A D R I A N  S T O K E S

Adrian Stokes and the Psychoanalytic
by
Ron Graziani

It is characteristic of Stokes' method that he should reshape the description of the art of the past while still using its traditional tools, recognizing and respecting those tools, their "acquired prestige."²⁰ even while redefining them. For example Stokes reshaped the humanistic attitude attributed to the Renaissance through his own Quatrocento concept. In an earlier article titled "Pisanello" (1929), Stokes described the humanism of the 15th century as the enhancement of the rough by the smooth, and vice versa. It was a humanism that externalized a mode of existence, an activity of the soul in the body and mind. It became a harmony that enhanced without subverting the environment, a nature "humanized" yet natural...outdoors approximating to indoors." The "authentic humanism" was more than simply a coherent structure, but a "Form," an architectonic embraced by the senses as well as by the mind."²¹

But Stokes was also a "true child of his age."²² His "prejudice of vision,"²³ the "feasible distance" that had occurred between art and life in the modern world, forced Stokes to realize that the redefining of humanism would have to be recognizable in the art medium itself. "Mingling" had to take place between the collective present and a past seen taking the form of individual autonomous objects. Such mingling became the very core of the aesthetic experience for Stokes.

The treatment of this core undergoes a descriptive change from writing Quattro Cento (1932) to Stones of Rimini (1935). The gears begin to shift in a series of reviews on modern art Stokes wrote for Spectator late in 1933.

In his first article, "Art Today," Stokes expanded on his concept of beauty, or the quality in Form, originally set forth in his "Pisanello" article. There, in order for beauty to become art—identified as a "trick of imitation, the saying of much in the terms of a very limited medium"—it had to possess a form "so positive a quality that it was complete to itself, the rest of the world shut out."²⁴ Although the "interrelations of its constituents" would always vary this quality in Form is what "constricts" expression. The essence in Form became the "inspirer," not the technique or "design." Form was a means of "talking to the senses and through them to the mind."²⁵ But unlike the Quattrocento artist whose architecture and environment were healthy sources of Form and so enabled artists simply to add to their sense of Form by way of naturalistic representation, the modern artist had to first "discover what art is in order to create it." Because of the contemporary "heterogeneous environment," modern artists were "too largely engrossed with the invention of Form."²⁶