4, 13, 17, 51, 64, 70, 79, 85, 87 translation: between Latin and vernacular Tuscan, 38; of “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” 30–31, 132–33n15, 143n3; of Ceci n’est pas une pipe., 132n15, 142n1, 144n19; of Les Mots et les choses, 31–32, 126n5; of La Peinture de Manet, 54, 139n8, 141n54; of “Les Suivantes,” 26, 56, 73; of terminology for painting, 36–38, 135n59 “traps” and entrapment, 37, 66, 73, 79, 144n12 Treachery of Images, The (La Trahison des images) (1929, 1935), 69–95, Plate 4; and calligrams, 7, 73, 75, 86; “lessons” of, 69–70, 73, 79, 88, 146n59; multiplicity of versions, 32, 69, 73, 142–43n2; negation of the principles of painting, 70–71, 75–76, 82; negative textual propositions in, 69, 73, 74, 75, 76, 85; puns and wordplay in, 85, 86; Ruscha on, 70, 73, 77; sexuality in, 85–86; title variation of, 69; “traps” in, 73, 144n12; word/image dissonance in, 71, 74, 81–82, 86. See also Magritte, René; word and image paintings Tunis, 67 Tunisia, 30 unconscious, the. See psychoanalysis United States of America, 9, 26, 27, 41, 100, 131n9. See also Anglo-­A merican art history and criticism Use of Pleasure, The (Foucault), 3, 21, 129n49. See also History of Sexuality, The Valéry, Paul, 17, 61–62; “The Triumph of Manet,” 140n34 Vasari, 34–35 Velázquez, Diego, 13, 46–47; birth/death, 4. See also Las Meninas Veyne, Paul, 16, 19 viewer: and calls to action, 2, 8, 50, 85; and pleasure, 20, 34; privileging of, 45, 47, 48, 49; reflexive position of, 47–48, 49, 53; subjecti-

vation of, 37; subjective responses of, 58, 67, 86, 116; transformation of, 1–4, 13, 17, 51, 64, 70, 79, 85, 87; and “traps,” 37, 66, 73 visibilities theory, 15, 16, 22, 43–44, 45, 46 visibility and invisibility: Bataille on, 67; dialectic in painting, 48; in Fromanger, 113; in Manet, 58, 63, 64, 67; Merleau-­Ponty on, 36, 67; in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, 36, 37, 38, 45, 48–50. See also concealing and revealing vision, 9, 29, 43, 45, 48, 113 visual culture, 3, 4, 5, 29 visual field, 7, 24, 73, 82, 83 visuality, 3, 33, 41, 130n67 voluptas, 21. See also pleasure; sexuality Waldberg, Patrick, 80, 82 Warhol, Andy, 69, 103, 143n4, 144n13; Mineola Motorcycle, 103 “What Is an Author?” (Foucault), 137n24 “What Is Enlightenment?” (Foucault), 7, 18, 19, 20, 22, 35, 123 Wilson, Sarah, 102, 148n15 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 95, 132n13 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 113, 137n26 women, representation of: in Magritte, 86; in Manet, 64–65, 67; in Picabia, 86 word and image paintings, 69–95, 103, 120; conjunction of language and image in, 69, 82, 85; and destruction of representational space, 73; frames and framing in, 82; as knowledge, 82, 83; and negation of the principles of painting, 71, 82; precedent of Kandinsky for, 74; precedent of Klee for, 74, 90; precedent of Picabia for, 85; realization in Warhol, 69, 103, 144n13; and the subject, 79–80; and resemblance, 71, 74, 75, 82, 85, 90; “traps” in, 73, 79. See also Treachery of Images, The wordplay. See puns and wordplay Žižek, Slavoj, 138n34 Zola, Émile, 61

Catherine M. Soussloff is professor of art history, visual art, and theory and associate at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, University of British Columbia. Her books include Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the Twenty-­First Century, The Subject in Art: Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern, Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, and The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept (Minnesota, 1997). She has held research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Getty Research Institute, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and the Institut national d’histoire de l’art. She taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for twenty-­four years, where she held the first Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in Art History and a University of California Presidential Chair.

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Plate 1. Paul Rebeyrolle, The Dungeon, from Les prisonniers series, 1972. Collection of Sylvie Baltazart-­Eon. Housed at Espace Paul Rebeyrolle. Photograph by Michael Nguyen. Copyright 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Plate 2. Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Copyright Museo Nacional del Prado.

Plate 3. Hieronymus Bosch, The Temptations of St. Anthony, circa 1501–­16. Collection of Museu Nacional de Arte Antiqua, Lisbon. Image reproduced under Wikimedia Commons public domain guidelines.

Plate 4. René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (This Is Not a Pipe.), 1929. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Banque d’Images, ADAGP / Art Resource, NY. Copyright 2016 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 5. Artemisia Gentileschi, La Pittura, 1638–­39. Royal Collection Trust. Copyright 2016 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Plate 6. Édouard Manet, Music in the Tuileries Gardens, 1862. Copyright The National Gallery, London. Sir Hugh Lane Bequest, 1917.

Plate 7. Francis Picabia, Voilà la femme, 1915. Private collection, Paris. Courtesy of Jean-­Jacques Lebel. Copyright 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Plate 8. Eduardo Arroyo, Gilles Aillaud, and Antonio Recalcati, Live and Let Die; or, The Tragic End of Marcel Duchamp, 1965. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. Copyright 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Plate 9. Gérard Fromanger, Rue de la mer, from Le Désir est partout series, 1974. Collection FRAC Auvergne.

Plate 10. Gérard Fromanger, How To Make the Portrait of a Painting, 1975. Private collection.

Plate 11. Gérard Fromanger, Egyptian Violet, 1972. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de

Paris. Copyright Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris / Parisienne de Photographie.

Plate 12. Gérard Fromanger, The Life of the Artist, 1975–­77. Private collection.