Analysis of key texts of Michel Foucault devoted to the pictorial aesthetic during the sixties only makes sense if it is properly reported to the epistemological issues raised by archeology, i.e. the methodical description of speeches he was developing at the same time. The use of painting as an archive, on the first hand, and the outline of an archeology of painting, on the other hand, can highlight a tension between teachings of archeology of speeches and reflections inspired by painting. The symptom of this tension consists in the different meanings – archeological or pictural – of the notion of representation. This essential discontinuity between visibilities and discourses concerns the most basic premise of Foucaldian history of thought : instead of positing the continuity of one historical time, history of thought calls for a description of a crumbled temporality of history and for a complex interweaving of « various historicities ». The confrontation of Foucault's archeology to his thought on painting thus shows one of the ways by which he finally came to propose an original philosophy of historical time. We would then hold the necessary preliminary to a possible reconstruction of the book, unfortunately lost, that Foucault devoted to the work of Manet, Le noir et la couleur.