Idea and Image

What does art tell us about man’s place in history?

In Thought and Image, award-winning author and philosopher Fredrik Lång takes the reader on a two-thousand-year journey spanning the worlds of art and philosophy, from ancient Greece into the modern day. Thought and Image explores the ways in which artistic expression is linked to the way of life and manner of thought of people throughout the centuries.

“Art, like knowledge, is an interpretation of a contemporary existence, executed in the concepts that thinking provides at the time. Every picture is worth a thousand words and every significant work of art contains a statement and is a confirmation of the general values of its time.”

Lång journeys slowly through the winding gallery of images and concepts that man has built up over the millennia, analysing the gaze of Giotto and the technical metaphors of Duchamp. The book ends with a challenging question: What is the significance of the insights gained for the understanding of our own time?

Fredrik Lång, born in 1947, is a researcher and writer. His literary production consists of nearly thirty worksin the form of novelsof ideas, essays,aphorisms, and philosophical works. Lång is known as the author of the idea-historical work Bild och tanke, which deals with the parallel development of art and thinking from antiquity up to Marcel Duchamp, romance novels and novels of ideas about, e.g., Leonardo da Vinci and Pythagoras.

Fredrik Lång has received many awards, including the State Literature Prize in 1985 for Sommarenmed Sue, theFinland Prize in 2002, and the biggestFinnish literary prize, the Tollander Prize, in 2021. His latest books include the essay collection, Geosofi—Bilder på en utställning (2020), and the novel Farväl Nappari (2023).