A D R I A N  S T O K E S

Adrian Stokes and the Psychoanalytic
by
Ron Graziani

But Stokes sensed the inadequacy of Stones of Rimini when he posited a further requirement: "If we would understand a visual art, we ourselves must cherish some fantasy of the material that stimulated the artist, and ourselves feel some emotional reason why his [the artist's] imagination chose...to employ one material rather than another." He also stated, unsatisfactorily, that "poets alone are trustworthy interpreters"⁴¹ of the emblematic. The poet might be able to transcend historical or even iconographic analysis but the "emblematic" was supposed to "entrance" any observer. What Stokes needed was not only a way to articulate the aesthetic experience derived from the medium, but to demonstrate how the "emblematic" inherent to all art can survive its own historical determination and become accessible to any person in any time.

From the start, Stokes had realized that an aesthetic that would reveal the inherent potential of any art to communicate universally had to have a psychological basis. In 1945 he finally introduced "a more profound system" in the "Envoi" of Venice: An Aspect of Art, a book that completed Stokes' first trilogy while laying the groundwork for its successor. What he offered was a scheme that could merge aesthetic structure with psychic structure—the psychoanalytic approach.

Stokes had already considered the psychoanalytic scheme in the early 1920s, when he was influenced by Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. By the end of the '20s he had read much of the psychoanalytic literature. In 1930 he began analysis with Melanie Klein. That Stokes read Freud is apparent, especially in Stokes' interest in clichés and puns. But in an even more profound way than indicated by his sporadic use of the psychoanalytic lexicon, Stokes' early aesthetics reveals a Freudian influence.

In "Formulation Regarding the Two Principles of Mental Functioning," Freud insisted that the artist had "special gifts" which allow him to mould his phantasies into "a new kind of reality." He maintained that the artist's "high reality sense" developed from his "relation to his own internal reality and a purely formal, that is, aesthetic pleasure in the presentation of his phantasies."⁴² Art in effect became a dream condensed, made objective, or in Stokes' words "the saying of much in in the terms of a very limited medium."⁴³ However, Freud required that the artist distance his work from its "personal note" so as not to bore us with ordinary daydreams."⁴⁴ Stokes' own preference for the carving mode, with its reference to the "otherness" of the medium—its distance from the purely personal—parallels these beliefs.