Adrian Stokes

"Adrian Stokes (1902-1972) was at once the last of the great British amateur art writers in the tradition of Ruskin and Pater, and - as the first art theorist to substantially synthesize aesthetics and psychoanalysis - among the first of the moderns. Since the publication of his groundbreaking Faber books The Quattro Cento and Stones of Rimini in the 1930s, Stokes's writing has enjoyed an incredibly diverse readership across disciplines ranging from psychoanalysis to literature and art, from Ernst Gombrich to Dore Ashton, Ben Nicholson to Philip Guston, Ezra Pound to John Ashbery. " -- Publisher's description.

Illustrated with Barbara Hepworth's abstract stone carving, with other works of art, and with fascinating vignettes from Adrian Stokes's writing, this biography highlights his revolutionary emphasis on the materials-led inspiration of architecture, sculpture, painting, and the avant-garde creations of the Ballets Russes. In also detailing Stokes's role as catalyst of the transformation of St Ives in Cornwall into an internationally-acclaimed centre of modern art, and his falling in love again in his early forties, this biography shows how Stokes used all these experiences, together with his many years of psychoanalytic treatment by Melanie Klein, in forging insights about ways the outer world gives form to the inner world of fantasy and imagination.

Although interest in the painter, poet, and art writer Adrian Stokes (1902&–1972) has been growing in recent years, Art and Its Discontents is the first biographical study of this pivotal figure in British modernism. Focused on Stokes's formative years, the book offers important new insights into his intellectual development, his growing commitment to the arts, and his eventual turn to the art criticism that would win him international renown. Even as Richard Read follows Stokes from his London childhood to his travels in Italy and his psychoanalysis with Melanie Klein, he weaves Stokes's experiences and writings into the great social and cultural issues of his era. Stokes's friendship with Ezra Pound is given its due, but Read balances his exploration of Stokes's modernist ideas with detailed discussion of his profound debt to the teachings of John Ruskin and Walter Pater. Seen in this broad perspective, Stokes emerges as a thinker who bridged Victorian and modernist cultures and renewed the British tradition of aesthetic criticism.

"Adrian Stokes (1902-72) - aesthete, critic, painter and poet - is among the most original and creative writers on art of the twentieth century. He was the author of over twenty critical books and numerous papers: for example, the remarkable series of books published in the 1930s; The Quattro Cento (1932), Stones of Rimini (1934), and Colour and Form (1937) that embraced Mediterranean culture and modernity. His criticism extends the evocative English aesthetic tradition of Walter Pater and John Ruskin into the present, endowed by a stern sensibility to the consolations offered by art and architecture, and the insights that psychoanalysis affords. Indeed, for Stokes architecture provides the entree into art, and this book is the first study to comprehensively examine Stokess theory of art from a specifically architectonic perspective. The volume explores the crucial experiences through which this architectonic awareness evolved; traces the influence upon Stokes of places, texts and personalities, and examines how his theory of art developed and matured. The argument is supported by appropriate illustrations to confirm the evidence that Stokess claim for architecture as mother of the arts carries the deepest experiential and psychological import."

Introduction / Stephen Bann -- Stokes and the architectural basis of the sculptural / Alex Potts -- "A deep and necessary commerce": Venice and the "architecture of colour-form" / Stephen Kite -- "The house of the mind": on Piero, perspective, and psychoanalysis / Peter Leech -- "We are exalted": Adrian Stokes's coming to terms with Michelangelo's massiveness / David Hulks -- Stokes's analysis / Richard Read -- Portrait of an analyst: Adrian Stokes and Melanie Klein / Lyndsey Stonebridge -- Healing art, healing Stokes / Janet Sayers -- "Showing openly the inside of action": place, ballet, psychoanalysis / Martin Golding -- The art historian as art critic: in praise of Adrian Stokes / David Carrier -- "Inferential muscle" and the work of criticism: Michael Baxandall on Adrian Stokes and art-critical language / Paul Tucker -- To bring the distant things near: distance in relation to the work of art in Stokes's thought / Etienne Jollet -- Stones of solace / Michael Ann Holly.

Freud's account of the sublimated drives at work beneath the surfaces of advanced societies, alongside the modernist fictions of Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Woolf and others, both reflected and inaugurated a strain of modernism preoccupied with the darkest elements of the human psyche. In The Destructive Element Lyndsey Stonebridge examines the career and legacy of British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein as a lens through which to examine the 20th century's fascination with death drives, the sublimation of civilization's discontents and the socialization of children--fascinations that would surface throughout the cultural production of the West. At once cultural history and psychoanalytic theory, and a bold reformulation of the legacies of modernism, The Destructive Element is an essential contribution to our understanding of the Western tradition.

This edition is an introductory selection from the writings of Adrian Stokes (1902-1972), the Kleinian aesthete who created a unique vision of the relation between psychoanalysis, art, and aesthetic experience in general. His approach was founded initially on his travels in Italy which then acquired a more formal theoretical foundation during his analysis with Melanie Klein. Stokes was a close friend of leading figures in both psychoanalytic and artistic-literary circles, including Richard Wollheim who organised a previous edition of extracts, The Image in Form. The present edition concentrates specifically on the writing that demonstrates the parallels between art and psychoanalysis.