The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking

236 Pages·2021·21.592 MB·English

by  Hanneke Grootenboer

The Pensive Image

The Pensive Image
Art as a Form of Thinking
Hanneke Grootenboer
The UniversiTy of ChiCago Press · Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2020 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
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Published 2020
Printed in the United States of America
29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 71795- 1 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 71800- 2 (e- book)
DOI: https:// doi .org /10 .7208 /chicago /9780226718002 .001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Grootenboer, Hanneke, author.
Title: The pensive image : art as a form of thinking / Hanneke
Grootenboer.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press,
2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020030495 | ISBN 9780226717951 (cloth) |
ISBN 9780226718002 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Art—Philosophy. | Painting—Philosophy. | Art,
Modern—History. | Painting, Modern—History.
Classification: LCC N66 .G76 2020 | DDC 700.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030495
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1 992
(Permanence of Paper).
True painting, therefore, has not only surprises, but, as it were, calls to us;
and has so powerful an effect, that we cannot help coming near it, as if it had
something to tell us.
roger de Piles, The Principles of Painting (1708)
It is necessary to rid ourselves of the idea that the concept, the content of an art-
work, is something already thought, as if it already existed in a prosaic form . . .
art has the purpose of bringing a not yet conscious concept to consciousness.
g. W. f. hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics (1820– 1821)

Contents
Art as a Form of Thinking · 1
Part I: Defining the Pensive Image
Chapter 1 Theorizing Stillness · 21
Chapter 2 Tracing the Denkbild · 46
Part II: Painting as Philosophical Reflection
Chapter 3 Room for Reflection: Interior and Interiority · 75
Chapter 4 The Profundity of Still Life · 110
Chapter 5 Painting as a Space for Thought · 134
Painting’s Wonder · 165
Acknowledgments · 171
Notes · 175
Bibliography · 187
Index · 201
Color illustrations follow page 104.

Art as a Form of Thinking
Why speak of a painting, again? And why write about it? To say what in the end
can never have been completely, exhaustively, said; to say just part of it, to retra-
verse a slice of time in which that painting came back like a haunting enigma,
a problem, a question; to keep the “minutes” of that traversal, to stockpile the
readings done, questioned, revisited, inexhaustible; to produce dazzling, some-
times patient, often inadequate traces of these readings.
loUis Marin, On Representation
Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
WalTer BenjaMin
“To think is to see”1
In his lecture series An Introduction to Metaphysics, delivered in 1935, Mar-
tin Heidegger asks, “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” For
the philosopher, this is the most original of questions— he uses the term
Ursprung— because to raise it means in fact to make a leap (Sprung) from the
very basis, or ground (Ur), of our existence. A thing is a being as it exists— it
is, Heidegger insists, but where exactly does the Being of this thing lie, or in
what does it consist? Are we able to “see” Being? Heidegger seems to sug-
gest we can when he gives one of his typical, rather overburdened examples
from the visual arts: “A painting by Van Gogh. A pair of rough peasant shoes,
nothing else. Actually, the painting represents nothing. But as to what is in
that picture, you are immediately alone with it as though you yourself were
making your way wearily homeward with your hoe on an evening in late fall
after the last potato fires have died down. What is there? The canvas? The
brush strokes? The spots of color?”2
This passage is different than the one that inspired the famous debate
involving Meyer Schapiro and Jacques Derrida, and in any case, I want to
1