Art and Its Discontents: The Early Life of Adrian Stokes

ART

“Adrian Stokes (1902-72) wrote some of the most engaging and provocative art criticism of the twentieth century. Stokes’s work emerged from a rich dialogue between the legacy of Ruskin and Pater, and intense engagement with the Italian Renaissance, the writings and art of the European modernists (including friends such as Ezra Pound, Barbara Hepworth, and Ben Nicholson), and psychoanalytic theory. In this, the first sustained examination of Stokes’s writings, Richard Read investigates how his work transformed English aesthetics when he became the first critical writer in Britain convincingly to relate psychoanalytic theory to art.”

• xliii, 260 p., 30 p. of plates : ill., ; 24 cm. #100424 Signed by Author (inscription). First Edition.
• I. Early Years, 1902-26
• 1. Early Years
• II. Poetry and Prose: ‘Four Essays on the Tempio Malatestiano’, 1926-30
• 2. Ekphrasis: ‘Pisanello’, 1926-30
• 3. Art Theory: Ariadne and ‘Pisanello’, 1925-30
• 4. Biography: Sunrise and ‘Pisanello’, 1926-30
• 5. F/Phantasy and Myth: ‘Matteo’, 1922-28
• 6. Stone and Water: Canto XVII and ‘Agostino’, 1929
• III. Carving and Modelling: The Unfinished Trilogy, 1929-34
• 7. Racial Theory: ‘Alberti’, ‘Giorgione’ and The Quattro Cento: 1929-32
• 8. Psychoanalysis: The Case of ‘Mr B’, 1932
• 9. Carving and Modelling: Stones of Rimini and the Hampstead Artists, 1933-34.
• Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Stokes, Adrian Durham, 1902-1972
• Art critics — Great Britain — Biography