Art and Its Discontents

Art and Its Discontents Synopsis

This title was first published in 2002. Adrian Stokes (1902-1972) wrote some of the most engaging and provocative art criticism of the twentieth century. He was a prolific author publishing books on the Renaissance, among them The Quattro Cento and Stones of Rimini (recently reissued), on ballet, and on the work of contemporary Modernist artists. Stokes entered psychoanalysis with Melanie Klein in 1929 in an attempt to resolve some of the quandaries of his own complex sexual identity and corrosive self-consciousness. In later life, he gained a significant reputation as a poet and painter. 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 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 the writings, Richard Read investigates how Adrian Stokes's work transformed English aesthetics when he became the first critical writer in Britain convincingly to relate psychoanalytic theory to art.