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Catherine M. Soussloff, Foucault on
Painting
Review by Laura Katherine Smith
Catherine M. Soussloff’s book, Foucault on Painting (2017), is a monographic study on the art theory of the prominent twentieth-century philosopher Michel Foucault, exploring its place within the domain of art history, and its importance in Foucault’s own œuvre. In a systematic study of painters ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, Soussloff elegantly gathers together Foucault’s diverse studies on paintings, language, and their inter-relation to emphasize the degree to which these writings on art inform his general philosophy of knowledge and history. The sources upon which Soussloff draws range from Foucault’s well-known books:
Les mots et les choses, to his book mirroring one of the titles of Magritte’s famous painting: Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1973), to his lectures (between 1967-1971) on Manet, the last of which Soussloff explains can
be understood as preparatory for a never-realized book on the artist.1 Foucault on Painting focuses on the
philosopher’s analysis of the artists Diego Velázquez, Edouard Manet, René Magritte, Paul Rebeyrolle, and Gérard Fromanger. Soussloff argues that, for Foucault, what these artists have in common is their capacity to transform the way in which painting can be understood, both in their respective times, and in the history of art. Described by the author as a “historiography,” Soussloff’s book excavates and clearly describes what is at stake in Foucault’s art theory; namely, the argument that painting is, and should be understood as, the production of a unique kind of knowledge, one that is linked to his particular ethics.2
As a historiography of Foucault’s writing on painting, the book is very much a success. With acute attention to the translation and reception of Foucault’s works in French and Anglo-American art criticism, Soussloff draws a lineage of Foucault’s ideas on painting (distinguishing the medium from images and art in general) and its relation to language.3 The author situates her study within recent publications on the topic and includes
in the preface a section entitled, “Intentional Risks.” Here, the author explains that Gary Shapiro’s book
Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (2003) is “the first comprehensive
interpretation of [Foucault’s] writings on painting” in English and furthermore identifies Joseph Tanke’s
Foucault’s Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity (2009), which “attempted to relate to Foucault’s entire
philosophical project.”4 Soussloff aligns Foucault on Painting with the work of Shapiro in stating that: “In
contrast [to Tanke], 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
1 Catherine M. Soussloff, Foucault on Painting, p. 29-30. 2 Ibid., p.4 & 19.
3 See Soussloff’s section entitled, “Life As A Painting, Not An Image,” p.23. 4 Ibid., p. 9.
Catherine M. Soussloff, Foucault on Painting Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017 ISBN-10: 1517902428
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works he discussed—and in his present.”5 Specifically, in his present, Soussloff identifies, following Deleuze,
Foucault’s own identification with painters and artists. Soussloff opens Foucault on Painting by underscoring
that the philosopher compared himself to a painter when it came to “the transformative effects of his writing on
his being or existence” and she likewise concludes, in the chapter on Fromanger, by explaining that Foucault’s writing on the artist “resembled that of an avant-garde artist writing a manifesto for a movement,” seeming to confirm her earlier suggestion that “painting became part of him.”6
Foucault’s writing on painting is importantly situated by Soussloff within the aesthetic debates of the time; namely, between Anglo-American art theory debates (roughly in the period between 1965-1985), which saw a shift away from figuration and a turn towards conceptual art, and in France, where a new-found interest in figuration (notably with the narrative figuration movement of the 1960’s) and an emphasis on semiotics blossomed. Soussloff writes that, “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.”7 Soussloff identifies what she calls a “critical aporia” in American theory on figuration,
sparked by the much-delayed publication of Foucault’s essay on Fromanger, “which has only just begun to be addressed by art historians.”8 While this research productively identifies exciting emerging areas of study, the
reader cannot help but wish for an expansion of these debates right here in Foucault on Painting.
Among the most interesting chapters in the book are the Introduction: What Painting Does and Chapter One: Systems of Art Historical and Philosophical Thought. In the Introduction, Soussloff expands upon the philosophical concepts at stake for Foucault on painting, namely, his argument that painting constitutes its own place of knowledge, grounded precisely in the pleasure of looking.9 Within this, painting can teach us
about the ways in which we relate to the world and to our constructed notions of reality. Painting, according to Foucault, and explained by Soussloff, both constitutes itself, and emphasizes time as anachronistic. In Chapter One, wherein the reception, translation history, and aesthetic debates are sketched, Soussloff explains that, “[…] 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.”10 The remaining chapters explore the work of the selected artists respectively;
each pointing to Foucault’s particular fascination with the artists: the question of place (subjectivity and the mirror), irony (the play of depth and self-depiction), language-play and negativity in the word-image relation, and the relation between painting and the history of photography. While these overarching themes—notions of reality, subjectivity, and temporality—do act as a thread throughout the book, they are not expanded upon other than to underscore that these crucial aspects of Foucault’s general philosophy can be acutely rooted in his writing on painting. The stated methodology of a historiography, however, does certainly attain its goal of tracing a lineage of thought that must be included in the domain of art history. Soussloff stated clearly that: “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,
5 Ibid., p.10. 6 Ibid., p.1, p.100 & p.11. 7 Ibid., p.33. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., p.20. 10 Ibid., p.28.
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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.”11
What is significant about this methodology is how this choice of a historiography relates to the field of art history itself and to the inclusion of Foucault therein. On the one hand, Soussloff rightly argues that the expansion of the field of art history, a domain known for its descriptive and historicizing tendencies, include, more overtly, philosophers—here specifically Foucault—who could be “considered collaborators in thinking [the theory of painting as transformative]”.12 As Soussloff explains, this lacuna, specifically with regards to
the work of Foucault, was already pointed to by Svetlana Alpers in 1983.13 Meanwhile numerous publications
in what we might call ‘visual cultures,’ take Foucault’s analysis on the arts as a common-place: Richard Eldridge’s An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art (2014) includes a summary of Foucault’s analysis of Velázquez’s painting; Foucault is included in Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers (2007), and while Modern
French Visual Theory (2013) does not devote a chapter to Foucault, this omission, accompanied by brief
introduction, is, according to the editors, “because they [Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida] are well represented in other critical readers and anthologies, but form a crucial intellectual context for the work of most of our selected theorists.”14 Other volumes include, for example, An Introduction of Visual Culture (2009) and Images:
A Reader (2006), the latter of which reproduces part of Foucault’s This Is Not a Pipe and part of Alpers’ text
referenced by Soussloff. Given this highlighted gap between art history and art theory (philosophy, aesthetics, visual cultural, image studies or cultural studies), it seems odd that Soussloff chooses to write Foucault on
Painting “in the voice of an art historian,” which here seems to mean as ‘strictly’ a historiography that does
not engage in an in-depth theoretical analysis, the kind of which Tanke’s book on Foucault apparently takes on.15 Soussloff both argues to include the insights of Foucault within the domain of art history—and, it must
be underscored again, that she succeeds in tracing his lineage of painting theory beautifully—and yet, the author stops short of expanding upon the very theories that underpin Foucault’s thought on painting. The result is a wonderful contribution to a lineage of Foucault’s writing on painting and its key arguments, and yet, it oddly seems to confirm that art history is more comfortable to retain its ‘optic’ overview than to delve into the philosophical relation to painting.
Despite this tension, which productively reminds the reader of the benefits of interdisciplinary discussion,
Foucault on Painting not only offers many interesting insights but achieves a historical lineage of Foucault’s
ideas on painting in an original and comprehensive manner that enriches how we relate to painting. Soussloff not only recovers the significance of delayed translations to art criticism, thus anticipating further research, but she specifically engages with the wordplay and punning that underpin the language of painting—something that is easily lost in English translation.16 Soussloff explains the Saussurean and Barthean semiotic lineage
of the word-image relation, emphasizing again the linguistic difference between American and French art criticism post World War II. The influence of his teacher, the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty is traced, and
11 Ibid., p.122. 12 Ibid., p.3
13 See: Alpers, Svetlana, “Interpretation without Representation, or, the Viewing of Las Meninas” in Representations, No.1 (Feb. 1983), pp.30-42.
14 Eds. Nigel Saint and Andy Stafford, Modern French Visual Theory: A Critical Reader, Manchester: Manchester University Press (2013), p.2.
15 Catherine M. Soussloff, Foucault on Painting, p.10. 16 Ibid., p.34.
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Foucault is contextualized alongside Hubert Damisch and Louis Marin.
Foucault on Painting fills the lacuna of a historiography of Foucault’s writing on painting and, as Soussloff
underscores, serves as an important corrective to the notion that ‘painting is dead.’ And yet Soussloff’s historiographical approach, which expands our understanding of what painting does, brings up the following questions: While it is evident that art history requires historical contextualization, where does an approach
that ‘stands above the texts that interpret paintings,’ leave an expanded engagement with art philosophy? Can space be made within the domain of art history itself to engage directly with Foucault’s theories of painting, specifically as a particular kind of knowledge—one of transformation—which tackles those questions, among others, of the subject, time, and reality? In other words: aren’t histories themselves always already a question of philosophy?
Laura Katherine Smith is a PhD candidate in Literature and Culture at KU Leuven, Belgium. Laura’s project
entitled, “Violence, Language, Hope: The Relation of the Image to the Real in Benjamin, Baudrillard, and
Didi-Huberman” explores the material and philosophical implications of Benjamin’s concept of the image
as it relates to his philosophy of history and his social theory. The project furthermore investigates the way in which this concept of image has been taken up and transformed in the later work of social theorist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard and art historian-philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman. Laura’s project is funded with a Doctoral Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Laura holds an honours degree in Art History from Bishop’s University (Canada) and a Master of Arts degree in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London.
