A D R I A N  S T O K E S

Adrian Stokes and the Psychoanalytic
by
Ron Graziani

Art has had to fill the void left by architecture in the modern world. Although good objects are restored on the picture surface, they nonetheless take the shape of part-objects. Both the enveloping boundlessness of homogeneity and the self-sufficient entity become part-objects separate from yet dependent upon each other. These part-objects become the pivotal fiction of the avant-garde artist's contention that his art is autonomous. It is a repressive idea—a paranoid-schizoid position. The modern art appearance is not distorted nor neglected but regressive. Modern art articulates the "merging act that belongs to part objects." We search for coherence yet the urban environment has no integrating message, hence the "fragmenting and heroic energy of modern art."⁸²

Nonetheless there is in Cézanne. In Colour and Form (1937) Stokes described Cézanne as the only artist since Piero della Francesca to have with "equal insistence" plastic strength and respect for nature. In Inside Out (1947) Stokes still emphasized that Cézanne-became-a-landscape."⁸³ For Stokes, Cézanne articulated "the inevitable control of man's mind over his environment, while allowing the real world its perfect otherness."⁸⁴ This balance became the modern "classical." Stokes stated that the "equal insistence" of both Cézanne's "romantic fire" and "smokeless heat of the detached elements of the external world" could only have been achieved after a "complete caress" with nature,⁸⁵ giving Cézanne a stronger will to manipulate nature as well as respect for the way it was. This parallels the way the psyche mitigates anxiety by merging, allowing the good and bad objects to be separated with less dread,creating a less abysmal bad image and a stronger good image, and therefore a stronger ego.

In short, through Cézanne's sense of logic he was able to create shape—the objectivity of otherness. Cézanne is defined as the modern version of classicism, a classicism of ceaseless doubt. Yet only through the nourishment of nature [the original breast] did Cézanne get the strength to continue his manipulation of nature—repair its image. Stokes could now reveal how Cézanne had "introduced both love and respect into an extraordinary attack upon his apples," a "noble ego's integrative activity both in itself and in relation to objects. An act of self-possession fit to measure against the world."⁸⁶

Ron Graziani