Adrian Stokes (critic)

Adrian Stokes (27 October 1902 – 15 December 1972) was a British writer and painter, known principally as an influential art critic. He was also a published poet.

Born on 27 October 1902 into a wealthy stockbroker family living in London, Adrian Stokes was the youngest of his parents’ three children. After public school, Rugby, he studied philosophy at Oxford, graduating, B.A. 1923, with second-class results in his examinations (excelling in philosophy but refusing to submit ancillary scripts in German and maths). Stokes then travelled around the world. He incorporated some of his resulting diary and reflections into his first book, The Thread of Ariadne (1925), publication of which led to his introduction to Osbert Sitwell, and to the art of Early Renaissance Italy and to the avant-garde creations of the Ballets Russes, both of which Stokes applauded in his next book, Sunrise in the West (1926).

Stokes’s first major achievements began after he met modernist poet, Ezra Pound in November 1926, and after he started analysis with Melanie Klein, in January 1930. Stokes evolved an innovative aesthetic in the first two of his major books of the 1930s - The Quattro Cento (1932) and Stones of Rimini (1934). In The Quattro Cento he characterized the intense Early Renaissance feeling for material and space as 'mass-effect' and 'stone-blossom'. The stone—deeply respected as a medium – is, he said, 'carved to flower' thereby bringing to the surface the fantasies the artist reads in its depths.

Stones of Rimini (1934) tightens and focuses these organicist themes, further psychologises the artistic process, and establishes thereby one of Stokes’s most central themes: the duality of 'carving-modelling'. A fine 'carver' allows the form to come to life through the medium of the stone; the 'modeller' - on the other hand - sees the medium as so much stuff on which to impose a preconceived idea. In the contemporary art of the 1930s Stokes found these 'carving' qualities in the work of Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore, whose Modernism he championed in articles in The Spectator. As a lover of ballet and a ballet-critic Stokes also promoted the avant-garde creations of the Ballets Russes in two further books: To-Night the Ballet (1934) and Russian Ballets (1935). Following the end of his analysis in 1935 he learnt to paint, joined the Euston Road school of art, and extended his carving-modelling aesthetic to painting in his seventh book, Colour and Form (1937).

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