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ISBN: HB: 9780226717951

University of Chicago Press

December 2020

240 pp.

22.8x15.2 cm

16 colour plates, 26 halftones

HB:
£28,00
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Pensive Image

Art as a Form of Thinking

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 the Author

Hanneke Grootenboer is a university lecturer in the history of art and a fellow and tutor at St Peter's College, University of Oxford. She is the author of "The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still-Life Painting", also published by the University of Chicago Press.