I used to read this when I had access to a university library. Now I'm limited to just this: a page of an article.

It is frustrating.

I'm interested in both Deleuze and Bacon and Deleuze's book on Bacon.

All we get is one page online. The bits there are okay. We can rephrase them for Australia:

"The prospect that a professionalized abstract art would take hold in [Australia] was threatening to an older class of literati and dilettanti for whom art was a �civilizing� rather than a �professional� tendency. It had become apparent that the rising cultural bourgeoisie perceived modernist abstract art as autonomous, driven by the dialectic of its own technicality. The technicality of its action enabled it to assume a practical (and a moral) legitimacy which devalued the authority of the older civilizing class. Cosmopolitan modernism accounted for its practice in terms of coherent ideology."

That happened in the 1950s. A reaction to the foreign otherness set in. A counter that was based on a �humanistic� vocabulary and a civilizing discourse of the authentically human. This humanist discourse opposed:

".... the outlandish vocabularies used by the foreign-seeming intellectuals of international abstract art. While surrealism recognizable as such was rejected for its unsightly political ramifications, in so far as its mannerisms were adaptable they were domesticated as picturesque detail. Acceptable deformations entailed the reinvocation of a form of romanticism: depoliticized, de-psychologized, [Australian,] and all right."

And that's all we get. How does Bacon fit into that? Or Delueze? Dunno.

What I do know is that European surrealism was effectively banished.