Adrian Stokes (critic)

Adrian Stokes in the 1930s
This article is not about the painter Adrian Scott Stokes

Adrian Stokes (27 October 1902 – 15 December 1972) was a British writer and painter, known principally as an influential art critic. He was also a published poet.

Background

Stokes's father, Durham Stokes, was a wealthy stockbroker who had once stood for Parliament as a Liberal Party candidate. His affluence allowed the younger Stokes to live financially independent his entire life. Adrian Stokes attended Heddon Court School[1] and Rugby School. During World War I his oldest brother Philip was killed in France. Stokes entered Magdalen College, Oxford where he read philosophy, politics, and classics. He achieved a second class in those fields in 1923 as well as excellence in tennis. After graduation, Stokes travelled to India and returned by way of China and north America. It was these travels and even more his later visits to Italy that fostered an appreciation of art as the means to make sense of life.

Psychoanalytic art critic

His first book, published in 1925, The Thread of Ariadne, was based on that thesis. The same year he moved to Venice to write and research on the Italian renaissance. Two events in the late 1920s would change his life and art-historical writings profoundly. In 1926, Stokes met Ezra Pound at Rapallo, Italy. In early January 1930 he began treatment for a number of ills with the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882–1960). Pound's literary conception of the Italian renaissance figured strongly in Stokes's writing about art, beginning with articles in The Criterion, edited by T. S. Eliot and published by Faber & Faber, the publisher of many of Stokes's books, beginning with The Quattro Cento: A Different Conception of the Italian Renaissance, 1932, and Stones of Rimini, 1934.

His psychoanalytic treatment often kept him away from Italy in London where he became closely involved with modern artists and with the Ballets Russes, wrote reviews for The Spectator, and lived briefly in the ultra-modern Isokon building in Hampstead. In 1937 he studied painting at the Euston Road School with William Coldstream (1908–1987), Lawrence Gowing (1918-1991), F. Graham Bell (1910–1943) and Victor Pasmore (1908–1998). His book Form and Colour, published in 1937, displays the sensibilities of an artist as much as those of an art historian.

In 1938 he married the Scottish painter Margaret Mellis (1914-2009) with whom he moved in April 1939 to Carbis Bay, near St Ives in Cornwall where he had become a mentor of the artist, Peter Lanyon (1918–1964). In August 1939, Stokes brought Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson to live with himself and Margaret in Carbis Bay, where they were joined by Naum Gabo (1890-1977) that September, and from where Stokes contributed (as did Ben Nicholson) to Polemic, "a short-lived British magazine of philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics" .[2]

After a few stormy years of marriage and the birth of a son, Telfer (b. 1940), Stokes and Margaret got divorced and soon after, Stokes married Margaret's younger sister, Ann Mellis (1922-2014), in Ascona in Switzerland, then one of the only countries where it was legal for a man to marry the sister of a still-living ex-wife. Stokes's and Ann's son, Philip, was born in 1948; in June 1950, the family returned to England where Stokes's daughter, Ariadne, was born in June 1951, not long before the Stokes family moved to Hurtwood House, near Guildford in Surrey.

By then Stokes had begun explicitly incorporating the psychoanalytic ideas of Melanie Klein and others into his published writing. They included his two autobiographical works, Inside Out, 1947, and Smooth and Rough, 1951. Publication of these books was followed by longer essays on individual artists in the Faber Gallery books, Cézanne, 1947, Raphael, 1956, and Monet, 1958; and by much more explicitly psychoanalytic books, beginning with Michelangelo: A Study in the Nature of Art, 1955. These were followed by further psychoanalytically-influenced accounts of art: namely, Greek Culture and the Ego, 1958, Three Essays on the Painting of our Time, 1961, Painting and the Inner World, 1963 (which includes a debate with the psychoanalyst, Donald Meltzer, inspired by a paper Stokes presented to the Imago Group of artists, philosophers, and psychoanalysts in London), and The Invitation in Art (1965).

From 1960–67 Stokes was a trustee of the Tate Gallery, London. In 1967, his final work Reflections on the Nude was both a synthesis of his ideas as well as the conclusion of his writing on art. In the following months he devoted himself to painting, writing poetry, and collecting some of his writings into an edited collection, The Image in Form, published by Penguin Books in June 1972, just a few months before his death from cancer that December.

His paintings are owned by a number of galleries including the Tate, where his last paintings were shown in an exhibition in February 1973. A retrospective exhibition was held at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 1982. Meanwhile a collection of his psychoanalytic papers, many first presented by Stokes at meetings of the Imago Group, was published as an edited collection, A Game that Must be Lost, 1973. His poems have also been published in various books including Penguin Modern Poets 23, 1973, and With All the Views: The Collected Poems of Adrian Stokes, 1981.

Stokes was completely self-educated in art history. His wealth allowed him to consort with the intelligentsia of Europe, traveling with the Sitwellspin Italy and Spain, playing tennis with Ezra Pound, in Rapalloand sharing a villa with Edward Sackville-West in the home of Aldous Huxley in the south of France. It also freed him from constraints of having to write to please mainstream art-historical audiences. Marginalized by the emerging Warburg art historians with whom he disputed on aesthetic and psycho-analytical grounds, Stokes was championed from 1959 on, after a period of neglect by his friends R,ithe philosopher chard Wollheim and the art critics Andrew Forge and David Sylvester. Methodologically, Stokes continues the British aesthetic-school art writing of John Ruskin and Walter Pater, . He reacted against the formalism of the Bloomsbury group and went on to influence twentieth century art historians -- John Berger, Peter Fuller, Michael Baxandall, John Shearman and John Gage, for instance -- all of whom owe a debt to Stokes' "phenomenological precision" (Richard Read).

Works

On Stokes

See also

Reparation

References and sources

References
  1. ↑ http://books.google.com/books?id=9M9qzwfIa_UC&pg=PT32
  2. ↑ George Orwell – An Exhibition from the Collection of Daniel J. Leab Brown University, Fall 1997
Sources

• Richard Read (2003) Art and its Discontents: The Early Life of Adrian Stokes

External links

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