The Pensive Image – Art as a Form of Thinking - Hardcover

Grootenboer, Hanneke

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022671795X ISBN 13: 9780226717951

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2021

Synopsis

While the philosophical dimension of painting has long been discussed, a clear case for painting as a form of visual thinking has yet to be made. Traditionally, vanitas still life paintings are considered to raise ontological issues while landscapes direct the mind towards introspection. Grootenboer moves beyond these considerations to focus on what remains unspoken in painting, the implicit and inexpressible that manifests in a quality she calls pensiveness. Different from self-aware or actively desiring images, pensive images are speculative, pointing beyond interpretation. An alternative pictorial category, pensive images stir us away from interpretation and toward a state of suspension where thinking through and with the image can start. In fluid prose, Grootenboer explores various modalities of visual thinking-- as the location where thought should be found, as a refuge enabling reflection, and as an encounter that provokes thought. Through these considerations, she demonstrates that art works serve as models for thought as much as they act as instruments through which thinking can take place. Starting from the premise that painting is itself a type of thinking, The Pensive Image argues that art is capable of forming thoughts and shaping concepts in visual terms.

About this title

About the Author

Hanneke Grootenboer professor of the history of art at Oxford University. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still-Life Painting and Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures. Her work has been published in Art Bulletin, Oxford Art Journal, Art History, and numerous other outlets.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2021
• ISBN 10: 022671795X
• ISBN 13: 9780226717951
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240