Private view

One of the more curious synchronicities of recent art history is that Francis Bacon's paintings often look like pieces of bacon. That may sound like a silly joke, but a similar thought underpins the aesthetics of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-95). In Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation (1981) Deleuze described a theory of art based on the body, flesh and hysteria. Bacon is the only painter who has ever ended up in the title of a key philosophical text, and whose work has then formed the point of departure for a new philosophy of art. (The fact that Bacon was English and the philosopher French only adds to the achievement.) It is this—and not the huge leaps in prices paid for his paintings in recent years—which qualifies him as contender for the title "second most important painter of the 20th century" (after Picasso).

For decades the contenders for second place seemed to be Jackson Pollock or Barnett Newman, Gerhard Richter or Willem de Kooning—painters who fitted into the grand narratives of modernist art history. These were artists who slotted into the right "isms" and the big trends towards ever more abstract and "pure" painting, towards the idea of painting as a symbolic activity in itself. This is the Picasso-Pollock schism: Picasso painted things; Pollock's action of painting was itself symbolic of the myth of "artist-creator." But in recent years this simple logic of art historical development has begun to look a little hasty. Where could painting go after the late 1960s, when Ad Reinhardt painted only black canvases and Robert Ryman painted only white ones? Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans came up with one solution: paint photography. Is that a significant development?

The problem is that we need some kind of theoretical legitimation for new art which has a sense of logical progress. Otherwise there would be no history in art history, and people could still paint like Giotto. This is where Deleuze brings home the Bacon. He came up with a sophisticated legitimation of old-fashioned figuration in painting.

Bacon didn't belong to an "ism." His early work, like Pollock's, betrays such a debt to surrealism and Picasso that it was difficult not to see him as a mere follower. While Pollock abandoned figuration, Bacon continued to pursue it.

In Deleuze's broad-brush art history, figurative painting came under attack in the last century from photography and a critique of painting's spiritual aspirations. Somehow painting had to get away from depicting stories and symbols. For Deleuze, "the extraordinary work of abstract painting was necessary to tear modern art away from figuration." But the philosopher asks, "Is there not another path more direct and sensible?" Bacon's paintings constitute, for him, this path—they are figurative without being representational.

Deleuze's point is that at the very moment when the art world was declaring that figuration was over, the greatest figurative painter of the age was hard at work. Deleuze saw in Bacon a notion of "pure figure." Bacon's compositions usually set his figures, or bodies, inside a circle or oval contour, a kind of stage, separating the body from anything around it. There is no narrative or scene involved. In the background are fields of colour indicating shallow non-specific space. Bacon painted heads, not faces, once again drawing our attention to the body. The body is depicted in spasm and scream. It is under its own involuntary guidance in contorted images of horror and pain. This is the body without the face and brain. It is also the body without the skeleton— Bacon's bodies, as Deleuze observed, are flesh continually moving off from the structure of the bones, into new shapes. Like bacon, it seems.

This all adds up to an aesthetic of sensation. Bacon painted the figure as it senses things, out of the realm of intellectual control or analytical reflection. He does not paint movement, he paints the sensation of movement. Deleuze says we are sensing the painting with our bodies, not our minds: "The entire series of spasms in Bacon is of this type: scenes of love, of vomiting and excreting in which the body attempts to escape from itself through one of its organs in order to rejoin the field or material structure"—by which Deleuze means the surface of the painting.

Bacon can be seen as the apogee of the oldest western art tradition: the depiction of the human form. But Bacon's figures are not graceful like the Greeks, or strong like Michelangelo's, or sensuous like Rodin's—they are stripped and tortured, and, as such, an image appropriate to his times. They emerged in an age ashamed by the values of civilisation. Thus, on the basis of his philosophical and historical timeliness, the runner-up prize for 20th-century painting should be awarded to Francis Bacon.

Deleuze sent Bacon his book. Bacon was flattered by the attention and agreed to meet up. They spent an evening together after the book was published, but apparently didn't bond. Deleuze remembered the encounter: "After he is seated for an hour or so, he contorts himself in every direction, as if he were himself a Bacon painting."