Adrian Stokes (critic)
Encyclopedia
Adrian Stokes was a British writer and painter, known principally as an influential art critic. He was also a published poet.
candidate. His affluence allowed the younger Stokes to live financially independent his entire life. Adrian Stokes attended Rugby School
. During World War I his elder 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 the United States. It was these travels, as well as a college visit to Italy, that fostered an appreciation of art as the means to make sense of life.
at Rapallo, Italy. In 1929 he began therapy with the Freudian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein
(1882–1960) to investigate his bisexuality and depression. Pound's literary conception of the Italian renaissance and Klein's psychoanalytic theory would figure strongly in Stoke's art history. His essays in The Criterion magazine began to be published in collected works. Pound prevailed upon T. S. Eliot
(then editor at Faber & Faber) to publish the first two of Stokes' books of art history essays, The Quattro Cento: A Different Conception of the Italian Renaissance, 1932, and The Stones of Rimini, 1934. That same year Stokes moved to England to live among the British artists at Parkhill Road, Hampstead, painting and writing reviews for the Spectator. In 1937 he studied painting at the Euston Road School
with William Coldstream
(1908–1987), Lawrence Gowing
, F. Graham Bell (1910–1943) and Victor Pasmore
(1908–1998). His book Form and Colour of the same year displays the sensibilities of an artist as much as an art historian. In 1938 he married the Scottish painter Margaret Mellis (b. 1914). The Stokes' moved to Carbis Bay, Cornwall, shortly before World War II, joining other artists from London, including Barbara Hepworth
, Ben Nicholson
, Naum Gabo
and Peter Lanyon
, a native of Cornwall (1918–1964). After stormy years of marriage and the birth of a son, Telfer (1940), Stokes divorced only to marry his ex-wife's sister, Ann Mellis (b. 1922), in 1947 requiring a move to Ticino, Switzerland, with more liberal laws of consanguinity. A second son was born in 1948. Stokes returned to England in 1950 to Hurtwood House, Guildford. Many of the paintings for which he is known today were produced during this time.
Together with his friend Ben Nicholson, he contributed to the second number of Polemic
(No. 2, January, 1946), a short-lived British "Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics".
His post-war writing included two autobiographical works, Inside Out, 1947, and Smooth and Rough, 1951. Longer essays on individual artists such as Cézanne, 1947, Raphael
, 1956 and Monet, 1958 also appeared. These works continued to use Freudian analysis as a basis to explain art. A major work of his later years using psychological interpretation, Michelangelo: A Study in the Nature of Art, appeared in 1955. His most programmatic use of psychology as a tool for the art historian appeared in 1963 as Painting and the Inner World, including an interview with the psychiatrist Donald Meltzer
.
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. Diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1971, he focused on his painting until his death the following year. His paintings are owned by a number of galleries including the Tate. A retrospective exhibition was held at the Serpentine Gallery
, London, in 1982. A collection of poems, With All the Views, appeared in London in 1981.
Stokes was completely self-educated in art history. His wealth allowed him to consort with the intelligentsia of Europe, traveling with the Sitwells, tennis with Ezra Pound
, sharing a villa with Aldous Huxley
in Sanary. It also freed him from constraints of writing to please mainstream art-historical audiences. Marginalized by the emerging Warburg art historians whom he disputed on aesthetic and psycho-analytical grounds, Stokes was championed in the 1950s after a period of neglect by his friends Richard Wollheim
(1923–2003) and the critics Andrew Forge and David Sylvester. Methodologically, Stokes continues the British esthetic-school art writing of John Ruskin
and Walter Pater
, reacting against the formalism of the Bloomsbury group
. Later art historians such as John Berger
, Peter Fuller, Michael Baxandall
, John Shearman
and John Gage owe a debt to Stokes' "phenomenological precision" (Read).
Background
Stokes' father, Durham Stokes, was a multi-millionaire stock broker who had once stood for Parliament as a Liberal PartyLiberal Party (UK)
The Liberal Party was one of the two major political parties of the United Kingdom during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a third party of negligible importance throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, before merging with the Social Democratic Party in 1988 to form the present day...
candidate. His affluence allowed the younger Stokes to live financially independent his entire life. Adrian Stokes attended Rugby School
Rugby School
Rugby School is a co-educational day and boarding school located in the town of Rugby, Warwickshire, England. It is one of the oldest independent schools in Britain.-History:...
. During World War I his elder brother Philip was killed in France. Stokes entered Magdalen College, Oxford
Magdalen College, Oxford
Magdalen College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. As of 2006 the college had an estimated financial endowment of £153 million. Magdalen is currently top of the Norrington Table after over half of its 2010 finalists received first-class degrees, a record...
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 the United States. It was these travels, as well as a college visit to Italy, that fostered an appreciation of art as the means to make sense of life.
Freudian art historian and 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 PoundEzra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
at Rapallo, Italy. In 1929 he began therapy with the Freudian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein
Melanie Klein
Melanie Reizes Klein was an Austrian-born British psychoanalyst who devised novel therapeutic techniques for children that had an impact on child psychology and contemporary psychoanalysis...
(1882–1960) to investigate his bisexuality and depression. Pound's literary conception of the Italian renaissance and Klein's psychoanalytic theory would figure strongly in Stoke's art history. His essays in The Criterion magazine began to be published in collected works. Pound prevailed upon T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
(then editor at Faber & Faber) to publish the first two of Stokes' books of art history essays, The Quattro Cento: A Different Conception of the Italian Renaissance, 1932, and The Stones of Rimini, 1934. That same year Stokes moved to England to live among the British artists at Parkhill Road, Hampstead, painting and writing reviews for the Spectator. In 1937 he studied painting at the Euston Road School
Euston Road School
The Euston Road School was a group of English painters, active in London between 1937 and 1939.William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore, Claude Rogers, Maurice Field and Graham Bell set up a School of Drawing and Painting in Euston Road in 1937; other associated artists included Lawrence Gowing, Tom...
with William Coldstream
William Coldstream
Sir William Menzies Coldstream was a British realist painter and a long standing art teacher.-Biography:...
(1908–1987), Lawrence Gowing
Lawrence Gowing
Sir Lawrence Gowing was a British artist, writer, curator and teacher. Initially recognized as a portrait and landscape painter, he quickly rose to prominence as an art educator, writer, and eventually, curator and museum trustee...
, F. Graham Bell (1910–1943) and Victor Pasmore
Victor Pasmore
Edwin John Victor Pasmore was a British artist and architect. He pioneered the development of abstract art in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s.-Biography:...
(1908–1998). His book Form and Colour of the same year displays the sensibilities of an artist as much as an art historian. In 1938 he married the Scottish painter Margaret Mellis (b. 1914). The Stokes' moved to Carbis Bay, Cornwall, shortly before World War II, joining other artists from London, including Barbara Hepworth
Barbara Hepworth
Dame Barbara Hepworth DBE was an English sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism, and with such contemporaries as Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo she helped to develop modern art in Britain.-Life and work:Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was born on 10 January 1903 in Wakefield,...
, Ben Nicholson
Ben Nicholson
Benjamin Lauder "Ben" Nicholson, OM was a British painter of abstract compositions , landscape and still-life.-Background and Training:...
, Naum Gabo
Naum Gabo
Naum Gabo KBE, born Naum Neemia Pevsner was a prominent Russian sculptor in the Constructivism movement and a pioneer of Kinetic Art.-Early life:...
and Peter Lanyon
Peter Lanyon
Peter Lanyon was a Cornish painter of landscapes leaning heavily towards abstraction. He also made constructions, pottery and collage....
, a native of Cornwall (1918–1964). After stormy years of marriage and the birth of a son, Telfer (1940), Stokes divorced only to marry his ex-wife's sister, Ann Mellis (b. 1922), in 1947 requiring a move to Ticino, Switzerland, with more liberal laws of consanguinity. A second son was born in 1948. Stokes returned to England in 1950 to Hurtwood House, Guildford. Many of the paintings for which he is known today were produced during this time.
Together with his friend Ben Nicholson, he contributed to the second number of Polemic
Polemic (Magazine)
Polemic was a British "Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics" published between 1945 and 1947, which aimed to be a general or non-specialist intellectual periodical....
(No. 2, January, 1946), a short-lived British "Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics".
His post-war writing included two autobiographical works, Inside Out, 1947, and Smooth and Rough, 1951. Longer essays on individual artists such as Cézanne, 1947, Raphael
Raphael
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...
, 1956 and Monet, 1958 also appeared. These works continued to use Freudian analysis as a basis to explain art. A major work of his later years using psychological interpretation, Michelangelo: A Study in the Nature of Art, appeared in 1955. His most programmatic use of psychology as a tool for the art historian appeared in 1963 as Painting and the Inner World, including an interview with the psychiatrist Donald Meltzer
Donald Meltzer
Donald Meltzer was a Kleinian psychoanalyst whose teaching made him influential in many countries. He became known for making clinical headway with difficult childhood conditions such as autism, and also for his theoretical innovations and developments...
.
From 1960-67 Stokes was a trustee of the Tate Gallery
Tate Gallery
The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...
, 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. Diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1971, he focused on his painting until his death the following year. His paintings are owned by a number of galleries including the Tate. A retrospective exhibition was held at the Serpentine Gallery
Serpentine Gallery
The Serpentine Gallery is an art gallery in Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, central London. It focuses on modern and contemporary art. The exhibitions, architecture, education and public programmes attract approximately 750,000 visitors a year...
, London, in 1982. A collection of poems, With All the Views, appeared in London in 1981.
Stokes was completely self-educated in art history. His wealth allowed him to consort with the intelligentsia of Europe, traveling with the Sitwells, tennis with Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, sharing a villa with Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel...
in Sanary. It also freed him from constraints of writing to please mainstream art-historical audiences. Marginalized by the emerging Warburg art historians whom he disputed on aesthetic and psycho-analytical grounds, Stokes was championed in the 1950s after a period of neglect by his friends Richard Wollheim
Richard Wollheim
Richard Arthur Wollheim was a British philosopher noted for original work on mind and emotions, especially as related to the visual arts, specifically, painting...
(1923–2003) and the critics Andrew Forge and David Sylvester. Methodologically, Stokes continues the British esthetic-school art writing of John Ruskin
John Ruskin
John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...
and Walter Pater
Walter Pater
Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, critic of art and literature, and writer of fiction.-Early life:...
, reacting against the formalism of the Bloomsbury group
Bloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half...
. Later art historians such as John Berger
John Berger
John Peter Berger is an English art critic, novelist, painter and author. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text.-Education:Born in Hackney, London, England, Berger was...
, Peter Fuller, Michael Baxandall
Michael Baxandall
Michael David Kighley Baxandall, FBA was a British-born art historian and a professor emeritus of Art History at University of California, Berkeley...
, John Shearman
John Shearman
John Kinder Gowran Shearman was an English art historian who also taught in America. He was a specialist in Italian Renaissance painting, regarded by many as "the outstanding figure" of his generation in this area, who published several influential works, but whose expected major books on...
and John Gage owe a debt to Stokes' "phenomenological precision" (Read).
Works
- The Thread of Ariadne. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1925
- Sunrise in the West: A Modern Interpretation of Past and Present. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1926
- The Quattro Cento: A Different Conception of the Italian Renaissance. (Part One: "Florence and Verona. An Essay in Italian Fifteenth-Century Architecture and Sculpture"). London: Faber & Faber, 1932
- The Stones of Rimini. London: Faber & Faber, 1934
- Tonight the Ballet, 1934
- The Russian Ballets, 1935
- Colour and Form. London: Faber & Faber, 1937; extensively revised edition, 1950
- Venice: An Aspect of Art. London: Faber & Faber, 1945
- Cézanne. The Faber Gallery, 1947
- Inside Out: An Essay in the Psychology and Aesthetic Appeal of Space. London: Faber, 1947
- Art and Science: A Study of Alberti, Piero della Francesca and Giorgione, 1949
- Smooth and Rough, 1951
- Michelangelo: A Study in the Nature of Art. London: Tavistock Publications, 1955
- Raphael, 1483–1520. Faber Gallery, 1956
- Greek Culture and the Ego: A Psycho-Analytic Survey of an Aspect of Greek Civilization and of Art. London: Tavistock, 1958
- Monet, 1840 - 1926. Faber Gallery, 1958
- Three Essays on the Painting of our Time, 1961
- (with Donald MeltzerDonald MeltzerDonald Meltzer was a Kleinian psychoanalyst whose teaching made him influential in many countries. He became known for making clinical headway with difficult childhood conditions such as autism, and also for his theoretical innovations and developments...
) Painting and the Inner World, 1963 - The Invitation in Art. London: Tavistock, 1965. Preface by Richard Wollheim.
- Venice, 1965
- Reflections on the Nude. London: Tavistock Publications, 1967
- The Image in Form: Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes. Richard Wollheim, ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1972
- A Game That Must Be Lost: Uncollected Papers. Eric RhodeEric RhodeEric Rhode is a British writer on traditional cosmology and psychoanalysis.-Life and work:Rhode's writing is unusual in its striving towards the integration of a wide variety of interests and intellectual disciplines...
, ed., 1973 - The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes. Lawrence GowingLawrence GowingSir Lawrence Gowing was a British artist, writer, curator and teacher. Initially recognized as a portrait and landscape painter, he quickly rose to prominence as an art educator, writer, and eventually, curator and museum trustee...
, ed. 3 vols. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1978 - With All the Views: The Collected Poems of Adrian Stokes. Peter Robinson, ed., 1981
- England and Its Aesthetes: Biography and Taste: John Ruskin, Walter Pater: Essays, 1997
On Stokes
- Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 97
- Wollheim, Richard. Introduction to The Image of Form: The Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes. Edited by Richard Wollheim. New York: Harper & Row, 1972
- Read, Richard. "Preface." Art and its Discontents: The Early Life of Adrian Stokes. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002, pp. xix-xlii
- Bann, Stephen. Dictionary of Art; Kite, Steven, "Adrian Stokes" http://www.pstokes.demon.co.uk/;
- Carrier, David. "Introduction: England and its aesthetes." England and Its Aesthetes: Biography and Taste: John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Adrian Stokes: Essays. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1997;
- Obituaries: The Times [London], December 19, 1972, p. 18
- Richard Wollheim, 'Stokes, Adrian Durham (1902–1972)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
External links
- adrianstokes.com
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article by Richard Wollheim, Stokes, Adrian Durham (1902–1972), May 2006 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31722 accessed 20 April 2007]
- Nicola Glover, "Psychoanalytic Aesthetics: The British School" Ch3:2 Adrian Stokes and psychoanalysis