Institutional fine art education involves the formation of high school students' artistic culture, the acquisition of fine art grammar, the formation of specific professional skills, as well as the development of complex cognitive processes and phenomena, such as artistic thinking, including elements of abstract thinking, associative thinking, thinking through images and imagination. The article examines the pedagogical dimensions of artistic thinking as part of the artistic culture of high school students, presenting processes / phenomena inherent and derived from artistic knowledge and the act of knowledge in the context of institutional artisticplastic education. Emphasizing the idea that thinking is a superior and complex cognitive process, are remarked operational mental processes such as analysis, synthesis, comparison, as essential in the process of study by nature and fine art activity as a whole. In the same order of ideas, is analyzed the interdependence of cognitive development and artistic-practical activity of high school students, as well as other correlative cognitive phenomena such as association, abstraction, concretization and imagination. Against this background, artistic thinking is examined as a form of conception of the language specific to art, a form of assimilation of reality, meta-formation of the personality of the educated and the surrounding world through creative activity. Thus, in fact, artistic thinking represents a process of ―transformation‖, formation of the individual uniqueness of the high school students' personality through understanding, feeling and creating artistic phenomena. Perspective, that indicates on the principle of unity between "thought-feeling-action", assuming the idea that the formation of artistic thinking involves the correlation between artistic knowledge, affection and metaformation.