MOTHER'S DAY SPECIALS! SHOW ME MORE
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.
Is there a kind of thinking that painting, or photography, can do, which 'thinking in words' cannot? What kind of realm do viewers enter when they go somewhere with an image? Are there pictures that are especially good to think with? These are the questions of Grootenboer's unflinching, generous book, and her conclusion is pungent: 'Philosophy . . . needs art to say what it cannot say.' -- T. J. Clark, author of Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come Thinking with Grootenboer is an unequivocal delight. The Pensive Image recuperates the vibrant invitations to contemplate and reflect that lurk in the quiet corners of Dutch art. Grootenboer's philosophical insight and deft eye for the unexamined detail meld in a book that is refreshingly original and truly engaging at every turn. -- Marisa Bass, author of Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt It's wonderful to finally have this book. For nearly a century now, the history and philosophy of art have been gathering ideas about how pictures seem to embody thought, rather than simply announce narratives or messages. The literature on this subject is bewilderingly diverse, and this is the first book to bring together compatible insights from writers as diverse as Diderot, Winckelmann, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Damisch, Deleuze, Clark, Ranciere, Marin, Mitchell, and Barthes. The result is a coherent account of the thought that sounds in 'stilled images' of all kinds. -- James Elkins, coauthor of Visual Worlds: Looking, Images, Visual Disciplines
