Contents Preface: Diagram, Modulation, Color Charles J. Stivale Acknowledgments Introduction David Lapoujade Session 1: Catastrophe and Diagram The catastrophe in painting, from Turner to Cézanne--Reading of Cézanne--Two moments in Cézanne--The painting as synthesis of time--Reading of Klee--The two moments of the grey point in Klee--Bacon's struggle against clichés and the notion of the diagram--Van Gogh's diagram Session 2: Painting Forces Stupidity of the blank page theme--Gérard Fromanger's method--The scream and vomiting: Joseph Conrad and abjection--Michelangelo: figure versus figuration--Painting forces: the flattening force of sleep in Bacon--Analysis of Bacon's Painting: the bird and the umbrella--Two types of analogy Session 3: Characteristics and Dangers of the Diagram The five characters of the diagram--The hand freed from the eye--Summary of the diagram's dangers--The diagram at its maximum: the danger of chaos and Abstract Expressionism--The diagram at its minimum: the code's danger and abstract painting--Confronting the chaos of modern life--The moderate path: figural painting as a measure of chaos Session 4: Diagram, Code, Analogy The three diagrammatic positions, blurring, code, diagram--Expressionism and the manual diagram--The code of abstract painting--Significant units and binary choices--The manual, the tactile, and the digital--The analogical and the digital--Digital code and similitude--Analogy and resemblance--Bateson and dolphins--Grafting of code onto analogy--Modulation--Reading of Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages Session 5: Types of Analogy, Signal-Spaces, and Modulation The three forms of analogy--The analogical and the digital--The concept of modulation and its variations--Signal-spaces--Egyptian space (depth, figure, and contour)--The Egyptian conspiracy of the cube Session 6: The Haptic and the Third Eye Propositions on Goethe's (genetic) triangle of colors and the (structural) chromatic circle--Brief history of the colorism: Delacroix and the Impressionists--Form, depth, and contour--Gauguin's La Belle Angèle--The haptic eye or the third eye: the return of Egypt in modern painting--The death of the Egyptian world and the disjunction of planes--Greek art, the tactile-the optical Session 7: Modulating Color Analogy, modulation, and signal spaces--The Greeks and the organic line--Rhythm in Greek statuary and the interior mold--Flesh and color--The two spaces: sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Wölfflin)--Modulating color--Delacroix, the Impressionists, and the Post-Impressionists Session 8: Regimes of Color Regimes of color and their characteristics--The three methods of colorimetry--Regimes of color in painting: the Renaissance regime--The dual regime of the seventeenth century: the Caravaggio regime, the Rubens regime--The dual itinerary of the chromatic circle--Seurat and Pissarro--Cézanne and color--Van Gogh, Gauguin, and broken tone: colors-structure and color-weight Notes Index.