ART AND ANALYSIS

AN ADRIAN STOKES READER

Edited by Meg Harris Williams

Published for The Harris Meltzer Trust by KARNAC COlVIE/V15

Published in 2014 for The Harris Meltzer Tiust by Karnac Boola Ltd, I 18 Finchley Road, London N!73 5HT

selections from rhe wrirings ofAdrian Stokes reprinted from the original editions end' The criticalrr/ritings ofAdrian stohesby permission of The AdriaÁr Stokes Estate. Copi'right @ 1978 The Adrian Stokes Estate Arrangement and introducdon @ 2014 Meg Harris'Williams Appendix 1 @ The HaÁris Mel¿er Tiust Appendix2@EricRhode Acknowledgements vll Cover illustrari on. Landscape, West Pentaith Moor (1937) by Adrian Stokes (1902-1972) @ The AdriaÁ Stokes Estate. Acquired byTäte 1985. About the authors ix Photo @ Tate, London 2014 lntroduction by Meg Harris'!7'illiams xi The rights ofAdrian Stokes aÁrd Meg Harris \¯illiams to be identiÊed as aurhors of this work have been asserted in accordance with SS 77 and78 of the Copyright Design and Patents.{cr 1988. , 1 The quest for sanity 1

The arts of life 1 AJI rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a Áetrieval system, or trensmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, The power to communicate 2 mechaÁrical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written Relating to the object (with Donald Meltzer) 4 permission of the publisher. Inner truth and outer space 8 The image of British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data saniry l0 A C.I.P for this book is available from t}te British Library Form and wholeness T4 Contemplative srares r5 ISBN 978 r 78220 tt9 2

Edited, designed and produced by The Bourne Studios 2 Art and the inner world 27 www.bournestudios. co. uk Painting and the inner world )7 Absorption and attention 3T www.haÁris-meltzer-trust. org. uk All art is of the body 35 www.karnacbooks.com Veighry articulation and hazy presences 37 Vi CONTENTS

The art of appreciation 39 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The artist and the art appreciator (with Donald Meltzer) 44

3 Modes of art and modes of being 51 Carving and modelling 5r Michelangelot sonnet 55 Pregnant shapes 57 Identity in difference 59 The evening light 60 Oneness and otherness 62 Classic synthesis 64 The line of equivalence 67 The invitation in art 68

4 Mother art 79 Integrity of the outward object 79 Concreted time 85 Acknowledgements are due to the Estate of Adrian Stokes Myth, stone, and water 87 for permission to reprint selections from his writings and The flux of feelings objectified 90 the cover image, and to the Tâte Gallery for the cover photo- Accumulated sea-change 94 graph. Donald Meltzer's biographical note on Adrian Stokes The feel-of our structure 96 (Appendix 1) was first publishedin Contemporary Psychoanaþsis (1974); Eric Rhodet introduction Stokes' 5 Close looking 99 to collected papers in A Game That Must Be Lost (Appendix 2) was first published Piero's perspective: art and science 99 by Carcanet Press (1973) . Giorgione: catastrophic change 105 I would particularly like to thank both Telfer Stokes and Tirrner: beneficence in space tt2 Eric Rhode for encouragement, help and advice. 6 Construction of the good mother 125 Inside Ouf,. an autobiographical narrative r25 Envoi r48

Appendix / by Donald Meltzer r55 Appendix 2 by Eric Rhode r59

Referen ces a nd bÌ b I iog ra phy r65 lndex r69 ABOUTTHE AUTHORS

I Adrian Durham Stokes was born in Bayswater, London, in 1902, and died in Hampstead, London, in 1972. He was educated at Rugby and at Magdalen College, Oxford, and was a member of the Euston Road School of artists during the 1930s, when he also undertook psychoanaþis with Melanie Klein. He was an athlete in his youth and after a period of travel and jour- nalism became both a painter and a writer on aesthetics, focus- ing on Italian Quattrocento ert and architecture, Impressionist painting, Russian ballet and Greek culture. During the war years he lived near St Ives in Cornwall. He became e tmstee of the Täte Gallery in 1961 and rescued the work of Alfred \¯allis, the Cornish primitive, from oblivion. Many distinguished figures of his time in the fields of art, philosophy and psychoanalysis were arnong his personal friends and consid- ered him one of the most original and creative wÁiters on art, in the English aesthetic tradition of Ruskin and Pater. Stokes married t'wice and had three children. Among the wenty books he published in his lifetime are: The Qaatno Cento (1932), Stones of Rtmtnl (1934), Tbnight the

X X ABOUTTHE AUTHORS

Ball¿ (1934), Colour and Form (1937), Wnice: An,4spect of Art INTRODUCTION (1945), Cézanne (1947), Inside Oat (1947), Art and Science (1949) , Smooth and Rough ( 1 95 1), Michekngelo (1955) , R¿phael (1956), Greeþ Cuhure and the Ego (1958), Monet (1958), Three Essalts on the Painting of Our Time (196I), P¿inting and the Inner World (including a dialogue with Donald Meltzer) (1963), The Inuitation in Art (1965), and Reflections on the Nude (1967). He also published numerous erticles and reviews. Meg Harris Williams A selection of his writings edited and introduced by Richard \T.ollheim was published as The Im¿ge in Form (1972). After his death, Stokes' further papers were collected and introduced by Eric Rlode in A Garne That Must Be Lost (1973); his poems were collected and introduced by Peter Robinson, enriúed With All The Viett,s (I98I). Most of his writings were subsequendy collected in the three-volume CriticalWritings (1978), edited by Lawrence Gowing. Biographical and bibliographical information, together with a list of Stokes scholars and works, may be found on the Adrian J-l ver si Image in Form fell out Stokes website: www.pstokes. demon. co. uk. H of pri its acid-soaked Penguin IJl."'t.s ed, there has been a need Meg Harris Villiams read English at Cambridge and Oxford for some sort of taster or introduction for new students to the universities and is a visual artist and writer with a lifelong psycho- work of Adrian Stokes. Adrian Durham Stokes (1902-1972) anaþic education; her mother was Martha Harris of the Tâvistock was en "English aesthete" in the tradition of Ruskin and Pater,i Clinic and her stepfather Donald Meltzer. She is a visiting lecturer and, like others in that rare tradition, highly individual and for the Association of Group and Individual Psychotherapists and idiosyncratic in his approach and writing style. As a philoso- for the Tâvistock Clinic, where Stokes is included in one of her pher of art more than en ert critic, his writing appealed to prac- teaching modules on applied psychoanalysis. tising artists to an unusual extent; he was himself a painter and Her books are: Inspir¿tion in Mibon and Keats (1982), A many of his pictures are held by the Tate. His earlier writings Str¿nge W¿y of Ki lling: Emi þ Bronte's Wuth ering Heights (I9 87), were explorations of aesthetic experience founded on architec- The Appre hension of Beauty (with Donald Meltzer, 1988), The ture and landscape, in particular that of Italy, then expanded Chamber of Maiden Thought (with Margot \¯addell , I99l), A to include sculpture and, subsequently, the art of painting. Thial of Faith: Hamlet in An¿þsis (7997 , new edition 2014), The Although his focus moved on, his vision of the fundamental V¿le of Soulmaking: the Post-Kleinian Model of the Mind (2005), mind-feeding experience offered by all these subjects never The Aesthetic Deueloprnent: The Poetic Spirit of Psycho¿naþsis changed. But it did develop conceptually, and the most signifi- (2010), and Bionls brrn*, A Reading oÁ ttt, Aaiobíographies cent fector in this was his psychoanalytical experience, which (20 1 0). \¯ebsite: www.artlit.info. i See David Carrier, The English Aesthetes (1997). XÁÁ ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER INTRODUCTION xiii

began in earnest in 1930 when he commenced a seven-yeer works. The relatively restricted intention here is to convey the personal analysis with Melanie Klein.ii As a result, Stokes qualiry of Stokes' vision of the linkage between aesthetic expe- (as Donald Meltzer has said) built a bridge between art and rience and psychoanaþis: meaning not just psychoanaþic psychoanalysis "rhar will stand for generations", adding that theory, but an awareness of unconscious emotional patterns and although Stokes himself did not expound his aesthetic theory resolutions manifest in art-forms that is heightened or clarified in a final form, \¯ollheim's selection nonerheless "pulled it by psychoanalytic experience - sometimes, indeed, in spite of together" for readers (Meltzer, I974): that is, it demonstrates its psychoanali'tic theory at least in its original reductive approach shape, consistency and evolution in publicarions that spanned to art and the artist. In particuler, the aim is to make acces- more then four decades. Subsequent scholars have always been sible Stokes' personal model of engaging with what the poets call impressed by the integriry of Stokes' aesrheric-psychoanalytic "the idea of the beautiful", and to bring out its psychoanalytic worldview, which was innare in him, whilst finding an answer- relevance; for his best writing has a poetic aura and, as always in ing echo and confirmation in Kleinian psychoanalytic theory poetry, his personal way of "close looking" is both idiosyncratic as it was developing during the last cenrury. As \Wollheim and universal. observed, there seemed already to have been a "place reserved" It is in Stokes' later writings (the Tävistock series of books) in Stokes' mind for Mrs Klein's ideas, hence it was a natural that we find his most deliberate moves toward formulating a gravitation; and through the Imago Society'ii and other friend- deeply psychoanalÁic theory of aesthetic experience, especially ships, Stokes kept closely in touch with the subsequent evolu- in relation to his establishment of the parallels between the rwo tion of these ideas. Kleinian "positions" ("paranoid-schizoid" and "depressive") and The collection of exrracrs in this book is less comprehensive the two approaches to ert ("carving" and "modelling") which than \¯ollheimt, and it does nor ettempt to encompess, or even apply to artist and art-viewer alike: the depressive entailing an to dip into, the full range of Stokes' inreresrs. Nor can this brief ecceptance of the object's otherness and the self's dependence introduction offer an overview of the body of Stokes scholar- upon it for mental sustenance; the paranoid-schizoid rePresent- ship, which bears witness ro an increasing appreciation of his ing a more primitive desire to possess, control and merge with the methodology and vision and includes new editions of some object. For through his knowledge of Kleinian object-relations theory as Nicþ Glover writes:

Stokes became well equipped to address the interplay between the artist and his medium, together with the relationship beÁween the spectator-critic and the artwork. Indeed, in his approach, Stokes saw no essential difference in the relationship between artist and medium, and spectator and artwork, for, according to KleiniaÁ theorÁ the same intrapsychic processes are at work in all object relationships. (Glover, 2009, p. 87)

Stokes himself said there wes no essential (psychic) difference iii Co-founded with the musician Robert Still in 1950; members included between the artist and the art-appreciator; he was interested in Meltzer, \¯ilfred Bion, Roger Money-Kyrle, John aesthetic response in the widest sense of the human need to have t Hampshire (see Meltzer, 1974 lbelow,Appendix meaningful experiences by means of the outer world of "objects" XÁV ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER INTRODUCTION XV

which could then conrribure ro inner-world structure - ro rhe the "good mother" held in his childhood preconceptions became development of mind and personaliry. Ir \Mas nerural to him to realized or actualized on his first encounter with the world of the fuse his personal, innate vision of beaury with the Kleinian model Mediterranean - its landscape, its art, its lifesryle, and even irs of the mind in which, for the infant, the mother is the world, geological prehistory; all of which contribute to the fantasy of arousing ambivalent emotions of love and hate which are only the qualities of the internal object - its richness, capaciousness, resolvable through an amempr ro ger to know the aesthetic object stability. This contrasted with his picture of a deprived mother, (its inside as well as its outside), not intrusively but respecting its vulnerable to schizoid attacks - e"êeaf" fantasy depicted through otherness: this being the only real means of seeking selÊknowl- observations or memories of life in London's Hyde Park. David edge and proceeding with psychic development. Carrier, in his introduction to the narrative, explains: The Kleinian, or post-Kleinian, implications of this viewwere Stokes is telling his life story by redescribing the contrast, pre- later clarified theoretically by Meltzer (1988) in his formulation sented in his 1930s books about fourteenth-century Italian of the "aesthetic conflict" that occurs in relation to the tension sculpture, bem'een modelled works which reveal tension and between the visible external beaury of the object, and the objectt that ideal carved art which is atemporal . . . Going to ItalÁ he unknown internal qualities, spece or intentions which cannot be develops in ways Klein gave him the vocabulary to understand. sensuously apprehended: thus two ways of knowing are brought (CarrieÁ 1997, p. 14) into conflict. The protorypal external realiry of the mother is echoed in the ambivalent emotional impact with which the self Indeed ifwe follow Stokes'own emphasis on unconscious rhink- initially confronts a new idea, whose potentiel "beauty" arouses ing, we can sey that in terms of mental structure he already fear and apprehension as well as emrecdon. As the art philoso- "understood", but then found a verbal congruence in the ideas pher Susanne Langer suggested:t" of psychoanalysis. The concept of the restoration of the good mother is the Aesthetic attraction, mysterious fear, are probably the first man- foundation for Stokes' declaration that successful art is a repre- ifestations of that mental function which in many becomes a sentation of "saniry", and that likewise, sanity is "an eesthetic peculiar tendency to see realiry symbolicallÁ and which issues in "essence the power of conception, and the lifelong habit of speech. achievement". He defines the of saniry" as the power (LangeÁ 1942, p. lI0) to communicate and receive communications. Sanity - health, wholeness - is the artist's goal in approaching the innate but The tension between contrary emotions stimulates the need to hidden object-potentialities ofhis material. The insistence on rhe find a symbol that contains the meaning. idea of "sanity" countermands the too-frequent psychoanaly"tic For Stokes, the ultimate aesthetic object rhar arouses our assumption that art is significant for its revelation of the arrisr's sense of awe and wonder is the world itself; and the initial personal psychoses and that herein lies its interest for psycho- aesthedc object is the mother, in both the emotional and the analysis. In Stokes's view, by contrest, immersion in an artwork bodily sense, initially in the part-object form of the breast. The may well put the artist (or viewer) in touch with their psychosis, relationship with the breast is the foundation for the quest for since elements of aggression must be activated in order ro srarr selÊknowledge, and art is one of the supreme modes of explor- moving out of inchoateness; and these elements always remain ing and modelling this quest. As he describes in his autobiog- visible within the finished work. But if the work is successful raphy Inside Out, and as may be seen from his other writings, then it mast present an image of sanity - in which all these iv Stokes refers to Langer's Feeling and Form in Michel¿ngelo (1955), n.275 destructive or hateful elements encounter not denial but rather, xvi ARTAND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER INTRODUCTION xvii

ûansformation, under the greater aegis of the "good object". As landscape. I have not in mind here the perception of a phallic the sculptor Louise Bourgeois engraved on rhe lintel of one of symbol, saÁ in e tree, but the impingement of the total con- her installations (Precious Liquids): "Art is a guaranree of saniry." figuration as a symbol, an aspect of symbolizetion uis-à-uis the It is not the psychosis that is interesting, but the integration of outside world at large to which psychoanalysts are not inclined psychoses and compulsions within the greater art-symbol. to pay prolonged attention even when attending to matters of (Stokes, All underþng form is "of the body'', writes Stokes: whether art. 1973, p. 1 16) the subject under consideration be nature, the manmade environ- This recognition of underlying form (in literary studies ment, art or architecture. This is the basis of our human percep- known as "deep grammar") melts down the rigidity of the clas- tion and provides the meaning which we attribute ro the ourer sical psychoanaþic contrast between primary (unconscious) world. \¯e see "the body'' in nature as much as in the manmade and secondary (conscious) processes, which becomes of far less environment and its contents. Stokes initially talked of "rhe relevance once the art-process is recognized as one of uncon- emblematic", then later came to call this complex compositional scious thinking finding symbolization in a \Mey that is commu- nerwork "the image in forni', directing attention to the andrrþ- nicable to others. In the same paper Stokes makes use of recent ing form of the arcwork which has an organized meaning of its psychoanalÁic and philosophical ideas to forti$' the view that own, as distinct from its content or epparent subject: a meaning unconscious and non-verbal fantasies may be highly sophisti- which the artist may only realize (consciously or unconsciousþ cated in their structure, to a degree that is not only deeper than as the work nears completion. \¯ith regard ro "rhe image in purely intellectual formulation, but also in greater contact with fornt'', Eric Rhode writes: the underþng good mother or object, and less the instrument lStokes] thought that the contemplation of art encourages the of childish omniporence. spectetor to recognize the "total configuration as e symbol" The search for underþing form by means of immersion through the structure of what he called "the image in forrn'. in the outwardness and corporeality of the artmaking process And he believed that the contemplation of arr, even more rhan is carried out by projective and introjective identifications (in the contemplation of landscape, could bring the spectator ro en psychoanalÁic terms), through which the inner object relates to intuitive understanding of how the often inchoate self might the outer object or artwork. Stokes notes the dialectical structure identiô' with those internal figures that psychoanalysts call of all philosophical quests: wo basic principles or positions are "good objects". (Rhode, 1973, p.4) required, which need first to be distinguished, and then integrated. Making use of his psychoanaþic knowledge, he expanded exist- The "image in forni' is equivalent to Langer's definition of ing aesthetic theories of carving and modelling, and of identiry- the "underlying idea" of a work, or the "art-symbol" that is, - in-difference, by adding in the concept of identification. He the overall symbol, not the various subsidiary symbols which applied this to the two fundamental modes of object-relationship may be featured like signage within the composition. The overall operating in aesthetic experience: otherness and fusion, seperate- symbol is not a reference but a containeÁ comprised of all the ness and possession, the whole-object and the part-object view- significant formal elements such as composition, colouÁ rexrure, points. On this basis he could vividly observe and describe the media handling, etc. As Stokes explains in his essay on "Primary interaction of difÊerent psychic approaches to art, and the way process, thinking and art": in which they paralleled the child's complex bonding processes The shapes at which [a person] looks, whateyer the object of with its mother, "working-out" (in his loaded term) the often his immediate attention, are bound to encounrer the inner disturbing and conflictual beginnings of aesthetic absorption. xviii ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER INTRODUCTION xix

Stokes' lifelong preoccuparion with the dialectical modes experience, and are indeed necessary and complementery: cerv- increased in complexity over the span of his writings. Initially ing does not negate or devalue modelling but rather, subsumes the terms carving and modelling had referred to the difference it. He saw the rhythm of attack and reparation, and the oscilla- berween stone- and bronze-sculpting, insofar as these represent tion of paranoid-schizoid and depressive orientations, as Part different ways of eftempting repararion of the aestheric object of the life instinct, fundamental both to artistic creativity and that is inevitably damaged the instant its surface is disturbed by to psychic development. The self-sufficient object was modified 'S¯here the sculptor. carving, after its initial amack, supremely - and ultimately enriched - by acknowledging the usefulness avows the independent otherness of the object, entailing relin- of "envelopment" and the intermingling of minds. Pursuing quishment and respect for its inviolacy or privacÁ modelling this theme more closelÁ it became apperent that this inter- gives play to primitive types of fusion and part-object projec- mingling could take on either aggressive or enquiring qualities, tions into the object, together with the infantile temptation of in a way that the post-Kleinian theory of Bion and Meltzer the self to believe it is an omnipotenr crearor in full control of has categorized as a distinction between "intrusive projective its productions. identification" and "communicative projective identification". In his early works, Stokes used the rerm "Quamro Cenro" Bion indeed saw the latter as alternating between "patience" (a to epitomize the quintessential carving approach, since he stressful state) and "security" (a momentary glimpse of truth); associated or discovered it through the stone carved-our and to indicate this oscillation he coined the symbol Ps<->D, sculpture of the Quattrocento. He distinguished it from a psychoan elytical equivalent to the alternation of modelling building-up (modelling) methods of reparation of the object, and carving modes in artistic process; while by contrast, intru- as used in other rypes of sculpting and which are also rypical sive identification results in a cynical stete of mind which is out 'W-hen of the medium of painting. he became interested in of touch with emotion and represents a tyrannical attack on expanding his aesthetic from the realm of sculpting ro rhar the link between self and object. Bions theory of the positive of painting, he incorporated "identiry in difference" inro emotional links between love, hate and knowledge, as distinct his vocabulary since he needed to find e way to describe the from non-emotional, cynical or negative links, allowed for the painter's equivalent to the sculptor's carving during the search pre-Kleinian pain-pleasure principle to be superseded, along for a "total configuration" - an overall symbol not just a part- with the view of art as the sublimation of repressed guilt-ridden object symbol. Identity in difference encompassed colouÁ desires. Instead it is a quest for sanity through symbolizing the shape and composition, and the relation of parts to the whole interaction of identifications, marking out the route towerd on a flat surface, not just a three-dimensional one. As a result self-knowledge. of this expansion in his focus, the artistt mental orientation For the artist, all these identifications ere captured and wes no longer tied or confined to any particular medium but displayed in the underlying bodily form of the artwork, whose became, as Glover puts it, more "existential": concerned with final equilibrium contains and manifests the processes of its abstract modes of being that are applicable to any activiry or composition. The achievement of formal unity or harmony - situation in the outside world. "the image in form" - corresponds to the depressive acceptance For a long time, Stokes maintained the "Quattro Cenro" of the otherness of the aesthetic object, en ecceptance which is or carving was his "preferred" mode. Gradually howeveÁ as only gained after an initial carving attack on the medium and a his scope and knowledge-base widened, he came emphati- sequence of modelling moves aimed at establishing not omnip- cally to assert thet both orientations are present in all aesthetic otent restitution but communicative links. So the artwork is XX ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER INTRODUCTION xxi to the viewer - and indeed to the arrisr, who is rhe servanr nor worlds, of three-dimensional structures, spatial volumes and the master of his own creetivity - a symbolic container for the lines of force, which he recognizes as dramatizing psychic ten- emotionel turbulence, though not in rhe sense of a comforter sions. In particular he focuses on the resonance between inside functions envelopment and (as the multi-functional external mother may be); rether, as and outside, where the dual of Keats describes it in the "Grecian lJni', the aesthetic object incorporation - the essence of aesthetic appreciation - takes place. Thus he describes simultaneously both the reconstitution regains an inviolate psychic distance after the incursions of the of the "independent, self-sufficient, outside good object", and child: an enriched wholeness after projection and introjection our reladonship with it as it evolves through "contemplating have achieved a fine balance. and following out" its formal network of directions: the way in To conclude on a personal note: I first became acquainted which we become "in touch with a process that seems to be hap- with the writings ofAdrian Stokes ar e rime when I was search- pening on our looking, a process to which we are joined as if to an aesthetic ing for theory which could encompass the notion an alternation of part-objects." ('S7illiams, 1988, pp. 187-188)" of literary criticism as an ert form, and was feeling impatient "aesthetic and disillusioned with the reductionist theories in fashion The criticism" that Stokes here demonstrates so during the 1980s, including many of those which purported vividly is the closest that criticism comes to the transference modelling the most intimate and to be psychoanalytic. I was heartened and inspired by read- conditions of psychoanalysis, essential of analogies berween the two disciplines. As \¯ollheim ing Stokes' magnificent study of TurneÁ which seemed ro has observed, Stokes Ruskin has "a precision not of offer a genuine interdisciplinary bridge, nor just in discursive - like - description, but rather of presentetion, as though the critic's terms but in the poetic language of a lived experience attained task was to offer up, along with the object, those associations through finding a "symbolic congruence" wirh the aesthetic its place in our understanding object. At that time I wrote: and sentiments which determine or appreciation" (\¯ollheim, 1972, p. 30). Stokes' prose, et its 'We are looking for an approach to the body of art - the Urn - best, is indeed a "presentational form", in the sense formulated which expresses a congruence with the tensions and directives of by Susanne Langer; its meaning is in its deep grammar, not in its underlying Idea, its commanding form: an approach which is the lexical sign-language of its phraseology. It demands that we the opposite of reductive, and which in a sense partakes of the become enveloped in a way analogous to his own envelopment art-symbol's integrity and echoes its world-oÊits-own. On one by his theme: that is, it works by initiating identifications, not level, Stokes gives a "Kleinian interpretatiori'of art; but it is not by dictate. Lawrence Gowing said that the experience of read- one which is founded principally on categorizing art's phantasy ing Stokes wes lrery close to looking at art and he saw this es contents, still less on the evaluation of psychopathology (which - an unusual feature, unlike most art criticism. And it is perhaps he regarded as a sad üavescy of the "transcendent" or "efFerves- an illusion that we can read for ourselves: we are always hand cent" or "widely significant" psychoanalytic spirit). Nor does he in hand like Dante with Virgil, whether with internal or exter- rely solely on the other critical favourite, on tracing the motif of nal objects, ettempting to fit our minds to the experience on "reparation" - the Kleinian restatement of the traditional theme offer. Symbolic congruence is a generetive mode, based on of innocence beyond experience - though he is indeed continu- ously aware of the rhÁhm of attack and reparation, and of the inspiration rather than imitation: by its means a potentially artist's anxiety at confrontation with a blank sheet of paper infinite series of transformations may be transmitted between where the first step in creation is But Stokes' major violation. v An internet version of this papea 'A post-Kleinian model of aesthetic stance for investigation is his architectural sense ofworlds within criticism", is available on www.psyartjournal.com. xxii ART AND ANALYSTS: AN ADRTAN STOKES READER INTRODUCTION xxiiÁ

reader-subjecr and landscape- or arrwork-objecr, in a way anal- conscious-unconscious, secondary-primary; it entails learning ogous to Meltzert description of the psychoanalyric process as to read depth arguments and symbols, not just surface ones. e "conversation between internal objects". It is what enables Hence the special quality of "contemplative stetes" which are psychoanalysis to join the ranks of the art-forms in what Stokes both inward and outward-looking. calls the spirit "brotherliness", of rather than pronouncing Chapter Two, 'Art and the inner world", explores these judgement on the working of artists. themes in more detail, emphasizing the Kleinian view of the Through his distinctive prose sryle we see Stokes discov_ concreteness of the inner world and how it is mirrored in the ering his own emotional experience as he looks-and-writes, outer world, not in the sense of the pathetic fallacy, but in the communicating in minure detail the struggles of creativity. By sense of how we attribute meaning to the actuality that we "working-our" in this way (to use his own phrase) h. .rråd.ls perceive - indeed how our perceptions are created in tandem for the_reader his personal explorations into the truth of beaury, with these inner (Platonic) pre-conceptions. This chapter and "travelling in the realms of gold" as Kears put it. Although this the previous one include extracts from a dialogue with Donald type of acutely observed immersion in the aesthetic object is Meltzer on what art shows us about the nature of the inner generally unknown ro mosr psychoanalytic writers on rhe arrs, world; the role of the artist in society is considered and the is quintessentially it psychoanalytic. In fact this ultimately idea of the "bad object" is clarified as being a projection of bad provides the most vital link berween stokes' ideas and those parts of the self; and the essential psychic similarity between of psychoanalysis: the translation of an inside-outside dialogue the artist and the art-appreciaror is established. into a verbal art-form which then demands from the readá a ChapterThree, "Modes of art and modes of being", collects generarive response of symbolic congruence - nor colonizing some of Stokes' clearest statements not just on carving and but internalizing. modelling but on the general need for a dialectical approach \üZith this in mind, the selections in this book are arranged to analysing art, especially when we take inro account experi- not_chronologicallÁ but with a view to first establishing stof.s' ence of art, for both artist and viewer. The focus is on "lines of philosophical and psychoanalytic theoretical viewpoint, using equivalence", or es Bion would put it, the "caesura' or linkages shorter exrracrs, and ending with longer passeges that demon- between vertices or viewpoints, such as classical-romantic, and strate the power of his capaciry for close observation and internal-external realities the place where conrraries meet and description. - subtitles for each excerpr are raken from Stokes' a new dimension opens out. The concepr of identiry in differ- own words, with the exception of "carastrophic change', for the ence allows for the carving potential of colour. Stokes' ultimate (Stokes' Giorgione term is "inrerchange"), es his description formulation of "the invitation in art", in which the "enveloping fits so well the classical term which was adopted by Biån to pull" makes the object's orherness "more poignantly grasped", express the ambivalent qualities of imminent psychic change. is probably his nearest approach to establishing a theory of "The Chapter One, quest for sanity'', establishes the general aesthetic experience. sense in which the underlying desire for reparation of the Chapter FouÁ "Mother art", documents Stokes' homage to m_other is equivalent to the development of sanitÁ something architecture and the architectural arts as the fount and origin of which "an Stokes considers aestheric achievemenr". k is depen- his own personality development the source of his discovery dent on the - establishment of communication berween self and that behind all other perceptions lay the idea of rhe mother's internal "communion" object. The kind of searched for entails body; architecture is both mother of the arts and the route by more than one mode and rranscends the simplistic division of means of which art-as-morher becomes manifest. As Stephen XXiV ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER INTRODUCTION xxv

Kite has writren, in Stokes' "archirectonic" sensibilirÁ this fluid "Mediterranean" values and their ultimate conceptualization. aree of response is one in which "The wall plane becomes the His life's quest for the aesthetic in all things could be said to zone of personal encounter between our inner feelings and have begun with his child's wail that so mysdfied the adults: their outer transposition' (Kite, 2008, p. 2). The architectural "I want it all right!" As Carrier has pointed out, it was after qualities of nature, emerging over rime, find an answering composing this "selÊconstructed myth" of his childhood (a response in mant agricultural and landscape-shaping endeav- continuation of his selÊanalysis) that Stokes was able to tackle ours; the sustaining of life and creating a harmonious worked his ambivalence towards the "modelling" modes of art he had environment are a single concern not separate matters. These previously marginalized. extrects make Stokes' innate congruence with Kleinian think- I have included in this chapter the "Envoi" from Wnice: An ing abundantly clear. Aspect ofArtwhich, as a stetement of his principles, could really Chapter Five, "Close looking", shows Stokes' principles in apply to all Stokes' writings. ection as he "works-out" the symbolic congruence between his Two tributes by personal friends (Donald Meltzer and Eric experience and that of the arrisr, whose inner investigations Rhode), written shortly after Stokes' death, are reprinted as take the form not of didacticism but of "deep-laid symbol". It appendices. is the equivalent of "close reading" in literary criticism which In this edition I have omitted longer footnotes, ampli- pays minute attenrion to poetic diction and the sensuous fied some references, and occasionally made minor changes impact of deep grammar. In each case the critic or aesthete to punctuation. \¯here possible, references have been given is not concerned with proving a point but is engaged on a both to the original editions and to the three-volume Critic¿l journey of discoverÁ "following in the steps of the Author" Writings edited by Lawrence Gowing. as Keats put it. The description of Piero della Francesca The painting reproduced on the book cover, West Penuith demonstrates painting-as-carving through a "chromâric sense Moor, dates from the end of Stokes'analysis, and testifies to his of form" and a sense of "the family of things"; Giorgionet affection for Cornwall where, he said, he experienced "a sense mysterious Ternpesta shows rhe "principle of inrerchange" of home". lying behind the aesthetic conflict between calm and srorm; Turner's development defines the quest for "beneficence in spece", the ultimate architectural achievement in painting. This last is a supreme example of aesthetic conflict success- fully resolved, since it shows the author tackling his established hatreds or aesthetic dis-taste, seeking for the classical within the romantic, sticking ro rhe disturbing line of equivalence, and working the "diaphragm" into a "receiving-screen" (Bion): that is, converting hate into love - a theme with which Stokes is much preoccupied, and here presenrs nor just theoretically but practically. Chapter Six, "Construcrion of the good mother", includes a large part of the autobiographical sketch Inside Oat in which Stokes with hindsight reviews his preconception of CHAPTER ONE

The quest for sanity

One day men will learn to think of sanity as an aesthetic achievement' ("Living in Ticino", 1g64)

lhe arts of life

\\f fhile I mightwelcome the accusation of being contin- \ X / uously in touch with the qualiry of psychoanalytic W tho',jht, I should find it i.,.o-fori"tl. *.r.--y absractions or my method laid at the door of that science; if only because I bring non-clinical material to bear: and again, the use I have made of my own experience is effected with little particularization except in the outside world. But more than that: the kind of mirroring I attempt is unconnected with a scientific procedure; is undivorced from an even longer preoc- cupation with the arts. I do not find that these two angles of focus for existence are at variance. From the angle of the arts of life, it is at first disquieting

i From the foreword, Smooth and Rough, 1951, pp. lI-12; Critical Writings II, pp.2r5-2t6. 2 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER THE QUEST FOR SANITY 5

to concede paramount importance to the issue from the balanc- But, on the contrarÁ it is consciousness thet is unique and ing of forces present in infancy: and whereas the intricaaÁ of individualized; being the distorting, reflecting skin; unique adulthood serves portraiture, the hardly less intricate, though the pulsating surface by which emotion is confronted with the less various, finesse of the infantile state can never be enough necessitous planes of actualiry with the full radiance of reason. individualized. Hence, to explain psychologically, to "explain" \¯e shall, before long, better love ourselves again as sapient the adult in terms of the infant, seems (for an aesthetic purpose) beings, with more stabiliry than heretofore. Instead of visual- to be overweighted, dismissive, stultifying. A noisy weapon has izing conscious life (forgetting the to-and-fro of memory) to be been put in the hands of the trite disputant. a thin, ramshackle deck (removable in one piece), planted on toP Doubtless a novel lack of deceptiveness is now needed from of romantic wildness in the holds, having some knowledge of the the man who would comprehend himself; but not humiliation, ingenious poetry of the ways and meens, we shall marvel at and if the probe which he himself provides but cannot point, goes reverence a huge structure above ground, storey upon storey of far enough. On the other hand, this deeper comprehension, amplification, of development, of repetition in accordance with contrary to popular beliefl induces a deeper awe of those vital the foundation and lie of the land. recapitulations embodied by conscious aciviry and culture. The power to receive communication and to communicate is Life, it is perhaps more clearly realized, embraces a thousand the essence of sanity. Just as infants the world over make simi- necessary arts. I adjudge, therefore, that psychoanalytic knowl- lar noises, the preliminaries to speech, just as these sounds are edge provides firm basis, the ultimate basis, for the attitudes of common basis for the diversity of words, of intonation and of humanism. languages, so, the emotional pressures upon infancy ere trans- formed by adult intelligence, culture, civilization, as they create love and The power to communicate" therefrom poetry and prose. The individual life of hate, of hating of hate and loving of love - sometimes reversed to dire, dull and amiable outcomes alike, attempts stabiliry a analogies to life are from the arts; the processes - I [ ^ny governing pattern. Normaliry differently conceived byvarying societies, has been :l: l: lVI ;:"ä:"å':ï: lî:::':î,i,lïl ïäîi,fi: admired less for beaury of structure than for use. The happy, sometimes almost equally innocent of urgency; a form that is a harmonious man, often envied by artists, was rarely himself the parable of urgency so far as life resembles a ritual whose early eesthete. Normality of the future, if it will be more nearly ideal, causes and development have been forgotten and would hardly will have eschewed not only individual but mass neuroses. In be deduced from the ceremonies enacted. grasping the actual, however, an entanglement with emotional The general character of the unconscious, especially the life supervenes: such will be the version, with an aesthetic tinge, many degrees of transparency to opaqueness, the incorporaring of "appearance" and the "thing in itself". processes which breed its population, the repression thither of Thuth mey one day be found to possess the resolute features much guilt, anxiety and love as well as hate, is misconstrued of the masks and covers of illusion. Except, notably, in the case by literary ameteurs as the cave-like repositorÁ sombre or wild, of those subject to political religions, mass illusion does not, of the exceptional, the far-fetched, the magical and the weird. perhaps, thrive in Europe today as heretofore. \7e have witnessed so much put to the test: issues have been presented that must ii From "The sense ofloss (2)", Smooth and Rough, 195I, pp. 48-51; Critical Vritings II, pp. 237 -239. be out of scale with the potentiel response. \¯e have witnessed 4 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER THE QUEST FOR SANITY 5 ultimate savagery and nihilism and the limits of every hope exclusively part-object relations âre overcome in favour of inte- dramatically presented. One steadfast thing, one small posses- gretion of the self and of whole-object relations characterizedby sion, never so eccurare nor so widely diffused, is the time of day. the separate and selÊcontained qualities imputed to objects. The The pips of the wireless are rhe voice of a father whose justice is transition requires as well a shift in values from the preoccupation not doubted, to whom all rhe little clocks and watches without with comfort, gradfication and omnipotence characteristic of the hesitation repair for guidance and, if need be, for correcrion. paranoid-schizoid organization, to the central theme of concern t...1 for the safery and freedom of the good objects, particularly again, The riches oflove flowfrom the religious perception of a loved internal ones, and especially the mother, her breasts, her babies object assimilated within. This source for power and stabiliry and her relationship to the fæher. this balance in the face of each ancienr sorrow; deprivation and \X4rile this shift in value systems has a link with Freudt aggression, cannot be disenthroned altogether, if the prime guilt distinction of primary and secondary process in mental func- and anxiety do not overporv\Áer it. Unassailable love harboured tioning, it is by no means synonymous with it. Another item of within us is full securiry as all the world recognizes. importance, however, presents an identity of concept, though There is a keen edge to unfading division in the mind. The the form is expanded. Freud's categories of anxiery and guilt find usual result, however, the more general result, is shallowness, the expression in Kleinian theory with the conception of the nvo violence of shallow weters in answer to a moderate wind. Each spectre of mental pain: the persecutory anxieties of the para- man fights to be stable: few can dispense altogether with manic noid-schizoid position and the depressive anxieties such as guilt, defences since they are often the means of considerable stabil- shame, remorse, longing etc. ity - at the cost, perhaps, of compulsiveness, maniacal stupidity, Now you will recall that in conversation, talking about your insensitiveness and worse. concept of a minimum object, we found ourselves involved in There is only the gradual, cumularive way of no uncerrainry a discussion that turned out to be an investigation of the differ- to improve the lot, liberate the love, employ in constructiveness ence between what might be called "safety'' in one's internal the needed, inevitable aggression of mankind: by the relieving of relationships as against "security''. I put forward to you some- persecutory and depressive anxiety itself as well as of much of the thing that I think is inherent in Mrs Kleins work. There is no circumstances that feed it . . . Together with our death the gift of such thing as safety in object relationships to be found in the love is all, from beginning to the end. qualiry ofthe object itself. In contrast to processes characteris- tic of the schizoid position in which idealization, for instance, attempts to remove the object from the realm of interpersonal Relating to the object (with Donald Meltzer)"' processes, subject to envy and jealousÁ or where the splitting mechanisms attempt to reduce an object to a point where the I f, elaen The essence ofthe transition fberween the para- impulse to attack it and fragment it further, is diminished; in contrast to these mechanisms of the paranoid-schizoid posi- lVIi,î'.î:Ï;:l';:1,i:'åîî:,'"äËi:îlåï:åli;:ï tion, the very heart of the depressive position is the reelize- of self and objects, especially internal objects, wherein splitting and tion that security can only be achieved through responsibility. Responsibiliry entails integration, that is, eccepting responsi- iii From "Concerning the social basis of art" (a dialogue with Donald biliry for psychical reality, for the impulsivity and affects and Mel¿er), in Painting an7 the InnerlVorlá, 7963, pp.22-26;"Critical Writings III, pp. 220-223. attitudes, for all the different perts of the self uis-à-uis internal 6 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER THE QUEST FOR SANITY 7 and external objects. Inherent in the concept ofthe depressive In referring to anxiety we must remember that we have in position is the realization that the drive towards integration is mind the whole range of persecutory and depressive anxieties. experienced as love for an object, that is, as the experience of Stokes: You are going on to speak of the role of projective cherishing the welfare of an object above one's own comfort. It identification in regard to art. Before you begin, I would like to is also implicit in these theories that, for an object to be loved, comment on what you have said about the plain projective char- it must be unique and it must have qualities of beaury and acter. My paper, the context for this discussion,i" is concerned goodness which are able to evoke in the self the feelings of love with the ordinary projection of inner objects (though I had object and devotion. The corresponding inner that undergoes something to sey as well about the strong projection into us of achieves a development parallel with the self's integration haunting shapes). You accepted it as our point of departure for those qualities as it becomes fully human in complexity. Thus this discussion, with one important exception, in the matter of it demands a life of its own, freedom, liberty of action, and the what I called "a minimum object", a phrase by which I drew right of growth and development. In relation to such an object attention to the bare, generalized, sometimes almost geometric, the feeling of love arises; the impulse, the desire, is aroused and in general, ideal, plane on which much artwork takes place. to take responsibility for all those parts of the self that are In the interests of the fight for integration, characteristic of the antagonistic and dangerous to the object. In essence this is the depressive position, about which, in accordance with Hanna basis of the drive towards integration, towards the integrating Segal's formulation, we entirely egree that it provides the mise- also of the various parts of the self. It perhaps is important to en-scène for aesthetic creation, you object strongly to a mecha- rrery mention that love for the truth becomes strongly allied nism in art, as seen by me, that forges safery for the object. You to the capacities to appreciate the beauty and the goodness have just said, very notably: "There is no such thing as safery of the object, since manic defences, and through them the in object relationships to be found in the qualiry of the object danger of regression to the paranoid-schizoid position, have itself [. . .]." I em very far from wenting to quarrel with that their foundations in an attack on the üuth. statement, es you know. But you have gone on to say that art I think that, in so far es the creative process is an entirely mirrors the struggle for integration and for an integrated object; private one, we have learned from Dr Segal and yourself that and that there are alternations of integrated and unintegrated we should think of the artist to be representing in his art work, states in the very process of making art. No one cen doubt for as through his dreJms, the continuous process of the relation- a moment that a trend towards idealization characterizes much ships to his internal objects, including all the vicissitudes of of the greetest art (nor the aggressive projections against which attack and reparation. But if we say that the artist performs idealization is one defence). I think that a large part of the reas- acts of reparation through his creativity we must recognize surance provided by art exists in the service won from para- that in the creative process itself, phases of attack and phases noid-schizoid mechanisms - the transition is never complete, of reparation exist in some sort of rhythmical relationship. you have said - for what is, overall, a triumph of integration This implies that the artist, at àny one moment of time in on the depressive level. Even in the best integrated people, the creative process finds his objects to be in a ceÁtain state of something, at least, of the earlier mechanisms remains ective, experiences a integration or fragmentetion; he consequently in satisfactions as well as in the conflicts. Indeed the primitive relative state of integration or fragmentation within the infan. identifications, with an oral basis, that tie sociery are always tile components of his ego in relation to his objects. It must be recognized that this process necessarily involves great anxiety. iv "Painting and the inner world"; see extracts below (Chapters 2, 3) 8 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER THE QUEST FOR SANITY 9

'W'e particularly to the fore. The fact that you are going on to speak is the case. would that inner conflict were thus wind- of the relevance to art of the primitive mechanism of projec- swept, that visitation of the deeper caverns of the mind were tive identificâtion among others, makes me chary of cutting subject to such causes es those that govern tides. And indeed any ground from under foot in the matter of early mechanisms they are, though it would take each of us all our years to and the production of art. Now, in Enuy and Gratitade Melanie trace such tidal movements in emotion, such governance by Klein wrote that it is not always possible to distinguish abso- the few essentials. In terms of strength and space and neces- lutely between the good and the idealized breast. Someone has sity and freedom, a mental no less than a physical reminder 'We said that art brings together the real and the perfect. This is not bestows for us stark grandeur in the scene. belong to this primarily a question of sugaring the pill of reality as Freud, I immense cradle of life. think, suggested the role of form to be in clothing the artist's In life we substitute, we repeat, we magnifr, we complicate, day-dream, since to this element of invitation as he saw it, we we substitute, we repeat until the whole world is subsumed attribute a far more fundamental part in the chemistry of the under our consciousness (childhoodt world was smaller). In the pill. All the same, art can easily be debased into a sugar-coated course of life we embrace more and more the character of the product that usually has great popularity among those who are outside world, giving ourselves to it, taking it within. At death, hostile to art for whatever reason. we and it are indistinguishable. The more obvious process of living is a giving forth rather Mel¿er: I think Mrs Klein was stressing the fact that only by than a taking in. Living is ceaseless expression; ceaseless substitu- knowing the genesis of an object can rwe be certain of its value. tion, the putting of one thing into meny forms both of action and of thought; the infinite ramification of a few themes. And lnner truth and outer space" so, in the more profound contemplation of our lot, we may look upon the truth within in terms of an outside ramification, the lT{his wide conc d is more exquisite arrengement of space. I less moments And Art? It will already be obvious that it is here regarded as ".r,h.ric. I in which we a powerful the epitome of this central process. extent of Nature; in watching e sunset, perhaps, or the fury \¯e have our weys and means of keeping things alive: we forget of the see upon rocks, or the action of submerged rocks, free nothing; and the deeper sources ofour feeling are tapped by our to the air between waves, for ever and for ever in that brief environment, by material objects as well as by the human objects moment throwing off the maximum water before the return with whom \Me repeat original relationships. The external world of the wave. Through all the sensations of vastness and of is the instigator of memory: the external world reflects every superhuman force and rhythm which such a scene gives to facet of the past: it is the past rolled into the present. Projection, the senses, surely we attend a parable of inner economy, of various distinguishing 'W'e then, continuous and projection, is the those forces within, seemingly foreign to us. are looking characteristic of man. Animus (of how many kinds, infinite on Nature, but at the same time we look on a clearer distribu- in gradation) impinges upon every look, every remark, every tion of forces within ourselves, a clearer interaction, one more unspoken and spoken thought. Above all, as we regard what is Homeric, more in style and therefore more disinterested than external, ourselves speak there. t...1 v FÁom Inside Out, 1947; Critical Vritings II, §I-§6. 10 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER THE QUEST FOR SANITY 11

To paint a picture is metaphorically to take things to who do all the imaginative work in this way. The better we pieces in the outside world and to put them together again; a understand art the less of the content we impose, the more re-enacrment of an early state, since the child is bent upon just becomes communicated. In adopting en aesthedc viewpoint such a putting together of what in fantasy he has destroyed, - this, indeed, is a necessary contribution on our pert - which bitten or torn to shreds. It is likely that this element of repara- we have learned from studying many works of art, we discover tion underlies all forms of art-making as well as other kinds of that to a considerable extent our ettention is confined to the "constructive" activity. Historically speaking, the most usual relationship of formal attributes and of their image-creating menner in painting of reconstituting an object has been to relevance to the subject matter. The work of art should be to create an image of the object, to recreate the object in terms of some extent a strait-jacket in regard to the eventual images en essence rather than of a literal appearence. This is the manner that it is most likely to induce. Obviously any mode of feel- of all conceptual art. A further development, in European art ing can be communicated by art, perhaps even by abstract art. especially, has been to reconstitute the image more directly in Nevertheless the personification of that message in the terms terms of appearance, even of the momentary appeerance due to of aesthetic form constructs a simulacrum, a presence that a particuler light. This is perhaps the more adult mode of orga- qualifies the image of the paramount feeling expressed. That nization, a greetü adventure for the creative faculty in which feeling takes to itself as a crowning attribute more general it may well be lost; just as artistry is so often lost by children as images of experience. Form, then, ultimately constructs an they grow up and effempt in their drawing a greater fidelity to image or figure of which, in art, the expression of perticular appeerance. In the v/orst traditions of naturalistic painting, the feeling avails itself. A simple instance lies with Bonnard, with image-making nexus, essential to eny work of art, is entirely, the shape of hats in his time that approximated to the shape For, or almost entirely, lost. such painting entertains a precon- of the head and indeed of the breast. He seems to co-ordinare ceived image of the appeerance, involves a tricþ shoddy treat- experience largely through an unenvious and loving attitude appeerence without an image except the one which is ment of to this form. He is equally interested in a concave rounded convention aI, everydey, inartistic. shape. Again, when we know well an ertist and his work we may feel that emong the characteristic forms he makes The Ìmage of sanity" some at least are tied to an image of his own physique or of a personal aspect in his physical responses. This also would be 'Fl ormal arransements can sometimes transmit a durable an instance of form as en egent which, through the means of þ irrr"g.. Th"t"is not merely to say that they are expres- the artist's personality as an evident first step in substantia- I sive. There is a sense in which every object of the tion, allows him to construct from psychical and emotional as outside world is expressive since we tend to endow natural well as physical concatenations a thing that we tend to read as things, any piece of the environment, with our associations we read aface. A face records more experience than its atten- to it, thereby constructing an identity additional to the one tion at the moment we look at it. generally recognized. At heightened moments anything can Perhaps all we demand of a work of art is that it should be gain the aura of a personege. But in art it should not be we as a face in this sense. But form in the widest sense of all, as the attempted organization that rules every experience, must obvi- From "The image in form", Reflections on the Nud¿,7967, pp.48-51; vi ously give rise to a strong and compelling imagery so generalized Critical \Y/ritings III, pp. 331-334. 12 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER THE QUEST FOR SANITY 13 that it can hardly be absent from a consciousness in working with other experiences and, to some extent certainlÁ will point order though ordinarily present in nothing like the aesthedc to common ground with a particular espect of visual experience strength, since were it otherwise refreshment and encourage- in the first place or of the relationship between experiences. ment that we gain from art would not be necessary. Form must Abstract art would otherwise be virtually meaningless. Hence possess the character of a compelling apparition, and it is easy to we have here an amalgam of meaning conveyed by material that reelize that it is the icon of co-ordination. transmits an image not only optical but for the mind or memory Integration or co-ordination of what? it will be asked. Some as well; unique for the eye but generalized for the mind. Here aspect, I have argued elsewhere, of the integration of experience, too the form constrains us to an image, and it is not merely one of the self, with which is bound up the integriry of other people of our choosing. and of other things as separate, even though the artist has identi- Aesthetic experience can be defined as the opposite, indeed fied an espect of himselfwith the object, has transfixed the object often as a palliative, of traumatic experience. But I am not going with his own compulsion, though not to the extent of utterly to try to probe the conditions of being of which this aspect of overpowering its otherness. These perceptions of relationship form is the symbol. I have attempted this elsewhere, es I have that are the basis of a minimum sanity demand reinforcement. said. Some of the preliminaries are straightforward - for instance, Outwardness, a physical or concrete adaptation of relationship, the connection with the body-image. I shall partly be confining spells out enlargement, meens certainty. myself to this aspect. It must appeer e strange suggestion that art is in any way bent I have often before referred to the rough-and-smooth values upon constructing an image for saniry however minimal, in in building, in architecture, thet are carried over into the other view of the wild unbalanced strains of feeling that have so often visual arts and, indeed, into the textures, as we have to call them, been inseparably employed in making this image. But surely if of concerted sound. \¯hy otherwise are we forced to speak of art allows not only the extremity of expressiveness but the most texture to describe appositions of instrumental sound? In truth, conclusive mode, if it constructs of expressive ness en enduring we cannot but speak of the surface of any work of art, and thing, that mode must incorporate an element to üanscend or equally of shape and volume, of the articulated body, metaphors ennoble a particular expressiveness ofwhich otherwise we should by which we assert the dynamic effect of its impression and the soon tire. \¯e are encouraged to experience a many-sided appre- selÊcompleteness. Formal values vivify such images; the inevi- hension in art. Expressiveness - it may be infantile - becomes table metaphors derive from inevitable images that accompany valuable in evolving the mature embrace by form. our apprehension of the formal qualities. In the fifteenth century In the case of abstrect aêt\rye ere sometimes told by the artist - courtyard of the palace at Urbino designed by Luciano Laurana, and it is very understandable - that we entirely mistake his work in my opinion one of the greatest masterpieces of architecture, if we insist it expresses this or that. It is itself, the artist says, it we surely see the same thing, a justice and fairness in the smooth- does not stand for, it does not express, anything: it is not meant ness of the pilasters on the brick wall. The strength of this wall to suggest associations. I think he is right in the sense he means is measured by the eloquence of its apertures and by the open it. He is providing us, however, in his work with an experience arcade beneath. Each plain yet cosdy member of this building of spatial relationships. Now it is obvious that no experience is has the value of a limb: in the co-ordination of the contrasting entirely isolated, or else it is traumatic. The experience commu- materials there is equal care for each; together they make stillness nicated by the abstract artist, on the contrary, invites comparison that, as it were, breathes. 14 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER THE QUEST FOR SANITY 15

Form and wholeness'" some abiliry to meet, as if for the first time, the phenomenal world and the emotion it carries. The sublimation is highly wrought. Art is, of course, a cultural F1-fhe work of ert, then, because it is expressively selÊ activity: the "good" imagos at the back of Form are identified with I subsistent. should invoke in us some such idea es the the actualities or potentialities of a particular culture: indeed, the I one of "entiry". It is as if the various emotions had been artist, "child of his age", is limited by the parent culture he serves, rounded like a stone. \¯e compare occasionally a many-sided whose immediate yet deeper moods he portrays, as well as his yet harmonious personaliry to a work of art: the comparison own, however isolated he may be. He labours also with artistic suggests the notion of a psyche for once so integrated, that in tradition and convention, whether to swell their fruit or whether, contemplating it we experience the kind of pleasure we have in upon desiccation, to recombine the stock. a well-proportioned object, and the uniformity of its surround- t...1 ing space. But together with the sense of a clear totality, of an In art an all-embracing element, the stage, silence, the blank individual yet varied object (one among man/), the notion, it canvas, can serve as the sleep of which dreams, though wakeful and must be remarked, contains a reference to a non-difFerential rapid, are the guardians. I shall identify the interchange between medium (space) which embraces the whole visible world. an all-embracing and particularized element (thus antithetical but Now, an impression occupies real salience for an artist when it blended) with "good" imagos that are the bases of Form. suggests an entire and separate unity, though, at the seme time, Form bestows not only pattern but completeness, not only it seems to be joined to the heart of other, diverse, experiences, the sense of separate life, but the sense of fusion. In art, repose to possess with them a pulse in common: that is the feeling the will in some manner encompass energy. This point is crucial. ertist strives to re-create. Thus, a good poem has the closed air \X4ratever the rhythm, the force, the fierceness, the furor, there of an entity, of something compact that makes a dent, but its is yet calm, for there is also completeness. An identity has been poetry is a contagion that spreads and spreads. \¯e can always established amid the manifold to whose differences full value is discover from aesthetic experience that sense of homogeneity given: just as a mirror's surface makes more comprehensive the or fusion combined, in differing proportions, with the sense of turbulent scene reflected there. [. . .] object-otherness. Form has a content of its own [. . .] . Form in art is content As well as the vivid impress of self-contained totalities, we conceived in terms of a medium and of a culture that have been instance of aesthetic sensation the "oceanic" feeling, renew at the profoundly associated by the artist with the imagos described by some of the qualities of id "language", such as inter- upheld above, or with their prime surrogates. changeabiliry from which poetic identifications flow. Because it combines the sense of fusion with the sense of Contemplattve object otherness, we might say that art is an emblem of the state states' of being in lover this seems true if we emphasize the infantile introjections and reparative attitudes that are strengthened by t is surely gratuitous to invoke art should the experiences tVhen J that state. These ettirudes are the fount of Form. the artist I of a scientist contemplating his children, his garden, a joins them in the creetive process, infantile psychic tensions I landscape, have been enough. His thoughts before the concerning sense-data renew in him some freshness of vision, landscape are by no means circumscribed with considerations

From "Form in att", A Garne That Must Be Lost (Stokes, 7973), ed. E. viii From "Primary process, rhinking, and art", A Game Thar Must Be Lost, vii (,t. Rhode, pp. 109-115. Stokes, 1973), ed. E. Rhode, pp. 1 16-131. 16 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER THE QUEST FOR SANITY 17

of strata or density of the population. The shapes at which a unity oÁ balance or composition wherein this close relationship he looks, whatever the object of his immediate attention, are sprang from the over-determination of some key segment, some bound to encounter the inner landscape. I have not in mind shape, or from the healing progressions that belong to e fine use here the perception of a phallic symbol, say, in a rree, but the of chromatic differentiations with their intensity adjusted to an impingement of the total configuration as a symbol, an aspect equality in terms of their areas. It occurs to me that the phrase of symbolization uis-à-uis the outside world at large to which "identity in difference" might be used also to describe succinctly psycho-analysts are not inclined to pay prolonged attention the result of an act of projective identification, a mechanism on even when attending to matters of a:n; whereas it has long which, in a proper and restricted use, much of our power of seemed to me that this is the first, most general, sublimated recognition and first learning depended, some general forms of content that should be held in mind in matters of art: not, it is our participation with the world. Projective identification exem- true, from the point of view of the analysis of the artist since it plifies both condensation and displacement. is held in common, but for the understanding of art - a subject On the subject of aesthetic value, added to pronounced selÊ on which so meny analysts have exercised themselves - and, sufficiency, I often wrote of an inviting, no less characteristic indeed, through ert, for the contemplation of the contempla- of aesthetic form, an inviting to merge with the presentation, tive element in most experiences. a semiunion I described as a predominantly part-object rela- In my view, to treat of art in terms of primary process activiry tionship. I have not felt the need to take this back when I have in the more crude sense, tied on to conscious secondary elabora- stated a similar equation beÁween the inner and outer world to tions, obtains few results for the understanding of art: and the be characteristic of all contemplative states. But I would today drawn-out analogies with dreams are frequently unfortunate. By emphasize the participation of the projective-identification and large, unlike dreams, art is a cultural ecdvity of communica- drive whereby the inner life and the outer object, possibly on tion; to discuss the cultured role in terms of secondary imposition the model of the mouth-breast part-object relationship, become only is misleading. For one thing, what is so entirely secondary pleasurably, if only because closely, associated in what has some- about cultural aims, ideals, characters; that is to say, how can times been called, for its sentimenral ofF-shoots, "the pathedc they themselves be separated needy from art as an embodiment fallacy' . The fact is that we never ceese to inhabit the outside of the inner life? The projection of private phantasy into that world as such with our feelings. And so the simplest definition broader context of course entails mitigation or adjustment of of art is that it is activiry designed, by means of materials and phantasy in some respects; it also multiplies the phantasies, finds sounds, to take advantage of, and thereby provide, an informa- for them meny analogies, elaborates the ways of condensation. tive context for our projective inclinations, first of all, of course, Art is not a thumb that sticks out from our immense reasonable- those of the artist. ness. On the contrary, it is witness to our unceasing concern, I shall need at this point to hazard a speculation on rhe narure whatever the reasonableness of which we are capable, with inner of rationaliry which I take to be a fine distillation from the inner life; and so is culture. woÁld under pressure from the external world: whereas it is I had thought of calling this paper "Identity in diftèrence", commonly assumed that realiry ûurh, oÁ if you like, the laws of a phrase that forry years ago I used frequently in descriptions neture, and the logical means by which they are revealed, possess of aesthetic functioning, in order to emphasize the demarcation their validiry independently of the mind's other drives, even of pictorial forms that entailed nevertheless echoes of adjacent though it is obvious that rationaliry entails consranr rejection of forms so that a brotherly relationship existed; or I was referring to the irrational in the way that saniry is the resolurion, as well as 18 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER THE QUEST FOR SANITY 19 the rejection, of what is then conceived to be the confusion of a delirious, romantic talk about primary process where it serves insanity, a transition we sometimes call the emergence from the as a magical deus ex macltina for explaining aesthetic super- predominantly paranoid-schizoid into the depressive position. It dynamism, perhaps the great mistake is the implication that is neither here nor there that our use of the instrument of reason, basic inner life lacks the element of concept and structure-that as every one will egree, is constantly employed in the service of the secondary process provides all the structure. irrationality, or that in many societies, and in the case of many I hope to make out a relevance in turning to Money-Kyrle's individuals, rationaliry is not far developed. The question is recent paper which I have found extremely impressive, "Cognitive whether reason itself, as a process, is shorn away from the rest of development" (Money-Kyrle, 1968). I cannot summarize his the mind. Are we right to regard truth as a sophisticated notion, close argument and I must take the risk that I mislead by the root as well as branch? The rare and precious search for truth for abstraction of a few sentences. The acquiring of knowledge, he its own sake is surely an activity that cannot be isolated from an says, "consists, not in being aware of sensory-emotional experi- un-envious recognition of the goodness and independence of the ence but in recognizing what it is." He considers first recognition good object, even though this recognition at the same time be to be recognition of something as a member of a class in accor- denied in the inner world from which it is projected. dance with innate preconception. 'A memory image of the first The commoner assumption seems to be that necessiry member to be recognized" - he singles out the breast and the impinging on the mind, outer rather than inner necessitÁ mouth - "acts as a kind of name for the class." Already in this somehow inspires rational thinking to the advancement of our paper Money-Kyrle has called attention to the age-old problem condition in a hostile world. The reality principle takes over. of universals. He persists with the norion of innate preconcep- The question is, though, what is there to take over? Our first tion because it offers the only explanation of the phenomena learning was not of the rationel kind. \¯e are not inclined in he envisages. I wonder whether we here see the embryo for the psychoanalytic context to believe that any process becomes the later aptitude to generalize and so, in the formation of entirely divorced from the method and content of its origin. concepts, for abstraction. 'A class represented by a memory May it not be possible to detect rudiments of a causal mode of image is a concept", he writes. "From these two concepts" envisagement in the experiences wherein I project something the mouth and the breasr - that consequently comes back into me: an eye for an eye? I . . . it would seem that all or almost all, of the vast number of suggest that the roots of causality are nurtured in projection concepts we employ are ultimately derived by processes of divi- extreme such as the very and introjection: maybe emotions sion and combination (splitting and integration) . . . Moreover, "nameless excessive persecutory anxiery that Bion has called I have the strong impression that the next steps in the construc- dread", and Meltzer "terror", have contributed to a concept of tion of a set of basic concepts does not depend solely on exter- the inevitable and necessitous, to the very iron of logic. But if nal experience, but is itself innately predetermined. The original the relationship be regarded as close between rationality and innate preconception of the good and bad breast or nipple processes, particularly the processes predominent in early times, seems itself to undergo a sponraneous differentiation and to of the mind as a whole, it will foremost lie in the use of concepts budoff, as it were, other innate preconceptions - in particulaÁ that are the indispensable counters for the activities of reason. those of a good and a bad penis. If so, the mouth concept is Most concepts are rarely clear beyond a narrow context, as if correspondingly differentiated into mouth and vagina. Or it they had been imagos that no\M can be named but not envis- may be that a mouth preconception differentiates into precon- aged unless particularized or embodied; by ert for instance. In ceptions of mouth and vagina, and precipitares a corresponding 20 ARTAND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER THE QUEST FOR SANITY 21

differentiation in the nipple concept. The exact procedure po\Mer of differentiation in the earliest rimes, that is ro say, mu$ be extraordinarily complex; but the experience of seeing a for splitting. On the other hand, I suggest that one aspect of patient, who has failed to achieve such differentiations in projective identification makes for synthesis, in what Bion infancy, begin to make them in dreams occurring in analysis - has called the "normal" employment: "a primitive form of penis differentiating from nipple, vagina from mouth and anus, communication that provides a foundation on which ulti- and so on has convinced me that what I am trying to describe - matelÁ verbal communication depends" (see Bion, 1967, pp. does, in some foÁm, normally take place in the first few months 93-109). of postnatal life. (Money-Kyrle, 196811978, pp. 419-4201) You will perhaps have realized that my own exiguous spec- Particularly notice here a po\ü'er of diffeÁentiation held to ulations issue - a fount that is very far from proving them be prior to displacement and condensation: a differentiation valid from the fashioning of "identity in difference" rhar I that, of course, comes into play long before the reality prin- attribute to art, whereby art reveals the nerves, as it were, ciple compels it: the reality principle, that is, taken ro refer, as and the history of the mind. But, however rich - and they it was meant to do, to the external pressures upon instinct, not are pre-eminent - the aesthetic uses of metaphor or symbol, as well to an internal propensity subject to opposing mental there resides in all art as the mosr immediate of its qualities, tendencies. Now, visual perception in particular soon involves the stress upon e concrere mode of representation together a sorting out, a grasping, of relevant differentiation; for with the ideographic and the verbal, three stages in represen- instance, figure from ground, initiated in the first few monrhs. tation to which Money-Kyrle refers. Arr communicates in \¯e might view the early need to differentiare, in however small the first place through sensuous represenrerions by means of aî aêea, as a necessary brake on the otherwise universal labiliry what Freud called "thing-represenrarions" which he attributed of substitutions and as an antecedent of a component for rhe to the unconscious alone. Surely here exists both the most later power of rational judgement. Money-Kyrle remarks the general and most poignant conrexr for the irruption of the internal necessity of early differentiations to mental health, for qualities attributed ro rhe primary process in the matter of lack of which much emotionel misconception and confusion art. Even words, those secondary constructions essential for persist. rational thinking, for communication, are used to some extent He has more to say about vital differentiations when later in art as if they were substances, as if they were things, as he speaks of the organism adapting itself to what he calls the systems, that is to sa)¿, of sound complete in themselves while "space-time system". The correct orientation still exercising the verbal role of counters of communication . . . can be lost in at least three ways: the baby can get into it about substances, about objects. I shall refer to this again. by total projective identification either out of envy or as an But it is not only the long-held views about arr, nor only escepe from a persecuting outer world; he can get oriented to Money-Kyrle's papeÁ that have spurred the present writing. the wrong base, in the sense that it is not one he really needs; Another recent paper has also been a determinant, Professor or he can become confused in his orientation because his base Richard \¯ollheims lecture "The mind and the mind's image is confused with a part of his own body. (Money-Kyrle, 1968 of itself", remarkable not only in subtle yet lucid philosophi- p.4251) 1t978, cal argument but for daring originality in the use of psycho- Though, torn from context, they may be found obscure, I analytic considerations to clinch it, an argumenr ro show that quote these sentences since they emphasize the need for a our reports of mental states "presuppose a conception of the 22 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER THE QUEST FOR SANITY 23 mind itself," Now, he further concludes that it is a conception kinaesthetic metaphors. To what extent, I have asked, are they

"tinged with spatiality'' : metaphors? Freud described in The Interpretation of Dreams the common "modification of dream-thoughts into pictorial and illuminating to say that I should reckon it both proper our form". \¯e read in italics: "Considerations of representability ordinary conception of the mind, while not that of a place, is is the peculiar psychical material of which dreams make use" one which, when distorted, spelt out, is the story of our life read (5. E. 5, p.344). This should be referred, it seems obvious, to in reverse: as such, it marks the path of a regression. ('!ü-ollheim, what he subsequently said in The Unconsciou.r (S. E 14) about 1969, p.216) "thing-representation" to which I have referred. \What he refers to here is "the subsumption of a stimulus under It is surely of interest that on the last page of the Standard a bodlly conception' which he relates to the dawn of think- Edition (apart from the reproduction of a short letter to Time ing, having referred to Freud's account and also to Bions. But and Tide) the following note by Freud figures, one of several he admits that the approximation of thoughts to corporeal notes on a single sheet of paper: substances, what he calls "the more extreme conception of August 22nd: Space may be the projection of the extension of the mind underlies, in many ways, the ordinary conception", the psychical apparatus. No other derivation is probable. although Instead of Kant's a priori determinants of our psychical appa- ratus. Psyche is extended; knows nothing about (Freud, . ultimatelÁ intellectual activity is inhibited rather than it. 1938; .9. 8.23, p. 300). encouraged if the corporeal character of a thought remains emphatic. In its own terms Bion's account closely parallels In Negation (1925) Freud had written: Freud's when it depicts the schizophrenic as so overwhelmingly Judging is a continuation, along lines of expediency, of the orig- assimilating a thought to a bit of the bodÁ a bad and persecut- inal process by which the ego took things into itself or expelled ing bit, that the only course feasible to him is to evacuate the them from itself, according to the pleasure principle. The polar- thought. ('S7'ollheim, 1969, p. 2I4) iry of judgement appears to correspond to the opposition of the \¯ollheim remarks the extreme spatiality in the conception two groups of instincts which we have supposed to exist. Affìr- of mind that is involved in projective identification and the mation - as a substitute for uniting - belongs to Eros; negation the successor to expulsion belongs to the instinct of destruc- spatialiry, in his view much modified or attenuated in normal - - tion. (Freud, S. E. 19, p.239) growth and development, inherent in the imagos of internal objects, including, of coutse, the super-ego. I do not wish to imply that I think the identification of This paper strengthens me in my view of the strong corpo- the corporeal with thought is not madness. I regard rationel- reality-cum-spatialiry that I have for a long time associated ity as an abstraction from the antecedents. Hence the first with art as a reflection of mental states and their communica- value of art, the pleasure, the relief, the relief in the exercise of more tion. Though I have been writing of visual art I have suggested propensities of mind. This pleasure and relief, of course, is confined to those can afford admission. that the same quality permeates the other arts: that in poetry who to make the Naturally this number includes many whose compulsiveness no less than in the dance, rhythm has corporeal reference: that and irrationality is pathological. the origin of most words goes back to substances and their interplay: that even the emotive impact of sound, the relation- Perhaps it seems strange that we should value so highly the ship of sound, may be described only in spatiel, tactile and reflection in art ofvarious mental facets since the pleasure can 24 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER THE QUEST FOR SANITY 25 hardly be called an antiquârian interest in mental states. No. eccount, thereby bringing language in line with the mode of the These other aspects still have great value in terms of communi- erts that are the offshoots of language for the communication cation and the apprehension of realitÁ in the company, that is, of states of mind. of the thin Prince Reason. And there is no other sphere, it seems, It is difficult, even when constructing a scientific presente- where they can mingle as successfullÁ without some insult to tion, to put art altogether out of court, and it doesnt seem desir- rationality. The entailed catharsis touches not only particular able. \¯ords can be so dead; bad, clumsy writing can be painful repressions - the aspect long stressed by psychoanalysis - it is and distant from us, whereas the simplest statements can seize also intellectual, that is to saÁ releases the mind's awareness of the mind, haunt the mind, if the sound and rhythm of the words total mental function. The artist brings to bear his phantasies, are felicitous. I believe in this context that "felicitous" means his compulsions, ideals and culture; a mirror of the wider mind assimilation to the general character of states of mind, as if we is constructed by the aesthetic mode of their communication, had introjected a projection that comes back to us enriched. The however subjective the communication may be. And the mind communication is full, becomes a participation in the mental is surely a large part of realiry. Some philosophers have taken it commonaliry wherein corporeal imagery still plays so large a to be the whole. part. Moreover, the less we treat of words in our writing as the voiceless digits of a code, the closer our thought about meaning Now for the last of the recent papers that seem to me to tends to be, due to this care for their effect. have a bearing. I am aware that in each case I may be express- Psychoanalysis discovered that every activity contains ing no more than my admiration of them; to their authors the symbolic functions. tWe do not consider the mathematical connections I envisage may be inadmissible. This last paper problem to be devoid of various symbolic significations for the is Dr Donald Meltzer's "The relation of words, language and practitioner. Emotional need inspires the exercise of rationaliry image", from which I shall extract one point. He distinguishes though it plays no pert in the process: the thinking itself is between "the use of language as a mode of operation of projec- then autonomous. But the doubt remains whether rationality tive identification - that is, for the communication of states of itself is finally distinguishable in an absolute sense from other mind - while words are used for the transmission of informa- tion from mind to mind." He writes: conceptualizing proclivities. \What cost does thinking, in the strictest, most developed we are suggesting, is primarily a function of Language, then, sense, have to pay for mind: I mean in the nature of the process, phantasy which employs projective identification unconscious rather than in regard to emotions that have spurred, or that as its mode of communication. The substance of its communi- still direct, the thinking? \¯hatever the answer and perhaps cations is states-oÊmind. Its means of communication is funda- - the fact should be considered in making answer the mental mentally primitive, namely song and dance . 'Vhat I am - suggesting is that we consider "vocalization" as the symbolic achievements with most air of completeness are those of art, form and "verbalization" as its corresponding notational sys- those strained all the time through a larger area of mind. One tem.'* reason, it seems, is that not only does painting, in particular, offer artist and spectator a higher exercise in the discriminatory I would stress the physical or concrete mode of expression by powers of vision but that art, in this and in other ways, revivi- throughout this means of vocalization as the basis of language fies, enlarges upon, the link between all mental activities and our active apprehension of outside things together with their ix This paper was later incorporated in Dream Life (Melver, 1983), pp. 96-t13. introjection. Thus, as I have said, most language is of necessity 26 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER metaphor, employs, et eny rate in origin, images of objects. To CHAPTERTWO be reminded by the construction in art - to be reminded of concreteness accompanying abstraction, never ceases (in spite of schizophrenic excess) to be generally appropriate, indeed corrective, whatever an enquiry may be. Thing-representation is primary, at no stege entirely eliminated. ConsequentlÁ the case of the word "primary'' has lost here the contingent sense of "primary process", though it includes that reference. t.l Art and the inner world Now, however strong the impact and demands of external necessity, they can bring little awareness of the actual, except to the mind that has a grip, though tenuous, on saniry since saniry is an adjustment to the external world and to the external figures that is based on a modicum of respect for truth. I use the word "truth" rather than "actualiry" or "reason" because the sane propensity is first an admission of psychic realiry that is to sa)¿, depends upon some ecceptance, however small, of the limitation of defences. Thus, the study of psychosis has shown that the Painting and the inner world sense of realiry is bound up with even a minimum degree of ungrudging and enduring admission, among other admissions, t seems desirable that I give a precise account of what I of the good as good. It might therefore be argued that it would J mean by the inner world, the one of Freud and Melanie sometimes be an advantage in the psychoanalytic context to I I Klein. Apart from the fact that I claim no precise picture, speak of e üuth, rather than a realiry principle; that the usage there is always the difficulry that the concepts of psychoanaly- would help smooth presentations of the psyche in terms of those sis are little known and far less understood, yet it is impossible primary and secondary processes thet, in the view of this paper, to interpolate several treatises available elsewhere. are much in need of tailoring at the joins. \We would do better, The aspect of the psyche that most concerns our context is in my opinion, to discriminate upon a one-piece process: and the potential chaos and the aftemprs to achieve stabiliry whether such, I believe, is largely the tendency of much present-day predominantly through defences of splitting such as getting rid psychoanalytic thought, an undertaking that leaves untouched of parts of the psyche on to other people, or through denial, the distinction between conscious and unconscious. omnipotence, idealization, or whether predominantly by the less excluding method, the prerogative of the truly adult being, that entails recognition of great diversity in the psyche under the aegis of trust in a good object. The word "objecr" mey seem obscure but it is used with determination. By means of introjection, the

i From Painting and the Inner World, 1963, pp. 5-9; Critical Writings III, pp.210-213.

27 28 ARTAND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER ART AND THE INNER WORLD 29 opposite of projection, rhe ego has incorporated phantasy figures of thumb: though his working in a settled sryle will cloak it (and part-figures such es the breast) both good and bad. These thickiÁ the artist has needed his temperamenr. He may work are objects to us not only because they have come from without all his life within a strict convenrion: on rhe other hand, a few but because they can retain within the psyche their phantasied of the greetest European painters have manifestly rediscovered, corporeal character. The ego itself may be much split: many parts re-allocated, more and more of themselves in the terms of their may have been projected permanendy ro inhabit other people art: their discoveries and extensions of themselves have ensued in order to control them, an insrance - it is called projective directly fÁom further aesthetic exploration. Art is built directly identification - of the interweaving of outer and inner relation- upon previous art, indirectly upon the artistt courage about ships. Though this phantasy-commerce be deeply buried in our himself and about his surroundings. The student today builds minds, it colours, nevertheless, as I have indicated, the recep- little by rote that he can subsequently dismember, enlarge, and tion of sense-datain much-transposed terms. Form in art, I have rebuild: he attempts an unprecedented immediacy of expression: urged elsewhere, reconsrirutes the independenr, selÊsufficient, the close of an evolution is tried at the beginning. I believe the outside good object, the whole morher whom the infant should fruitfulness to be limited as a rule. This is the conrexr for the accept to be independent from himself, as well es the envel- appreciation ofTurner in Part III.ii oping good breast of the earliest phase, at the foundation of To return to inner objects. There will have been manyvisitors the ego, the relationship with which is of the merging kind. In to Rome and to the Vatican who will have found daring shapes this reparative act the attempt must be made to bring less pleas- insistent beside the traffic roaÁ mingling with the contrasted ing aspects of these objects to bear, parallel with the integrative movements in a street. The painted forms from galleries survive, process in the ego as a whole that art mirrors no less. enter and inhabit the ciry. The palpable images that we saw well- Furthermore, within a pamern of integration, rhere intrude ing out of walls and canvasses touch us profoundly because they nerrow compulsive traits both of offence and defence in reflect figures in ourselves, incorporated figures, whose inner 'W'e sublimated forms. are likely ro observe an obsessional presence is more variable and far less orderly. \¯e relish it that aspect of art within the broad compulsion to repair and to inner tensions be transformed into the outer corporealiry of integrate what has been threatened, scattered, or destroyed. contrasted attitudes amid the simulated breadth of the outside Indeed, it is a nerrower compulsive element - we shall find it world. For a few people, at eny rate, rhere is a related percep- tion of dreams in Turner - that bestows on much art a quality of urgency and from which only a limited anxiery remains, a inevitabilitÁ causing the spectator to feel that a rigid driving similarity with the salient impressions of shape planted in our force, having attained eesrhetic sublimation, becomes mosr minds by Roman sightseeing; in regard ro dreams, that is, whose content impressive partly because art is never to be divorced, within we cannot at once recall. Some people may have an impression from the dream, nonetheless, its limits, from truth and understanding, and partly because a of densiry perhaps, or of great space, or of a successful sublimation of obsessional attitudes subject ro rhe dominant form: in effecr, of an epitome in the terms of substance major conspectus, signifies that some degree of aesthetic (i.e. and space. I call it an epitome becausè I have found that when this impression integrative) employment has been won from tendencies often has become the surviving imprint, yet, hostile to eny integrative role. when later, the dream has been recalled in some detail, the sensation of an arrangement There would be nothing to arr could it be exercised in of forms had been broken up into this recall, as if these formal despite of temperament. Nor even rhe framework ordained by elemenrs had synthesized or culture can be used to contrive for aesthetic expression a rule ii See below, Chapter 5. 30 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER ART AND THE INNER WORLD 31 resolved the contradictions of the content into something not work of ert as a good objecr, mey contemplate in this manner only simple but tangible. Owing to the corporeal nature of the an aspect of our own culture rher is anything but good, yet we adult's inner objects, it seems that a dream can deposit a residue would not need recourse to denial or ro orher defence. As is well of sensations of shape, as does ert, the more general, and there- known, the artist is both the leader and the servanr of his time . fore less painful, though not altogether distorted, perception of He is able in some degree - only some degree - in accordance inner objects. with a new cultural theme or eccenruarion, to lend himself to Much visual aft is founded in accumulated designations the expression of a psychical position that under other aesthetic of outer character and the world of space. This conscious aim circumstances (in accordance with other cultural circumstances) provides üanscendental dimensions for the inner world, in might or might not have been available to him. \¯e can have no a concrete form. \¯e do not usually associate the word "tran- conviction whatsoever concerning the way that oven the greatest scendental" with a condition expressly concrete, but it is surely of artists would have worked had they lived in other periods. The artist's admissible in the case of some methods of outer contemplation, perspicacity about culture, about what upholds, destroys or ameliorates his and particularly of eft that offers a single object to the senses, a sociery and his ert, provides both a condition and an earnesr version of inner objects available as one interaction. Inner idols, of his truthful commenr upon rhe inner world that he finds reflected hated and loved, together with some of the defences or rituals while examining any ourer situation. It is in line with the common disposal of feeling by means they impose, are compounded. Though the subject-matter of a of projec- tion, employed aesthetically for painting be what the theologians call carnal beaury in so far the purpose of insight in regard to both the within and the without and their relationship: orher- es the picture is a work of art, the particular erotic stimulus - wise the artist would achieve no integration, no art. no painted flowers seem to have scent, no aesthedc apple cause This brings me ro the subject of bad objects, of aggression, mouths to water becomes secondary to e more general awere- of - envy, of all that is negative. Again, these drives, and the objects ness of availability that has been heightened rather than domi- imbued with them, could not figure in art and they figure nated by the manifest erotic content. But it is understandable to - prominently excepr under the sign of co-ordinarion, of the mistake or to resist the point of art, to fìnd in its scentless flowers - form in art that stems from the presence of good objects. Tiagic no suggestion but of their deadness, et any rate when naturalistic ert, to be so, must bear nobiliry. But many appreciators today aft has been considered as the only norm. seem to find it more exciting if formal elements can be observed It follows from what has already been said that the inner barely to survive a monstrous expression of, say, greed. \¯hat is world encountered under the aegis of aesthetic form, elicits rela- entirely negative or chaotic, or merely unfeeling, can never be tionships to the basic good objects, namely the selÊsubsistent art, and what is n€ar to it is never great ert. mother and the enveloping good breast or part-object. Just as experience an integrated psyche reads and tempers by the light Á'i Abso rpti o n a nd atte ntio n of a firm ûust in the relationship to these good objects, so the manifold expressiveness of ert, in virtue of its form, figures within their orbit; the wider the expressiveness the better, es here is a sense in which we absorb the object of our a rule, inasmuch as aesthetic form obtains significance from attention: we speak of absorbing or imbibing knowl- the varied material to be unified of the ertist's temperament, edge while, for the momenr, the rest of the world is his culture and of his inheritance from ert, as well as from of iii FÁom the epilogue, "The luxury and necessiry of painting". Three Esays on his subject-matter. \¯e spectators, prepared to view the modern the Painting of Our Time, 1961, pp. 20-23; CriricallX/riringllil, pp. 157:160. 32 ARï AND ANALYS|S: AN ADRTAN STOKES READER ART AND THE INNER WORLD 33

excluded. Except for contemplative acrs we do not mentally is mere eppearance, rranscendent equally of self and of object_ imbibe a thing as an end itself as in but pert of a wider acriviry. nature. Evoking, through the creation of symbolic inducements, Though things and their sysrems remain outside us, \Ár'e seem the manner of primitive amachmenr to e parr-object (e.g. the to get to know them by taking them in; for the mosr pam, breast), art has served ritual, religion, and every cultuÁal aiL. however, we do not will them to flood through every In this conrext, but more particularly outside it, that is to saÁ of our being in entering the store "tom of what we call the mind. in examples which lack the focus of a narrow cultural ideal, we The work of arr, on rhe other hand, though by definition a fiil i" employmenr t. . .l for a rype of experience that may be suggests to us physi- called visionary though coupled (as assuredly it must be in the d of being enveloped. creation of art) with an insistence upon the independence of a manipulation of the limited, selÊsuffi cient object. object to an absorption \X/hat of it and a sinking into it; I have used common analogy can we find for so srrong an absorp- the "envelopmenr" word as shorthand. Since art is useless, it tion of ourselves into other things? As a mamer of fact such iden- exists solely for the contemplative act in which rhe senses are tification is extremely common: an element of it enters into all not the mere vehicles; the appeal is first to them. Two impor- group atrirudes, all states of contemplation and physical engross- tant results follow: as rhe senses are rhe feelers by whiclr we ment. The most common is surely the state of sleep wherein apprehend the otherness of outside things, the otherness or we discern best the "oceanic feeling" as Freud called ii, a loss of object-nature of the work of arr is srressed in this act of its identiry that he referred ro rhe infant's satisfaction at the breast contemplation; yet, as I have said, the ruling emenrion is also engaged by the process of its absorprion no less than by the more obvious projecting therein of our feelings. The great work of aft is surrounded by silence. It remains palpably "out there", yet none the less enwraps us; we do not so much absorb as become ourselves absorbed. This is the aspect of is bound to be related, largely in a compensarory manner, with the relationship, held in common with mystical experience, rhar these mechanisms of attack and of defence.) I want to ,tr.rr, because the no less impoitant and non mystical Dr Lewint is distinguished from the attitude to object-otherness in aesthetic appreciation has been rest of the dr blank background upon beter admitted. Aesthetic form immediately communicares, as which the dre projected; ii has well as a symbolic image of an integrated ego (Stokes, l95g), ... a definite meaning in itself and ... represenrs the idea of the answering image of a reconsrituted and independent "good" "sleep"; it is the elemenr of the dream thai betokens the fulfil- object. This object thereupon becomes incorporated with asaris- ment of the cardinal wish to sleep, which Freud considered faction that evokes in rurn a more permeating ground for what is felt to be good, and so a symbol for the "good" breast. The process entails the feeling of "a pulse in common", of a heightened iden- tification between the appraiser and his object: it is a process that has been accentuated in the so-called conventionalized or conceptual sryles of the graphic arts; without ado they impart a Vhether or nor the dream screen is well aurhendcared, ir generalized image imposed upon what is particulaÁ upon what serves to illustrate the formal value to which I would point in 34 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER ART AND IHE INNER WORLD 35 aesthetic experience, usually essociated with a subject-matter but conscious of having experienced directions and alternatives (the dream itself). In such projections the good breast is of an and the vague character of a weighry impress in harmony with illimitable character: eft is here joined by religious and philo- the non-figurative essertiveness of building. In architectural sophical yearning for the absolute, so primitive and, some will experience, however, changing surfaces, in-out, smooth-rough, think, so destructive of good sense in a pretended context of light-dark, up-down, all manner of trustful absorption by space, universal truth. The superb place for it is in useless art, harnessed are activated further than in a dream; full cognizance of space to an equal emphasis upon object-otherness. \¯e must realize at is sign enough of being wide awake. The state of sleep has thus the same time that more generally an oral character in experience been won for actuality." is very common; the modes of identificadon necessary to culture And so, too,I make bold to saÁ in art altogether. and to cultural behaviour, in part depend upon it. Thus, in virtue of its form at least, art rehearses favourable All art is of the body'' relationships free of excessive persecution, greed, and envy. Convention, stylization, the power to generalize, are among the means of furthering the enwrapping component in aesthetic form: where one line does the job of two, in any simplification, we experience the emphasis upon singleness. But at the same T il'î remains the quest, an impetus of adult search including the time the identical formal qualities, such as pattern, that lend one of art. Indeed the contribution of art is quickly apparenr; themselves to en envelopment theme, are the means also for for instance in regard to the huge concern particularly of the creating the object-otherness, independence, and selÊcontain- infant and the child a concern, therefore, that will always ment of the work of art: it "works" on its own, "functions" in - considerably persist about the inside of the body, though the way of an organism: this phantasy accompanies the one of - the nearest e'¿en to an intuitive formulation at which most our being enveloped, but is connected with another that proj- people arrive is in the context of hypochondria and psycho- ects the ego in terms of an integrated figure in which opposite sometic illness when these conditions have been recognized characteristics coalesce. The idea of beaury, I have said else- for what they are. \¯hereas the art of the written word is where (Stokes, 1958), projects the integrated ego in the terms with difficulty and indirectness cenrred on this matter, ofa corporeal figure. portraits and paintings of the figure are less hard to inter- I add this note in regard to Dr Lewins description ofhis dream pret. Rembrandt, it seems ro me, painted the female nude as screen as a flattened breast. One thinks et once of the flattened the sagging repository of jewels and dirt, of fabulous babies especially of low relief in much art of the world, particu- shapes and magical faeces despoiled yet later repaired and resrored, larly low relie§, often of the Mother and Child; Quattrocento a body often flaccid and creased yer srill the desirable source and, more generallÁ one thinks of the picture plane in painting of a scarred bounty: not the bounty of the perfected, stable that is preserved at all costs by modern art: more generally still, breast housed in the temple of the integrated psyche that we one thinks of the little recessions, lines, and protuberances of possess in the rounded forms of classical arr, bur riches and pilasters, for instance, of the markings on frieze or cornice, by drabness joined by the infant's interfering envy, somerimes which architecture reconstitutes the body. I wrote many years "Architecture a those who love One ago: is solid dream for it. iv From "AÁt and embodiment", Reflections on the Nude, 1967, pp. 36-40; often wakes from sleeping without any recollection of a dream Critical Writings III, pp. 325-328. 36 ARTAND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER ART AND THE INNER WORLD 37

with the character of an oppressive weight or listlessness left only to that multiform composition which symbolizes the by his thefts. There supervenes, nonerheless, a noble accept- integrated elements of the self no less than of the other ance of ambivalence in which love shines. pe rson. This is nor necesserily to hint at Rembrandtt emotional t...1 equipment nor to stigmatize a bias in sevenreenth-century northern European culture. On the contrary the contrasting classical conception is very rare: it is far more common to discover in arr the implication with the inside of the body: we accept it that the Athenian achievement is without parallel and their employmenr particularizes, rhe actualities of the hidden that the empriness and falsity to which the Greek ideal would psychic strucrure made up of evaluations and phantasies with often be reduced (though the inspiration will never disap- corporeal content. pear) could cause it to be less accessible even ro some who, like Rembrandt, studied and borrowed from classical composi- Weighty artÌculation tion, learning especially how to achieve the look of inevitabiliry and hazy presences, whereby to dominate the larger aspecs of design. Rembrandt consrrucred a stable format out of conrrary Flah. controlled renderness of Bell emotions, from a varied human condition to which he allowed I "r seen in The Dead Christ by the granular additiveness of his technique, the progression J- (National Gallery), embraces an to a munificence rhet crowns other impressions like a grati- view of the body had come down to him from Attic Greece. tude that has finally overcasr an envy. H. has shown in-sum, Pentelic sanity confronts muted eloquence. The stillness of as Kenneth Clark said of his portraiture, "rhe raw material of the candid dead torso dignifies life without separating it gêece", strands of negative feeling, for instance, about the body from grief. Dead, the body of Christ connecs with the living limited to the original zones, e process that will have entailed who take into their minds the image of Christ as an ideal some withdrawal of those parts of the self that have been sent b:dy, it is suggested here, as a chesr in part, smoorh, sloping, into the object to plunder or ro command; for otherwise the elephantine in wisdom; breathing, ir seems, a werm silènce. affirmation that I am I and they are theÁ an objective of arr, MoÁe generally we are offered images of life and death, deft cannot be clearly srared. angels and the mortified head of the corpse. The habit of 'We are intact only in so far as our objects are inract. Art of bodies, whether sensitive or dead, is disclosed once more: \Me whatever kind bears witness to intact objects even when the are told that in the variety of meanings to which it points subject-matter is disintegration. a body is as expressive as e face. The partial nude l¯hatever the form of tran- "l*"y, script the original conservarion or resrorarion is of the moth- conveys the sense of disclosuÁe: it is appropriate here to the er's body. And whereas pictorial art employs and stimulates Christian meaning. At the same rime the angels perform a those infantine phantasies - they are many - that utilize the slow gentle wrapping of the corpse. eyes for omnipotent projections, for omniscience, it enlarges Many characteristics of flesh are suggested by this delinea- upon the reassuring endurance of objects in the shadow of tion, but only one characteristic is omni-presenr to which other this attack: they are enrhroned by the artist by means of a image inform"_, pictorial settlement wherein they may : .f-n,-T!e Reflections on the Nud.e, 1967, pp.56-5g; surrender themselves Ctritical Y(/riti ngs lll, pp. 3 37 -339.- 38 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER ART AND THE INNER WORLD 39

delineations are subordinate: shape against a back ground. The wall incomprehensible letters speak our rhe rreumatic colrnrer- spaces thus contrived are roughly triangles. The angels' heads part sometimes associated with these bodily products. both echo and vary Christt head, the cylinders of their arms rhe I believe that strong feelings of such a kind, or feelings derived corpset arms. The element of geometry or of reduplication is from them, possessed Rembrandt; they are one roor of his power; an armature, the aesthedc armature, to which our feelings, as if and that otherwise he could nor so magnificently have imposed they too could be solid things, as if they could be claÁ cling; that the weighry articulation, for insrance, of Belshazzar's right hand. is to say our feelings of contact, our meeting with a separated Many of us find Rembrandt to be the grearest of artists, I object or with ourselves now encouraged to seperate from the think because no artist approaches him in projecting the feel I splitting of ourselves. \¯e feel in ourselves the tautness of the have spoken of, the feel of presences nor only substantiated from angels' feathered wings, the wrinkled clinging sleeve, the arm observation in the outside world but substantiated equally from covering in the making for the corpse below those wings. \¯e the hazy presences in the mind. \¯e are a\Mare of a lineage for feel in us the corpse's beautiful listless hands. Christ's right arm his every face far beyond the range of iconographic study. These droops but it is halÊsupported by a ledge on which the fingers presences are charged, weighry condensed from the light and bend, and by the angels' enwrapping grip. That demonstration from the dark literally and metaphoricallÁ with a finer drama of gravity serves less the effect of momentum than of poise, so than the apparition of writing on a wall. They are compendia, nearly compounded of compensetions as to be rest. bodies that manifest the history of their growrh: each speck How often is this the effect upon us of the Old Masters, gives power to an opaque fellow. In a very remarkable book particularly of paintings with nudes. In my own mind I revisit about Soutine, just published, Andrew Forge has written of early years abroad, the sense of discovery in many galleries, the Rembrandt in similar strain. He has this sentence: "This is his predominant effect of the pictures in relation to the discomfiture (Rembrandt's) measure, that his architecture is as ambitious as of loneliness. Art meant oasis for the body as well as for the mind his material is earthy." but also a ritual that affirmed unalterable contact, on the whole in a fully adult sense, rescued from the excess that had obscured The art of apprectation'1 or depleted an embrace. Rembrandt's Belshazz,ar's Feast in the National Gallery is far ur relationships to all objects seem ro me to be from conveying this involucre of Pentelic marble; on the contrary, describable in the terms of two exrreme forms, the it shows human beings with the incorrigible character of scored, one a very strong identification with the object, used pots. A darker conception of the body assumes a vivid clay. whether projective or introjective, whereby a barrier berween Hence Belshazzart imposing pallor even though he suggests a self and not-self is undone, the other e commerce with a self- richly feathered hen or turkey amid a üeasury of filth, though sufficient and independent object ar arm's length. In all times the quilted magisterial stomach mounts to a plucked neck and except the earliest weeks of life, both of these relationships, head. Leaden with the threads of gold and silver, turban and in vastly differing amalgams, are in play together, as is shown diadem reiterate the blindness of heaped matter as does the great not only by psychoanalysis but by arr, since the work of art is weighted see-saw of Belshazzart outstretched arms. The woman par excellence a self sufficient object as well as a configurarion recoiling on the right who spills from a cup herself suggests a rounded, stoppered vessel. The clattering gold, like all treasure, vi From "The luxury and necessiry ofpailting", Three Essays on the Paintirug has its threat or is threatened. Amid the fur of light upon the of Our Time, t 96 t . pþ. t0 -17 : Criticai \Vritiígs III, pp. t'St ÁSe . 40 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRTAN STOKES READER ART AND THE INNER WORLD 41

that we absorb or to which we lend ourselves as manipulerors. of our culrure has inspired an elemenr of regression: it inspired (The first generic difference between styles lies in the varying Picassot early appreciation of the values of .r.g.o ,.,rlpt.rr., combinations by which these tv\ro " exrremes are conveyed to very importent parr of his creativeness. \¯e taste a new humiliry us). Here is to be observed a fundamental connection of art and a new arrogance, a sophistication and a barbariry in all the with the culture from which it arises; for, arr helps us both to people and all the things surrounding us: and I do not use rhe identi$r ourselves with some aspect of our culture, to incorpo- word "tasre" altogether metaphorically since I would stress the rate cultural activities or to reject them, and at the same time oral component in our attitudes to parts of our environment: as to contemplate them as if they were fixed and hardy objects. presented by art, I have said, it does not overwhelm us since, as From the angle of contemplation culture is art - hence, once well as in the terms of envelopment and incorporation, \ 7e are more, the necessity of having art-since culture is most easily seen shown an espect of our environment and "mental climate,' by as an object for contemplation in aesthetic terms. Moreover, a the painter as an enclosed object, at armt length, reflecting what cultural reconciliation of what is various, and even opposite, is I have called rwo basic relationshipr to ob;..is. They are risually perceived, when reflected in arr, as a symbol for the integration experienced together; in art alone their collusion seems perfected that we have carried out upon contrary urges, opposite feelings, to the exrenr that we eppear to have the cake and to eat it with- once widely separated, about one and the same person. In paint- out a greedy rearing, the object to incorporare and the object set ing his picture the artist performs en acr of integration upon the out and selÊcontained. surely rhe starus of this cake is the one of outside world that has reference, rhen, as as "good" well ro rhe indepen- the internal object, the "good" breast which, as Melanie dence of objects, first to rhe re-creation and ro some resoluìion Klein (1957) has repeatedly said, formed and forms the egot of his own inner processes, next in regard to the organization of nucleus, the protorype not only for all our "good.', ob;.ct, ù,.rt, the ego in a generalized sense, and finally in regard to a cultural in the unenvious, unspoiling relationship with it, for happiness. significance. The result is an interplay berween these modes of But it is always a prime error ro search only for deiivations organization ro rhe end of making one - of them more poignant that are positive, affìrmative. I have not pointed to the fact that since it possesses the services of the others. part of the aesthetic compulsion will have a negative basis in the componenr t.l of aggression and, perhaps, of organ deficiency as There is no hard-and-fast division berween the appreciator well as in the rhrear, perhaps always presenr, of incipient.o.rfu- and the creator of art. Indeed, whatever his conscious interest sion. \¯e know of several great painters who have had ceaseless or knowledge, I have no doubt the that artist is potentially the trouble with their eyes, imaginary or real. vhen the trouble most highlytrained appreciator, often confined in range of inter- has been imaginary we must impute to them an unconscious est by the preoccuparion of his own crearive field. This is but sense of guilt, unusually strong, in connection with the greedÁ to emphasize again in a differenr manner that art is a cultural prehensile, and conrrolling act of vision as it has to activity though the fount be hidden "pp."r.d and unturored. \¯ere it the phantasy in early years. To observe is partly to .orruol, to b. otherwise, art would not mirror the whole men, the whole of omnipotent: whereas rhe exercise of the .r,r.i po*.r conrinues his capaciry. making of an, fn $e it is used also to ,..o.rrtr.r.t what thereby t...1 is dismembered: in reflecting such combined yet antithetical Picasso is reported to have said that as a he child could draw drives, a work of art symbolizes the broader integrating processes. like Raphael but that lateÁ as an adult, it had taken him a long The aestheric of integration is an end-in-itselfl unlike time to learn to draw like a "c.ount child. It seems that the characer the stock syntheses rhar consrruc a characr et type, professional, 42 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER ART AND THE INNER WORLD 43 class, or netional, often valued beyond all other ego projec- A collapsed room displays many more facets than a room inracr: tions by unaesthetic persons. Genius displays a new mending of after a bombing in the last war, we were able to look at elon- impulse, of feeling, with such conviction that there issues from it gated, piled-up displays of what had been exrerior, mingled with a novel treatrnent of subject-marrer es of form. Cézanne applied what had been interior, materializarions of the serene Analytic a steelbright knife to parrern and to distance: he introduced love Cubism that Picasso and Braque invented before the first war; and respect into an extraordinary attack upon his apples and and usuallÁ as in some of these paintings, we saw the poignant upon the landscapes of his home. His paintings are unified by key provided by some untouched, undamaged object that had a play of glinting cuts that both bisect and glorify the contour. miraculously escaped. The thread of life persisrs, in the case of It is above all composers who demonsrrare easily the varieties, early Cubist paintings a glass, a pipe, a newspapeÁ a guitar whose 'S7hat and even the contrariery implicit in a theme. rwists of humming now spreads beyond once-sounding walls that have combined feelings Mozart contrived within the clear cascade of become clean and tactile remains. In such süange surroundings, a chamber work. not altogether unlike the intact yer empty buildings invented by Many artists of an opposite temperemenr to Cézanne's witl Chirico, the brusque accoutrements of comfort for pavement have availed themselves of his discoveries. Considered psycho- life, the one of the cafe, extend a greer sense of calm: a simple logically the development of arr is no less complicated than the shape and a simple need emerge from the shattering noise and view from any other approach. But I want ro srress a factor that changing facets of the street. Later work by Picasso is more has usually been simple, the compulsion ro "ger things right" disturbing, since he has broken off and recombined parts of the issuing in part from the fear of deformity and of aggressiveness. bodÁ often adding more rhan one view of these partobjects. In the case of naturalistic painting the first test of what "looks Disruption of flesh and bone extends to the vitals; but the furor wrong" has been very simple. In drawing e jug how shameful of his genius is such that the sum of misplaced sections does nor it is that a side should become swollen or should be impover- suggest the parts of a machine: on the conrrary in the translated ished, how poignent and sacrilegious the lopsidedness. Many bodies, as in the renr room, of Guernica, rhere exist both horror present-day artists de$'this fear and scan the lopsidedness of our and pathos as well as aesthetic calm: the interior of the body is environment: modern art tends to conventionalize ugliness and not represented as a ruined closet but as part ofan exterior decor. distortion in the search for comprehensive balances: the vibrant SimilarlÁ the New York Manager of Picasso's ballet, Parade, wore po\Mer wanes to correct each enormity without devitalization, his ribs outside his costume and outside the child's sþcraper since art must reflect as well as affìrm: idealism in art has been the attached to his head. In the period known as Synthetic Cubism, face put upon some degree of truth, upon some need of balance Picasso and Braque had joined into whole objects upon tilted amid discord: also the unabashed shape of the deformed jug may table-tops the piled-up abstract bric-a-brac accumulated in have this timeless qualiry. In the past undeformed shapes have Analytic Cubism, to an enfolded effect as fresh as fruit. Strong, sometimes been balanced in a picture asymmetrically: today we jagged pettern, a wrought-iron jointure, rhe curve of a rib blunt often see deformed shapes balanced squarely. or acute, typify enduring characteristics in the manifold varia- I have abeady introduced a negarive approach in attributing tions of Picasso's art, a giant in our times. the development of modern painting parcIy to the nineteenth- The distinctiveness of what we call modern art does not lie century vulgarization of architecture. Ugliness has strengthened in the degree of conventionalization or of distortion or in a total not only confusion but a desire for collapse: in arr we will here neglect of appearances but in the ûearing by means of such discern an amalgamation of negative and positive componenrs. methods of all experi nces as if they were rudim entary; impact 44 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER ART AND THE INNER WORLD 45

takes precedence of the values revealed by the last ripple on rhe even cenrral, part of their inner-life processes. I am therefore pond. Things are already in bits end musr themselves be broken excluding the people who view art from more peripheral moti- up into absorbable parts. The emphasis upon srrong impact is vations. It will perhaps be useful to indicate that, in so far as an emphasis not only upon rhe projection of proprioceprive or contemplating art is a form of intercourse berween viewer and interoceptive sensetions and images associated with a mere part artist, it has an exact parallel in the sexual relationships berween \We of the body, but consequently upon the merging or incorporar- individuals. would wanr ro distinguish here berween evenrs ing function that belongs pre-eminendy ro our reladonship with in which sexual relationships are casual regarding choice of part- any part-object, in the first place the breast of infanthood: we ner, being in this sense a direct exrension of the masturbation cannot attribute originally to the infant an ewareness of whole process. (By this I don t mean ro imply necessarily that it is an or seperate objects either visually or imaginativelÁ only of highly extremely harmful or sadistic matter.) In contrast, there are coloured attributes or parrs that in their supreme goodness or those events of sexual inter course in which contact with the badness are assimilated with himself. In modern arr, rhen, rhe other person s inner world is central. Here, of course, we would wealth of adult experiences is often endowed with this primitive have to distinguish be rween acts of love and acts of sadism, cast that is normally retained at such srrengrh in adult life for again in the latter case nor necessarily implying that these acts some states onlÁ such as sleep. I am here referring ro a rrearment of sadism would have to be carried our in objectively peryerse in the work of em, nor entirely to the effect of the work itself, ways. In acts of love we know very well that processes both of which by definition brings to us also the sense of a whole and projecting love and good objects, as well as of introjecting from selÊsufficient object. On the other hand, a unifying simplifica- the love-parrner, are going on. In a similar waÁ in a destruc- tion of shape (and often a shape's mere exeggerarion) to some tive intercourse the projecting of bad parts of the self and of the degree figures in all plastic art: it facilitares rhe clutching impac, destroyed objects, as well as the masochistic submission of one's the easy identification, characteristic of relationship with a part- self to this form of abuse are enacred. There is a parallel, then, object, whereby the world is homogeneous. As well as ro observe, in the intercourse between the artist and the viewer: the artis- Form induces us to partake. tic production itself is a very concrere representation of what is transported. I think that the viewer we have in mind is not at all at play: while his social relationship to his companions may be The artist and the art appreciator (with Donald Meltzer)"' part of his play life, towards art he is at work, exposing himself I f, eltzer: Having now discussed projective identifica- l\ / | tion in both its destructive aspec, and its consrruc- I Y I tive aspecrs as an insrrument for communication of a primitive and concrete sort, I think we are in a position to exem- neture of a reconstructed object. Conversely, in a masochistic ine the psychology of the person who views art. (Of course we ere going to xperience not restricting ourselves to the viewing of visual art only.) I am to him e or a .very about talking people who view arr as an impomanr, and perhaps he artist. sm I have discussed a bit in my peper on "Tyranny''.uiii vii FÁom "Concerning the social basis of art" (a dialogue with Donald Meltzer), Painting and"rhe Inner World, 1963, pp. 3l-38;Tritical Writings t..l III, pp. 226-230. viii Revised in Sexual States ofMind (Mehzer, 1973), pp. 143-l5O 46 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER ART AND THE INNER WORLD 47

Stokes: I think you could say rhar because an evocarion of bearing on the intentions, conscious or otherwise, of rhe the breast relationship and of the relationship to the mother artist. In my paper I discussed the dislike of art from the herself are built into formal presentation es aperennial basis, point of view of the fear aroused by so vivid a commenr upon we are induced, far more strongly than we would otherwise be, psychical reality. Maybe, though, this is important in putting to contemplate the detailed of the processes of the inner life that the artist on his mertle. a work of art may contain. As to sexual intercourse as a process identical in its method \What you have said about the oral introjection performed by the viewer points particularly ro the enveloping action of a work of art and to the breast relationship from which it ically a reconsrrucrion not only t object but of the part-object, tent entiry, the complemenr ro the breast relationship, that has been created. formal, value rather than ,. ;::;î;ä Ï.::;r*i;;îlt*: Meltzer: \¯e are agreed of a subject-meter that may be negative, rhar may invire, as that the successful work of art is compelling; induces you suggest a masochistic state of mind. I would only add, it a process in us, an experience whereby in part; that even in such a cese the post-depressive co-ordi- the viewer's integration is called upon in the depressive position nation altogether necessary, we are agreed, to the creating of to restrain his attacking impulses, for the sake of a good introjec- art, will have been affirmed, transmitted, however indirectly. tion; it means allowing the good object to make a good kind of projection To put it another way; when a discernment of inner states, into onet inner world. however horrific, however dispensable by means of a sadistic i.l projection, is stabilized in rerms of aesthetic oppositions and I have said earlier that it is necessary for a theoretical approach balances and other espects of form, some co-ordination, some to recognize the possibiliry of evil motivation in the exhibidng of art, bringing together, will have occurred ar rhe expense of de nial; that is, either as e meâns of projecting the persecurory or and this bringing togerher will have required, ar rhe founr, depressive anxieties conneced with destroyed objects into view- the shadow of a reconstructed whole object and part-object ers ot worse, as a means of corrupting and attacking their inter- whose presence cen ar least be glimpsed in the very exis- nal relationships. But I have also stressed that the motivarion for tence of an aestheric result. Thus, a painting rhar represenrs exhibiting good works of art is derived from rwo sources: first of violence, disintegration, provided it be a good painting, of all from the desire to be understood and appreciated by others, the full calibre of an, should remain not ar all unpleasanr ro as an imporrant element for reinforcing the capacity ro carry on live with, day in day out. Earlier on, you have distinguished with painful struggle toward the depressive position; and second, between "rhe crearivitÁ the projection of it" and "the exhibit- I have implied that there comes a point of stabilization in the ing of the artistic producr." I am not so willing ro separate as inner world when that element of the depressive position thar entirely as you do for some insrances, all the motivations in has to do with feelings of concern for "all the moiher's babies" these two activities. becomes ve To avoid misunderstanding, I think we should remark that exhibit wor the fact that many people are disgusted or outraged by a new through his departure in art, does not necessarily have a predominant rightly be called the impulse to sermoniz¿. In this sense every 48 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER ART AND THE INNER WORLD 49 work of ert, from such a period of an artistt life, has the func- the art of his time, inasmuch as arr must reflect rypical concar- tion of a sermln to siblings, a sermon which is not only intended enations of experience, of endeavour, in the milieu in which the to show what has been accomplished by this brother but is also artist and his public live; otherwise the artist's achievement of intended to project into the siblings both the restored object form seems to be nearly always without urgency or power. This as well as to project those capacities for the bearing of depres- cultural expression of significant dispositions both perennial and sive pains which have been achieved by the arrisr in his own topical (underþing the creation of significant form) that may development. Seen from the spectatort angle, the viewing, and completely change the emotional bent, as well as the sryle, of art, the yearning to view; the work of masters would not only derive will have entailed a novel psychical emphasis. Since we aestheres from the relationship to the product of art as represenring the are inclined to agree that the creatort prime social task is to help mother's body and the contents of her body; it also represents his siblings with their conflicts in a conremporary seming, identi- the relationship to the artist as an older sibling from whom this fying stress and the resolving of it with accentuarions appropriate kind of encouragement and help in achieving a sufficient devo- to a parricular environment, jusr as each individual on his own tion and reverence for the pârent is sought. is bound to do; since the arrist's arrainment of aesthetic value is understood Stokes: You have now carried further your contribution on to be inseparable from what is both subservience and leadership, we realize ar once the the role of projective identification. It brings me a feeling of light, penetration of your approach. fear that may first in regard to a metter that has been of particular importance. I this sound as if I thought a painrer's work must include sociological comment. Things made by man please and depress the aesthete through a Of course it is not so. He is mode far more intimate than in his contemplation of Nature. concerned with value in the inside and outside world, the value of You explain it by introducing the projective identifications of landscape, say, to himself and to his contemporaries, a value rhat sometimes entails which the viewer of art is the recipient. I wish there had been resuscitation of a discarded aesrhedc tradition the occasion for you to re-introduce here from your Tyranny as he looks with new eyes, conditioned by current ideas, not only at Nature paper your conception of the smugness remaining in the projec- but at the art of the past. This application of the inner world tor of evil, and that you had brought it to bear in connecrion to outside situations accords with the sensuous condition of art and especially with a remark you made to me about the effect on us of much with some degree of naturalism. Victorian architecture. As to sermonizing to siblings, I cannot refrain from mention- ing that I found long ago that I could provide no other word than "brotherliness" to denote an interplay of equal, non-emphatic, forms in some of the greatest painting. In appþing psychoanalysis to the social value of arL to the manner of communication and to the role it plays in the calcula- tions and satisfactions ofthe artist himself, you make a new begin- ning. It is from your angle, I think, that what appears to be the slavery of the artist will be most fruitfully approached, en aspecr, I have pointed out elsewhere, entirely ignored by psychoanalysis. I mean the subjection of the artist to his time, and therefore to CHAPTERTHREE

Modes of art and modes of being

Carving and modelling'

f\ o we shall now attack the vital though confused \ r.rthetic distinction between carving and modelling. \-f Ther. must be a profound aesthetic distinction between them. As everyone knows, carving is a cutting eway, while modelling or moulding is a building up. Agostino's virtue will shed new light upon the high imaginative constructions which common fantasy has placed around each of these antithetical processes (imagination itself is a plastic agency, fashioning its products with fragments). Agostino's virtue will illumine afresh the field of visual art. For the distinction between carving and modelling proves to be most suggestive in relation to all visual art.

r -From Carving, modelling and Agostino", Stones of Rimini, 1934, pp. I 08- i 09; Cr it i c a I Wr it ings I, pp. 229 -230)

51 52 ARTAND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER MODES OF ART AND MODES OF BEING 53

That distinction between carving and modellingii is for me My oldest contention in this field"iis that differences of approach one of the most fruitful in the visual arts: it applies to all of between carving and modelling characterize pictorial concep- those arts. I enlarged in this distinction in Stones of Rlmlnl-I tions as well as conceptions in all the other visual arts. (Stokes, showed that in the early Renaissance there was an architecture 1932, 1935, 1937, 1949.) The carver, in a manner more nearly and sculpture that is the epitome of carving conception. Also concrete, is jabbing into a figure's stomach. The compensatory in The Quattro Cento I showed that there is constancy of life emotion is his reverence for the stone he consults so long: he in early Renaissance stone ornements' a tense communion elicits meaning from a substance, precious for itself, whose with the plane from which they were cut. These ornements subsequent forms made by the chisel were felt to be pre-exis- do not give the effect of having been stuck there. On the tent and potendel: similarly in painting there is the canvas, the contrery they are integral with their background plane. They rectangular surface and the whiteness to fructiS', a preexistent appear to be more than decoration: for through them we minimum structure that not only will be gradually affirmed but wiiness powers in the wall on which they lie, just as his face vasdy enriched by the coalescence with other meanings. \¯hat a 'W'hatever shows the man. its plastic value, a figure carved contrast, this side of art, to the summary, omnipotent-seeming in stone is fine carving when one feels that not the figure, aspect of creativeness, to the daring, the great daring and plastic but the stone through the medium of the figure, has come imposition that are even more characteristic and far more easily to life. Plastic conception, on the other hand, is uppermost recognized and applauded, qualities that cause us to clutch at when the material with which, or from which, a figure has them, or that tend to envelop us. But it has also always been been made appears no more than so much suitable stuff for my contention that some exercise of both approaches must this creation [...]. figure in visual art. Nevertheless, the greatest exponents since \¯ork of this intensely spatial (carving) kind recalls a the Renaissance of the rare rype of painting that reveres outside penorama contemplated in an equal light by which objects of objects for themselves, almost to the exclusion of projecting ãifferent dimensions and textures, of different beauty and of on to them more than the corresponding selÊsuffìcient inner different emotional appeal, whatever their distance, are seen objects, have had the least, or else the tardiest, recognition of with more or less the same distinctness, so thet one senses the their supremary. Those immense heroes of painting, Piero della uniform dominion of an uninterrupted sPace. The intervals Francesca, Georges de la Tour, Vermeer (Gowing, 1952), were between objects have assumed a markedly irreversible aspect: forgotten and rediscovered only in the last hundred years at a there it all is, so completely set out in space that one cannot time when texture, the heightened expressive use of the matiere entertain a single afterthought. In visual art, the idea of forms of painting, a substitute for pleasures in past ages available from however different, as answering to some cogent' common, buildings, was much on the increase. Their rediscovery, then, continuous dominion that enforces the bonds between those points to the connection between this care for material and a forms in spite of their manifold contrasts' gives rise to the non-grasping approach in general, since it is not at all the surface distinctive non-plastic aim: and this idea was inspired, above or texture of paintings by these Old Masters thet most character- all, by the equality of light on stone. izes, in their case, the "carving" attitudes to objects.

êVorld, ii From Colour and Forrn, 1937 (Áev. 1950), p. 3l Critical Writings II, p iii From Painting and the Inner 1963, pp. 15-16; Critical Vritings 23. III, pp. 217-2r8. 54 ARTAND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER MODES OF ART AND MODES OF BEING 55

Polishing stone is also like slapping the newborn infant to make from this flattening or thinning of the sphere, the slightest it breathe.'' For polishing gives the stone a major light and life. roundness obtains the maximum life and appeal. The light on "To cârve" is but a complication of "to polish", the elicitation stone is comparatively even: no shape need be stressed: where of still larger life. Carving is a whitdin g away. The first instinct complete roundness is avoided, the more it may be suggested. in relation to a carvable material is to thin it' and the first use So the shapes proper to stone are gradual, to which sharpness is of such material as tool or weePon required it to be sharp, to be given only by the thinned narure of the block as a whole. graduated in thinness. The primary (from the imaginative point Carving is an articulation of something that already exists ór"i.*) method of carving is to rub with an abrasive. It is possible in the block. The carved form should never, in any profound imaginative that the forms in stone sculpture which Possess pre-eminently a sense, be entirely freed from its matrix. In the case carving, as opposed to a plastic, significance, have nearly always of reliefs, the matrix does actually remain: hence the height- been obtained by rubbing, if only in the final process. However, ened carving appeal of which this technique is capable. But the it is not necessary for me to enter into a discussion of technique' tendency to preserve some pert of the matrix is evident in much I think one can hold that from the deep, imaginative angle, the figure carving, and in the case of some arrs, has given rise to defi- point, chisel, drill and claw are not so much indispensable instru- nite conventions: rhus, the undivided knees of Egyptian granite ments of stone sculpture as auxiliary \MeaPons that prepare the kings and idols. My example is a literal one: for even though no stone for the use, however perfunctory of abrasives. The chisel part of the matrix is palpable, the conception of it may yer be and the rest facilitate stone sculpture: and, historically speak- imputed to some part of the form. This is the inspiration behind ing, it may be that these instruments were adopted from wood meny of the great hard-stone Egyptian heads. In conception and ."*i.tg and gem carving for this purpose, rather than invented execution they are pure carving; of which the proof is that noth- for ,rse on sculptural stone. But the only point I wish to make is ing, no nothing, is more meaningless, more repulsive, than a that rubbing belongs integrally to the Process of stone sculpture plaster cast ofone ofthese heads. 'S7-ood [...]. Stone ãemands to be thinned, that is to saÁ rubbed. demands to be cut and even split. \¯ood is not only not so dense, Mi ch el a n g el o's son n et " but possesses less light seemingly its own. Typically wooden Hence,- wooden shapãs are neerer to typically modelled shapes. The best of artists hath no thought to show ,hap.s need to be more emphatic. In contrast with the flattening \¯hich the rough stone in its superfluous shell or ihinning proper ro srone more definitely circular shapes are Doth not include: to break the marble spell proper to *ood,-.onditioned as well' in the majority of cases, by Is all the hand that serves the brain can do. theìo,tndittg ffee-gro\Á/th formation of its grain. But the light on srone reveals the slightest undulation of its surface ; and since no f-l-fh. stone is opened by the sculptor, robbed, resrored, stone has a general circular structure, curves depend entirely on I transformed. Sometimes in the late drawings we may the care with which the block has been diminished. such forms, J- feel that excoriation stops in favour of a Quattro Cento though they may suggesr the utmost roundness, will tend in real- caressing; that the pluckings-out of spiral and oval, womb-like, iry to be more flattenèd o. than in the case of carved forms from the rectangular framework, cease. The form is good "o-pressed wood. Indeed, as we have said, from this lack of exaggeration, v From 1955, pp.76-78; Critical Writings III, pp. 44-45. Stokes 'translition iv From "Carving, modelling and Agostino" , Stones of Rimini, pp. ll2-ll5; cit oflines fÁom the sonne"r in "Fôim in aÁt" (Stokes,1 Critical Vritings I, pp. 232-233. 56 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER MODES OF ART AND MODES OF BEING 57 and un-robbed [. . .]. \¯hat rounded words this Virgin has on the other hand, much of his sculpture seems to state rhat from the angel at her ear. The square shoulders, the bent arm the outer stone is nor ro be considered as mere husk: it too has on the table-top, the rectangular pattern of a soft, voluminous forms in embryo. shape, seem effortless, glowing. There is often the same Poign- Even in earlÁ more finished works, he chose ro preserve ancy where Michelangelo has emphasized - as sometimes from some evidence of the original block: the tendency gre\M ro the earliest days - the roundness of the head: though massive, leave surfaces uncut or roughly cut. The homogeneous block it remains the more tender of his plastic inclinations. The well- could be homogeneous in a manner he valued, whereas the woven words, as we feel them to be, at the ear of the Madonna particularity of any form prised out of it became, after acerrain suggest for the design a quality of contentment even, a mood advanced point, less complete as it was "finished". in which Michelangelo may sometimes have come away from In circumstances rhat might have entailed paralysing uncer- conversing with Vittoria Colonna. He depended on her high- taintÁ Michelangelo pressed on ro solurions (aided by chance) born piety: doubtless in company with that dependence there of which the world remains in awe. Of his genius, the enduring existed the wavering belief that he, Michelangelo, put good- strength of his vision, we can only remark feebly, taurologicallÁ ness into her: and it is likely that a tere conYersational encoun- that his grip on life was thus strong. He valued in sculpture ter of this kind was the nearest approach he could make to parts of the rough stone rhar will collaborate in revealing the marital enjoyment. particular nude; uncover the emotional process of searching The famous lines in Michelangelo's sonnet reveal the convic- the block; add to depth and vivificarion; allow the worked tion that the sculptor projects no absolute form: his skill and forms to suggest both emergence and shelter, a slow uncoiling imagination are needed to uncover something of the myriad that borrows from the block the ideal oneness, rimelessness, forms the stone contains. He removes the twigs which conceal singleness of pristine srares. a bird on a nest. [...] As well as fantasies of propinquity we may those of expect in the context of carving Pregnant shapes "i exploring the inside of the moth snatching a future rival from her womb or uitfulness e approach one aspect of Quattro Cento sculp- that the aggressive infant cannot otherwise attribute to himself. \\ff The attack goes on in sculpture, blatantly, one might saÁ since W ïi,ili",l:;";:: f iïl"i,'nj"'.*,iJ will not be mastered unless fully accepted. The form in the ;i:"]:i:? it marble limbs seen in warer. From the jointure of so many must first be released or stolen, then exalted. It is as stone surfaces as ere carved in these reliefs, from the exaggerated the whole, much longed-for object, the if while discovering perspective by which they are conrrived, from the fact that infant were able to perpetuete this vision by those very same though bas reliefs they suggest forms in the round, we are fantasies, perhaps of robbing the fruitful womb, aggressive reminded of those strange elongations of roundness, rhose have contributed to his sense of loss and to his need of *hi.h pregnant mountings up and failings away of flarness, those making restitution. Art is what it is from the character of being transient foreshortenings that \Me may see in stones sunk in of reparation that may employ the entire contradictory an act clear \Maters, in the marble floors themselves of baths; we man. The sculptor controls a rich hoard, animates at the seme material, a catastrophic avalanche "He time an obdurate dead - vi From "The Me diterranean", Stones of Rimini, pp. 97 -99; Critical \vritings breaks the marble spell" according to Michelangelo's sonnet; I, pp.223-225. 58 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER MODES OF ART AND MODES OF BEING 59 experience again the potential and actual shapes of the stone ert \Mere employed in this furore. But again, the core, the in water, changing its form, glimmering like an apparition central furÁ was the love of concrere objects. Each diverse with each ripple or variation of light. But whereas we pick the Mediterranean feeling for stone found a new vehemence. And stone out of the tide or tread the bath floor to discover its real of those feelings of which I write throughout these volumes, I shape, Agostino's forms never cease to be potential as well consider the most fundamental one to be connected with the as actual. Yet this suggested potentialiry causes no hiatus in interaction of stone and \Mater. In a sense, the fecund stone- the impression they afford. These shapes are definite enough, blossom is already connecr with some association of moisture unequivocal: only they have as well the quality of apparition in the stone. which, so far from mitigating the singleness of their impact the eye, makes them the more insistent and even unfor- on ldentity i n dÌfferen ce "ü gettable. They glow, luminous in the rather dim light of the Tempio. Their vitality abounds. The life, the glow of marble dentity in difference is often realized by the few masrers has not elsewhere been dramatized thus. For, by this peculiar J of today through a kind of addition and subtraction that mode of bas relief in which forms in the round are boldly I I the eye performs upon the colours used in the picture. flattened out, the pregnant functions imputed to stone in its I shall rerurn again to this propensity of rhe eye, for it is relation with water are celebrated with all the accumulated most imporranr ro my argument. The invitation to addition force of Mediterranean art. These reliefs ere the apotheosis, and subtraction of colour [. . .] is e very ancienr practice in not only of Sigismondo who built the Tempio, and of Isotta painting, but ir is sometimes employed today in a manner his mistress, but of marble and limestone and all the civiliza- unembarrassed by the demands of exacr or even partial tions dependent upon their cult. representation. I shall refer cursorily to a semi-representa- Pregnant shapes of such a kind are possible only in relief tional Picasso recently exhibited at the Rosenberg galleries. We begin to understand how at its first elabora- carving. The picture is called Woman utith a Mandoline. On look- perspective science wes the inspiration, the true and tion, ing at this picture one will perceive immediately that there deep inspiration, and not merely the means, of Renaissance exists some integrating relation, more intense than the one art; why it was the early Renaissance carvers, rather than the usually described under the words "design" or "composi- who discovered and elaborated this science. \¯e painters, tion", between the figure and the chair on which she sits. how it is that what i have called begin to understand Quattro This relationship depends upon a little addirion sum that with its stone-blossom and incrustation, Cento sculpture, the eye unconsciously performs (and the eye delights in this stone, of movement, liquid and torrential with its love of exercise). If the area of colour of the figure's deep red dress the stone (needing perspective to meesure movement within is added to rhe area of pinkish colour of her flesh, the resul- its equal love to cerve shells and growth and distance), with tant colour would equal In tone the light-blue armchair on considered the core and centre of the steady flower, should be which she sits. Further, take this red and blue, their respecrive is a yet concentrated Renaissance. The Renaissance gigantic areas and shapes, and we shall find that the purple-brown values. The diverse cultures of reassertion of Mediterranean part of her headdress gives some sorr of equivalent, both in for all the centuries since classical times were commandeered form and in colour. Or again the black and purple-brown this expression, and thus reinforced the imitation of classical modes, themselves of several periods. Thousands of years of vii From Colour and Form, 1950, p. 49; Critical rYritings II, p. 34 60 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER MODES OF ART AND MODES OF BEING 61 headdress is a concentration or addition of the background very brother parts to which ir communicates pow.er. A better colours that are divided into three zones. The point is not that analogy, therefore, is the one of the human body. Thus, there an analysis on these lines should be literally true of the paint- is a movement between colours, a simple progression in the ing, but that this mode of interchange, fructification, meta- case of adjacenr hues, one more complicated in the case of an morphosis, in terms of hue or tone or intensiry, or by two of area, for instance, into which other areas "add up" or from them, or by all three, should be suggested; not that a colour which they emerge possessing further relationships between scheme should be thought out by the artist on these lines but themselves. But the movement has nothing excepr irs own that a conception of form, in turn based upon the family char- organic momenrum, and, unlike plastic rhythm, ir is nor, at acter of colour, should lead him instinctively to create a design each change of tempo or direction, dependent as well upon a thus integrated. In terms of two forms "going into" a third, of new polar relation to our own bodies. one texture as the sum ofanother oflarger area and so on, there As a rule , of course, e compromise exists between the carving is perhaps expressed the wished-for stabilizing, not so much of and modelling mode, even in bad pictures. But often it is evident our personalities as of its qualification by those miscellaneous that a painter has done all he can with dazzling changes of tone mixed-up archetypal figures within us, absorbed in childhood, to prevenr us grasping all the forms er once. This he does in the that are by no means at peace among themselves. interests of stress and strain and harsh rh1-thms (or even of mass) that show their strength by mounting and passing the peaks of opposition on The evenÌng light"iü which the eye bumps. He thinks he is interested in the puresr sparial foÁm. To my mind he is interested in form and movement that is temporal and incompletely uansmured n uncompetin o shaPes is to visual rerms. But I have aheady admitted the value lI^ orr. in *hi.h t, in which of plastic approach in the material it brings to carving approach. My bias I L".h enhances qual extent. is certainly in favour of the latteÁ whose products seem to me the Thus, from the angle of colour whence this conception of crown of visual art. I would not deprecate the plastic approach, form is derived, although one colour "shows off " the rest, it were the other a quarter as well understood. should be itself thereby "shown off': between colours, actiY- t...1 ity and passivity should be equally divided; and similarly The accumulated material of plasti between forms. It follows that in such presentetion we feel realize carving conception. A line is so that even the mass or the form of a picture as a whole is raft for the floating spirit. Bur colour not so much a unit standing over against us, inducing the to shape an outwardness or otherness. It is a more complete, bipolarity of tactile sensetion, as a more independent selÊ more inclusive, and indeed more courageous, sublimation. orientated and productive mechanism equally active in all its \¯e all arrive at this discovery towards the end the day parts, with a small wheel (one part), as it were, communi- of when in the evening the things around, at which we have ãating power to a conglomeration of much larger machin- .ry thereby contriving for itself a place in the unity of "nd insistence by which colour is best seen; but only because also, unlike the part of a machine, it receives Po\Mer from those

viii From Colour and Form, 1950, pp. 52-54; Critical \Yritings II, pp' 35-36. eppears encouraged by the equaliry of revelation ar an evening MODES OF ART AND MODES OF BEING 63 STOKES READER 62 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN

not follow' Each thing is we discover this kind of contemplation in company with allows. The eye comPrehends' does sþ the counterpert that eases the manic trend. I refer to the gradation is infinite' rooted: measured impact of sense-date that distinguishes the commu- nicating of aesthetic experience from the messages of ecstatic Oneness and otherness* or dreamy states: I refer to the otherness apprehended in the full perceptions by which art is made known. An element f the visual arts dePends uPon of self-sufficiency will inform our impression of the whole uch as rePose and movement, work of ert as well as of turned phrases and fine passages. and dark, that underlie The poem, the sum-total, has the articulation of a physi- be divorced initiallY from cal object, whereas the incantatory element of poetry ranges the sense of interacting textures' beyond, ready to interpenetrate, to hypnotize. Or perhaps is best Aesthetic has an identical root: it precise and vivid images, an enclosed world fed by metre, "pp,eciati-on rhe inescapable morher of the arts. serve a sentiment that is indefinable, permeating, unspoken. "åiri,..rure, first il;ã,"";;;;.Jby thá ideal way ro experience painting in Italy is Space is a homogeneous medium into which we are drawn then fine streets of ,o .t"-i.r. olive terract' their farms' and freely plunged by many representations of visual art; at ""à far as the.streets ;;.;i"l; houses, before entering a gallery' As the same time it is the mode of order and distinctiveness for for .on..rted a similar procedure can be recommended separated objects. Musical ensembles create perspectives for "r. and Vermeer' It is not Holland in preparation for Rembrandt the ear: as well es the "music", the enchantment, the magic, ,h"' what we now call Old Amsterdam was there is the exactness of rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, day' Much existed "^""i""t¿.rr..rising above smooth \Mater in Rembrandt's texture, and the enclosed pattern of symphonic shape, handy onhiscanvas,inthecharacterofthesurface'beforehestarted as a coin. \¯e are presented with discipline, articulation, to particularîze, to Paint' separateness, and with a blurring incantation that sucks us Ño*, if we are to allot Pr in, at the same time, gives us suck, communicates, however an underlYing image of the. bc staid the style, a rhythmic flow. The strength of these effects asÞects of that image, or' rather will differ widelÁ but the work of art must contain some irri*ott of art' TÉtte is the aspect which leads us to experl- argument for all of them. with the world' perhaps ence from art a feeling of oneness There is, then, in art a firm alliance between generality ¿"tt*ilar from tÉe e"peritnce of mystics' of-infants and the obdurate otherness of objects, as if an alliance, in "î,,ft. Ur."st and of eve'yoni at the deeper points of sleep' regard to the bodÁ between the positive rhythmic experiences -W.", .*p.rience it to Some extent also from passion, manic of the infant at the breast and the subsequent appreciation during a rare moment in states, intoxication, and perhaps of the whole mother's separate existence (also internalized), whichwehavetrulyaccepteddeath;aboveall'fromstates complete to herself, uninjured by his aggressive or appropri- âtharsis whose rhYthm has once ating fantasies that had caused her disappearance (though and for its for our Possession it was for one moment) to be mourned as the occasion of of art, in contemPlating works irreparable loss: there is the suggestion of oneness, and the will r faculties have full PlaÁ insistence on the reality of otherness if only by the self-inclu-

Critic¿llVritings III' pp' 37-38 sive object-character of the artefact itself. ix From Michel"a'ngelo, 1955, pp.65-67; 64 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER MODES OF ART AND MODES OF BEING 65

And so, these good and reassuring experiences, the basis austeriry, contributed throughout his working life to the of object-relationship, are used aesthetically as the cover for tension of his forms. A virile force was in control; for long all manner of experience (i.e. they inspire concePtions of stretches of his art, passive signifies encumberment and active, style even those predominantly hieratic or anti-corporeal and disencumbermenr. There is little sign, one might have said, abstract, govern the treatment of subject-matter). This is the before Michelangelo left for Rome in 1505 to work for pope practical idealism of all art which says "in order to live we must Julius, before the Laocoon came to light in January 1506, of so-eho* thrive". The artist is compelled to overcome depres- that encumberment of his forms so evident in theJulian slaues sive fantasies by making amend (often, as in the Renaissance' whoÁe conception doubtless influenced the Sistine ceiling. by presenting with an air of ease the surprising and the diffi- Yet his journeying between encumberment and disencumber- culi), the amend that articulates together an all-embracing ment \Mas incessanr: it will surely be agreed rhat no figure in physical entity with bodily seParateness, reconstructions of the whole range of art affords so vivid an image of disencum- internalized good objects, threatened by the bad. Content' berment as the marble David, disencumbered of clothes, of subject-matter, may be unredeemed; formal magic must rule weapons otheÁ than the sling, disencumbered of the years. over the pressures of culture. ObviouslÁ ert is not planned on This nakedness, of course, belongs to the subject-matter and tactics of avoidance. The artist has recognized our common therefore to a thousand Davids, but Michelangelo adopted the sense of loss in a deep layer of his mind. Michelangelo, it poetic Renaissance conception with an unrivalled wholeheart- is manifest, forged beauty out of conflict (not by denying edness: his still David of the turning head embodies disencum- conflict). The disguises of art reveal the artist; they do not berment as never before nor since, not as a negative but as a betray him. It can less often be said of the activities of others. positive state of earthy presence: disencumbered of cheers, These abstractions mey not be so unfamiliar. The above of fame, eyen of the conquest which he has yer ro perform. In conception of the Form in art has kinship under the modern this idealized presentarion of a palpable, nerve-filled body, we dress with some well-known esPects of Renaissance theorÁ encounter the classic synthesis between ancient experiences of the emphasis on the human figure, on the proPortions of what is undifferentiared or absolute and ancient experiences of th. .rrlå. as the basis of all proportion including those of what is particularized, a conjuncrion that is p"r, parcel of ".rd architecture; the welding of observation, of respect for the the formal elements in every art. No wonder rhat in Florentine particularity of objects, set in sPace' with a mathematical or eyes so attuned a David became the image of political, everyday Neoplatonic homogeneitY. Freedom. Athenian sraruary with a similar selÊpossessiveness had once provided the same thought. Classic synthesis * \¯e are bound, rhen, ro attribute ro the weight of Michelangelo's figures of early date - to the Cascina drawings, for instance and to the huge energy that liberate, them, Ë. have thought it appropriate to refer to the final "happy - character of encumbermenr disenthroned: inheriting themes of phase at this point because it helps us to visualize one naked energ'y, of brute strength from Pollaiuolo and Signorelli, ãf ,h. many alternatives of his temperament from which Michelangelo transformed oppressive weight into the tÁeadth Michelangelo's aêt proceeded. A passive inclination to and pumping power of the thorax especiallÁ into muscles rhar which he hnally almost surrendered, albeit with a masculine renew themselves by partaking of bulk. The machine for crush- x From Michelangelo, 1955, pp.85-87; Critical Vritings III, pp. 50-52. ing becomes the instrument for lifting, for release. Guilt, bad MODES 66 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER OF ART AND MODES OF BEING 67 internal objects, are identified with the oppression of marble are the product of deprivation, surrendeÁ revolr, enlisted by an idealizing yet naturalisric arr.

The line of equivalence"i much less significance then torsos to the artist: meny draw- in the sense of a truly Mediterraneen an, ings, apart from the studies of movement, show this to be so, l^lassicism while keeping the broad grasp and the digniry asso- ,r*. Inor. cleerly than the careful design for the first carving t 'of \-/ciated wirh the wider use of the word, is "close ro th. Minerva Christ. Thus, in the drawings especiallÁ the nature", far closer than is a great deal of romantic art which human frame, rather than the features, represents the person; treets of nature as a rew projection of emotional states, of and often, it seems to us' the state of predicament in which the inside man. This classical art springs from a precise love Michelangelo passed his life' üansubstantiated by this genius and a passionate identification with what is orher, insisting of great iortitude into an ideal condition of slow, perhaps upon en order rhere, srrong, enduring and final as being cumbersome, disembarrassment. an other thing, untainted by the overr gesture, without the I have particularly in mind the four unfinished Gi¿nts summary treatment, without the arrière pensée of "think- with their stones, with time, with eterniry (Skueù who wrestle ing makes it so". in the Accademia at Florence' I am suggesting that in suPport t..l of Michelangelo's sense of predicament and guilt there existed a I have used the art of Cézanne to descant upon a conrinu- state of uneasy us in terms of an oppressive ous relation between emotion and the outer world. A stress weight had at one time been partly which, on any poinr or points of rhe line of this equivalence (divide d welðome. One es or Captiu¿s of the Louvre, roughlÁ very roughly and artificiallÁ into the rwo zones clas- perhaps the most typical of Michelangelo's surviving -'l:t sical and romanric) determines both the quality of an artist's iotL", is bound, tied. (According to the first plan of 1505 for

it, the strength still shows, or, rather, the vision will overcome sometimes characrerize broadly the artist and his object. Though our concern is wider than specifi c att, they were introduced in order to illumine the equivalence where it is best acknowledged. Like the difference between these two rerms, so the differ- ence between err and life is one only of degree, if living is conceived as the multiform of expression. Artistic expres- sion or communicarion is selfsufficient in comparison with

xi From Inside OuL 1947 , pp. 109,116; Critical Writings II, pp. 174, lgO 68 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER MODES OF ART AND MODES OF BEING 69 the interlinking activities of life, of which art is the useless too narrow. Communication by means of precise images obtains -ffe epitome. nèed but to refer to another truism - a work of similarly in art a wider reference whenever rhe artist has created ait is a communication in terms of the data of the senses - to for the experience he describes an imagery to rranscend it, to point to a certain rivalry here with the exposed otherness of embrace parallel kinds of experience that can be sensed. poetic ,h. .*,.rrr"l world. Not only is a work of art, as a datum of analogy or image is apt; felicitous overrones coexist; the musi- a sense or senses, an object in the literal meaning, but that cal aptness of expression hazards wider conjunctions rhan those object expresses the universal desire ro translare life into an immediately in mind. outward attachment. In visual arr, roo, we see without diffìculry that form and representation enlarge each othert range of reference. SimilarlÁ the same formal elements are used to construct The tnvitation Án art"ii more than one system of relationship within a painting itself, and with us who look at it. \¯hatever the total meaning, the perennial aspect reveals a heightened close connecrion berween sensarion signifi- cance, that is to se)¿, impact on the perceiving instrument as it organizes the data, and more purely mental content that we then apprehend in the outside terms of sensation significance. ened by psychoanalysis, which tells, for instance, of parts of t.l the self tÊai are with difficulty allied, that tend to be split off, I hope it is not an outregeous conjecture concerning and of internal figures or objects that the self has incorporated, perception to say that stereorypes for psychical tension may be with which it is in consrenr communication or forcible excom- projected therebÁ and that these projections in some parr may munication. Pattern and the making of wholes are of immense have reinforced the perceptual bents to which I am referring. In psychical significance in a precise way, even ePart from the any case, whether or nor immured biologically in perception, ãrirr. ,o*"rás repairing what we have damaged or destroyed internal situations remark themselves therein. l¯e are dynami- outside ourselves. cally implicated with visual srress, particularly with the envelop- In distinction from projections that ensue uPon eny perceiv- ing use that art makes of it. \¯hen the final balancing, the whole ing, aesthetic projection, then, contains a heightened -concern that is made up of interacting *ñh ,rrrr.,.rr.. Th. contemplation of many works of art has perrs, is suspended for a time by the irregularities of srresses, these same srresses appear taught us rhis habit. I think it is so srrong only because in ev.ery to gain an overwhelming, blurring, and unitary action inasmuch insán.. of art we receive a persuasive invitation, of which I shall as rhe parts of a composition are thereby overrun, and inasmuch write in a momenr, to participare more closely. In this situation as the spectatort close parricipation, as if with part-objects, removes distance between him and this seeming process. Much of the attraction of the sketch lies in this situation, which arises also whenever we think we find the artist at work, in his calligraphy or flourish, his gesture or touch, and, even more generally, in-the accentuations of sryle. I have particularly in mind rhe extreme example of Baroque paintings with a diagonal recession, invaded ^j_r,F*^Tb,In,itationinArt,|965,pp.l3-26;CriticalWritingsIII,pp.268-276. by a represented illuminarion, cast diagonallÁ that curs across MODES OF ART AND MODES OF BEING 71 70 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER

more accentuated, the figures, that binds the composition as a movement of masses' sharpness and multipliciry of the introjec- tory-projectory *itho.rt respect for integrity of parts of the scene' of distinct processes, ere ar firsr minimized. Yet I shall note, on the other hand, rhar under figures, voiås and srrbstánc.s. A principle, a Process at work' the spell of this enveloping pull, ,å-, to override the parts. It is one asPect of the "painterly'' the objectt otherness, and its representarion of otherness, are rhe more poignantly grasped. But want also concepr formulated by \¯olfflin, iÁ ry!1ich values of what some I to stress rhe opposite point by indicating in naturalistic sryles, psychãlogists have called "rhe visual field" dominate certain which boast far grearer representation t"i,-,., in "the visual world" of ordinarÁ everyday, PercePtion' of the particular and of the incidental, that these first of all with an abiliry works, if they are to be judged arr, musr rerain, and indeed must . \¯e very often associate creativeness employ more industriously, procedures to disregard an order elsewhere obtained, to ignore an itch for to qualify the intima- tion of particulariry ro counrer the finaliry I' f",,or'r, of a harder-won integration whose image may strong impression of events entirely foreign to oneself by an impression still suggest an overPowering process' no less than its integration of an envelopmenr that embraces with other elements. distinctiveness. Hence the invitation in arr, the invitation to identify I now call the envelopment factor in art - this compelling invitation to identiô' the incantarory empathically, a vehemence beyond an identification with real- - process. I have often writ- ir.å rtrrr.t.rr., th"t largely lies, we shall see more fully' in a work's ten of it, principally in terms of part-object relationship, particu- larly of the prirne enveloping relationship suggestion of pro..rs in train, of transcending stress' with which to the breast where the " work of art stands "incantarory'' *. immerse ourselves, rhough it lies also in that capacious for the breast. I adopt the word -"y to suggesr the empathic, identificatorÁ yet keén bent for eptness' for the embracing as a singleness of pull upon adepts, so rhar they are enrolled by the formal procedures, more then o.r. aorr*nt, of one mode for "re ading" the elements at any rare, and then absorbed to some of its construcrion, to which I have already referred in regard extent into the subject-matter on show, a rela- tionship to form and image. Though they always have the strong qual- through whose power each conrenr in the work of art can be deeply communicated. iry of co-ordinatãd objecti on their orvn, the world's artifacts I shall try to indicate further methods and characteristics of visual art whereby the incantarory tend. to bring right uP to the eyes the suggestion of procedures process comes into being. I believe that that reduce ,h. r..rr. of their particulerily and difference; even' much formal srrucrure has this employment, beside entirely other employmenr, in part, the difference beween you and them, though the state and that a parr of the total content *iih *hi.h a work is manifesrly concerned be the coming of to be communicated: is often centred upon unitary or transcending relationships, though they the rains, or redemption and damnation, or the long dominance contrast with the workt co-ordination of the dead. Most painting styles are what we call conceptual: berween its differing componenrs, rhis, another contenr no less primarÁ whereby objects ,.tder.d under conformiry to an idea of their genus' the integration of the "r. ego's opposing facets and the resrored, independent to hierarchic conceprions (with a comparative neglect of individ- object can to be symbolized. I believe that the incantatory ual attributes and changing aPpearences) favouring the power quality results from the equation enlisted berween the process Iure us into an easy idÃtifi."tio.t with an expression of attitude of heightened percep- tion by which the willing "reads" or mood. The depicting of incident thus receives a somewhat specraror a work of art - often the with a difficulqy of which the artist makes timeless imprint, off.rs relationship that at first glance saps use ro river amenrion " to his patterns and inner as well as symbolism of existence completely sePerate from ourselves' - physical processes; an eque- "tt tion constructed or reinforced R *. merge with such an object, some of the sharpness that is by at least an espect of the formal is treatment that encourages the sense of a process presenr whãn differentiation of the inner from the outer world in action. There 72 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER MODES OF ART AND MODES OF BEING 73 is vitaliry in common that suggesrs an unitary relationshiP, as if from works of arr, even while we yiew them predominantly in the artifact were e pert-object. the lighr of their self sufficiency as resrored, whole objects, a I shall conrinue to touch on a few manifest elements in the value that thereby we are better prepared to absorb. case of naturalistic arr. Fof it goes without sayrng that dance, The first power that the work of art has over us, rhen, arises song, rhythm, alliteration, rhyme, lend themselves to, or creete' from the successful invitation to enjoy relationship with delin- an incantatory process, a unitary involvement, an elation if you eated processes thar enliven our own, to enjoy subsequently will. Thus when I wrote of this mefter in 1951, I did so in terms as a nourishment our own corresponding processes, chiefly, it of the manic. During the next yeer,1952, there appeared in the appears to me, the relationships between the ego and its objects, 'InternãtiTna] Journal of Psychoanaþsis Marion Milner's Paper, though concurrently the unitary power, inseparable from part- renamed in the Melanie Klein Symposium of 1955, "The role object relationship, rhar rranscends or denies division and of illusion in symbol formatiori', where, not only in matters of differences. To take the instance once more of this last relation- art, she emphasized a state of oneness as a necessary step in the ship from painting, light and space-extension can be employed apprehensiån of rwoness. Her keÁ'lvord here is "ecstasy'' rather to override each particularity in favour of a homogeneity with ,h"., "p"r,-object". Her paper derived partly from ideas she had which we ourselves are enveloped. And so, such eflècts in the already put forward in her book, On Not Being Able n Paint picture - their variety is vast - consrruct an envelo ping mise- (Milner, 1950). en-scène for those processes in ourselves rhar are evoked by the of the principal aesrheric effects an incantatory element is picture's other connotations. easiest gt"iped. éy "grasp" I refer also to being joined, envel- It is easily agreed that pictorial composition induces images op.d, *ith the aesthetic object. But whereas we easily expe- of inner process as we follow delineated rhythms, movemenrs, ,i.t.. the pull of pleasant, poetic, pictorial subject-matter directions with their counter-directions, conrrasts or affini- - classical idylls, fêtes champêtres, and so on - there is not so ties of shape with their amendanr voids, as well as the often much readiness to appreciate the perennial existence of a wider precarious balancing of masses. Predominant accents do not incanrarion that permeates pictorial formal language whatever achieve settlement without the help of other, and perhaps the subject or type of picture. Similarly a poem, like a picture, contrary, references; hence the immanent vitalitÁ and a vari- properþ appreciated, stands away from us as an object on its ety of possible approaches in analysing a composition; hence ã*.r, b,r, ih. po.rty that has gripped, the poetry of which it the ambiguirÁ in the sense of an oscillation of atrenrion, rhat is composed, when read as an unfolding Process' combines others have noted in the inrerweaving of poetic images. Ir may with cårresponding processes in a reader who lends himself. be thought that this will hardly apply to the represenrarion of Therefore my description is the incantatory process, since I balance between sreric, physical forms as opposed to the repre- feel that all art describes processes by which we find ourselves senration, in which naturalistic art excels, of movement or to some exrenr carried awaÁ and that our identification with of stress and strain. Such immobilitÁ however, often involves them will have been essential to the subsequent contemplation a sense of dragging weight, of the curving or swelling of a of the work of art as an image not only of an independent contour with which we deeply concern ourselves, since we take and completed object but of the ego's integration' Since, as enormous pleasure, where good drawing makes ir profitable, the good breast, have in feeling our wa)Á, in crawling, as a totality, it is an identification with -I it were, over a represented oft., ,rrt-itted that the identificarion with processes that are volume articulated to this end; many modes of draughtsman- thought of as in train allows a sense of nurture to be enjoyed ship, or of modellin g, may invite a very primirive, and even 74 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER MODES OF ART AND MODES OF BEING 75 blind, form of exPloration. In one of their asPects, too, rela- its native stare, I believe that every work of arr musr include tionships of colour and of texture elicit from us the same sense both activities. of proc.ss, of development, of a form growing from anothe-r or A painteÁ rhen, ro be so, must be capable of perpetrating eniering and folding up into it. And, as I have said, we find defacement; though it be defacemenr in order to add, creare, ourrelrrãs traversing represented distances, perhaps enveloped transform, resrore, the attack is defacement none the less. The by an overpowering diffu architecture, loading of the surface of the canvas, or the forcing upon rhis ptrr.rro, of -"tty bodilY dYnamic or flat, white surface of an overpowering suggestion of perspec- evolving process as well as n' tive, depth, the third dimension, sometimes seems to be an It is necessary to rePeet relationship enterprise not entirely dissimilar to a twisting of someone's between ourselves and on-going processes rePresented by the arm. I am inclined to think rhar, more than anything else, the aesthetic object conrrasrs with the integration of its parts, for defacement involved of the picture plane accounts for the tardy which we value it as a model of a whole and separate recon- arrival in pictorial art of an entirely coherenr linear perspective. stituted object. In a combination that art offers, we find a From many angles, extreme illusionism is an extreme form of record of piedominant modes of relationship, to part-objects art, not least in the aggressive and omnipotent attitude to the materials employed. as well as to whole objects. Many - every month many more - mate- t..l rials are no\Ár'' consciously respected, set-off, in our art today; I have been describing the suggestion of an overpowering thus made purposive, their naked character bears witness to an process in the painter's deployment of perceprual truth that independence of these objects. \¯e often deprecate an enrire ir"s been largely ignored in the exercise of practical percep- disguise of the canvas's flatness; we advocate "preservetion of tion. I use the word "process" because the overpowering is the picture plane". But whereas the paint, for instance, stays felt to be going on by the spectator. I turn now to the major paint in such works , a large part of the impact upon us may overall pro..tt, a reparation, in which both the good breast proceed from the fact that the canvas is so heavily loaded and and the whole, independent mother must figure, a reparation scored. Always the strong impact of which defacement, I am dependent, ir seems ro me, upon initial attack. I believe that convinced, is an attribute. It is "seconds out of the ring" for in the crearion of an there exists a preliminary element of every writer as he opposes his first unblemished sheet, innocent \With acting out of aggression, an acting out that then accompanies of his graffiti. It is even harder to begin to paint. the first ,.p"ãtirr. r."nrior-"tion, by which inequalities, tension-and mark or two, the cenvas has become the arena in which a reral- distortions, for instance) are integrated are made to "work"' I iatory bull has nor yer been weakened; no substantial assauh, have long held the distinction between carving and modelling no victorÁ has begun. If a painter be so blatant, so hardy, as to be g.nlric in an application to all the visual arts. These two to fling, almost heedlesslÁ upon rhe cenvas, e srrong impact, activiiies have many differences from the psychological angle, he will at best creare an enveloping or rranscendental effeit of first, I think, in the degree and quality of the attack upon omnipotence. the material. similarlÁ this difference of attack is relevant to Pictures in a gallerÁ even the pictures in the National GallerÁ the old distinction between the decorative and the fine arts make an ugly ensemble; as an ensemble the bare walls would where an increase of attack calls forth an increase of creative- be more pleasing. There is no doubt that the most beautiful ensembles ness. But if decoration titillates, ornaments, the medium, and of paintings are of those that are absrracr and thinly if larger creativeness may to some considerable extent oPpose worked, unaggressive in colour. A Ben Nicholson exhibition ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER 76 MODES OF ART AND MODES OF BEING 77 vivifies the walls on which it is hung. Some kinds of abstract painting, then, employ very subtle attack. But we soon reach the strange conclusion that ifattack be reduced below a certain minimum, art, creativeness, ceases; equallÁ if sensibiliry over the fact of attack is entirely lulled, denied. The plainer tricks of perspective drawing can be easily learned and then imposed, part-objects. should the knack be greedily appropriated without a thought for the numbing distortion of the surface thus worked, and so without aesthetic sensibility. A practised artist will have become habituated, of course, to his bold marks. But he cannot be a good artist unless at one time he reckoned painfully with the conflicting emotions that underlie his transformations of material, the aggression, the Power, the control, as well as the belief in his own goodness and reParative aim. The exercise of power alone never makes art: indeed it reconstructs the insensi- tive, the manic, and often strangelÁ the academic. Art requires full-dress rehearsal of varied methods that unify conflicting trends. Such presentation ceuses composition, the binding of thematic material, to be widely evocative. This is more clearly shown in music than in the other arts' Musicologists tend to discover that, whereas construction is easily analysed from a variety of angles, the creative element, that distinguishes a coherent web from clever dovetailing, in general eludes analy- sis. Hence a vegue appeal, sometimes, to "organic unity''. I believe that it is possible to be more specific in speaking of the deep charging of these sense data with emotive significance, whereby the deployment of formal attributes becomes a vivid language, that is to say, symbols of objects, of relationships to objects and of processes enwrapping objects, inner as well as outer. The word "symbol" here does not indicate parallel structures, but structures wherein the component Parts' though possessing no correspondence with the comPonent parts of the original objects, are interlocked and interrelated with an inten- sitÁ sharpness, regret, or other feeling-tone that belong at least to one aspect of the original object-relationships' especially to the fact of their coexistence, interpolations, and variety. CHAPTER FOUR

Mother art

lntegrity of the outward objectÁ

rchitecture, it has often been said, is the Mother of the I hope to intensify the meaning of this phrase Á{^ {r". ¿ .I although architectuÁe is usually subject to urg..ri pr".- tical requiremenrs, and always to climate. Such consid.r",ìorr, and much else - for insrance, the intellectual pleasures of coher- ence, the bodily references imputed to mess - are regarded heÁe as the conditions, or in the la*er cases, the modesl of an aesthetic aim which cannor itself, of course, be confined, as is so often done, to the terms of modes and media. In front of a fine building it would no doubt seem irrelevanr to think as follows: \Me were first one with our mothers; then, during early infanq, we found repeatedly (and feared the loss of, mourned) our guardians as whole people whose composite separateness in large meesure defined the uniry of our o\ry.n . . . But classical architecture, we shall see, esseys the reconstrucdon i From "The sense of rebirth Q)", Smooth and Roagb, 1951, pp.55_63; Critical Vritings I, pp.242-244. STOKES READER 80 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN MOTHER ART 81 of this outside character, this ego-defining object: thus there has Art wins for connecrive activity a grain of the finaliry of death. often existed a rather selÊconscious conYention of providing The urgent outwardness, straining to substantiate an image of an inside doors with pediments, of decorating interiors with all the independent whole, bears witness to the infantile, .r.r"ly *orr, forms originating from protection against the weather. single object whose loss was so feared, whose being, howeveÁ imbues the forms of classical architecture. But this does nor In Italy I have been much alive to what I eat. I cannot judge suggesr that an identical basis should be attributed to the graphic how the enjoyment of food has stimulated architectural interest arts' eyen in Europe where they have often evolved under eviáent but I feel certain that pleasure in building broadens appetite' architectural inspiration. Besides a repaired morher without, whether it be for the cylinders of maccheroni and spaghetti, the graphic en as a rule insists upon the spell of inner (often perse- pilasters of tagliatelli, the lucent golden drums of gnocchi alla cutory) figures that stalk the mind. romena or for fruit and cheese like strong-lipped aPertures uPon Fine building exemplifies the reparative function of art: the smooth wall of wine. \¯e partake of an inexhaustible feed- wide feelings, we have noted earlieÁ rhar cenrre on landscape, ing mother (a fine building announces), though we have bitten, on mother-eanh, are particularized in houses. primitive ¿*ått- toin, dirtied and pinched her, though we thought to have lost her ings are caves carved by the elements. \¯hereas ploughing utterlÁ to have destroyed her utterly in fantasy and act. l¯e are roughens and freshens rhe progenitor earrh, raking ,-ãorhi grateful to stone buildings for their stubborn material, hacked it for the seed that will produce our food. Also in ai.hit..t.rr. and hewed but put together carefully, restored in better shape there are indispensable themes of smooth and rough. Both by than those pieces that the infant imagined he had chewed or agriculture and architecrure, and very often in the graphic arts scarrered, for which he searched. Much crude rock stands rear- through the example of building, a sensitive.r.r, ,o ,.,if"ce has ranged; now in the form of apert sides been employed, the lover's or the infantt precognition, evoking of the bites, the tears, ously from stone or from canyes a uniry of forms *hth are fert to be "p.rtnr.s, identified with the recipient passa sense pre-existent; giving rise to a carving attitude that contrasts with organs, with features; as well as with the good mothe-r which we the projection of forms by means of the mere claÁ itself of little would eat more mercifully for preservation and safery within, momenr, or if it is equated wirh the products of the bodÁ non_ and for our own. pre-existent independently. I have written at length elsewhere A roof overhead is almost as necessary as \Mas the mother of these conrrasred yet always inrerwoven uends of ,h. graphic herself. ubiquitous for town and village, buildings seem vast in arts. My greater inreresr has been for works conceived primar- relation to ourselves: their lower forms are actual to the touch as ily from the carving side, since I value the meaning corrrr.yed well as ro rhe eye. A house is a womb substitute in whose pessages by the accenruated orherness, by the selÊsubsiste.r..l", it *år., we move with freedom. Hardly less obviously the exterior comes of forms, rarher than by those juxtapositions through which to symbolize rhe posr-natal world, the mothert divorced original we are made vividly conscious of tensions of the mind. I have \We aspects or par$ smoothed into the momentous whole. shall more concern with restoration, reparation, than with the versa- see rhar in line with the stress of classical builders upon exterior tile interior giants that seem to infect the artistt material with shadowy or stark power. If every work of visual art compounds the two trends, until our own day et any rate, rhere .orrlà b. ,ro doubr as to which of rhe rwo was the more evid,ent, and the more at home, in architecture. 82 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER MOTHER ART 83

It is a common experience to observe through the expressive rhemselves the qualities of that smooth-rough disposal which features of foliage a house as the structure of their person. Round we observe plainly in the simple Mediterranean house; best to\Mer, high roof and dome, the Hindu temple and the simi- known, perhaps, in process of being built, before glass has ramed lar roo§ of Chambord, the acrid, bellying chateaux of France yawning apertures of velvet-smooth blackness which confer an where so often emaze of shapes, or else giant forms, a vaunted ordered sense of voluminous depth, smoorher rhan the plastered mass, are emphasized - such rypical architectural sallies have walls whose bottom courses are somerimes left bare, displaying their context, no less than the classical building, from contour the close packing of stones that were blasted fto- tË. ,o.É and from climate. But in section, in detail, however forcible the upon the site. The roof tiles bring another qualiry of illuminated êffect of mass, whatever the stimulus of the plastic nerve, they roughness: light and dark, differing planes, assen their differ- resolve themselves, more esPecially for their inhabitants, into surfaces that are pierced by apertures with entry to a womb- like cave. The finer the architecture, the better this figure is re-erected, re-enacted, complaisant in climate and landscape' Soaring Gothic cathedrals may grossly spiritualize an image of the body: yet exuberance from stone in organic Petterns projects hunger the eyes, and _of doubtless there has been some perme- inseparable, to these fantasies anew, fantasies of a kind that are ation of the visual sense, as of touch, by the once all-embracirrg any building with apertures or a change some small degree, from oral impulse. ArchitecturallÁ we experience the beloved as the Pinnacles, shafts and phallic towers do not contradict of surface. provident mother. The building which provokes by its beaury whatever their abruptness, they will be refer- the trend since, a positive response, resuscitates an early hunger or greed in the ring also to the incorporation once attributed to the mother. disposition of morsels thar are smooth *itË -orils that are Architectural forms are a language confined to the joining of a rorrgh, or of wall-space with the apertures; an impression, I have few ideographs of immense ramification. said, composed as well from other archit..t,.rr"[ sensarions. Tb The landscapeii intimates union with the beloved. Colours, repeat: it is as if those eperrures had been rorn in that body by smooth and rough planes, apertures, symbolize reciproc- textures, our revengeful teeth so rhat we experience as a beauriful form, iry a thriving in a thorough partnership. The landscape's centre is and indeed as indispensable shelter also, rhe ourcome of sadis- fashioned by plain houses in a cobbled street' by the dichotomy tic attacks, fierce yet smoothed, healed into a source of health of wall-face and opening. Dichotomy is the unavoidable means to architectural effect. It has, of course, many embodiments' a sense of growth and e sense of thrust, for instance, heaviness and lightness, sheerness and recession or projection, rectangularity rotundiry lit surfaces and shadowed surfaces, a thematic "nd contrast between two principal textures, that is to say' between smooth and rough. I take this last to symbolize all, because it best marks the "bite" of architectural pleasure uPon the memory: the calm and beaury and magnificence. She was mourned owing to dichotomy that permeetes our final impression. Such effècts as the strength of greed, owing to the wealth of attacks th"r li",o. volume and scale, each providing a separate sensation, are finally been made on her attributes whenever there has been frustra- tion. ii Described in the previous chapter - an Italian village scene' creed is excited once more but achieves a guiltless catharsis 84 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER MOTHER ART 85 on rhis sublimated level. And so, we \Melcome the appearance This expressiveness and overt domination by architecture in European arr musr be related to a variery of European materials, particularly to limestones and ro rhe Roman pozzolana; further, to temperate climate and the clear Mediterranean light. Even more than the Egyptians, rhe Greeks, especially the Athenians commanding the unrivalled Pentelic marble, insisted upon the smoothest of walls for their principal archirectural sryle. Fine masonry of close joinrs was often plastered in order that it should thereby be the more smooth, the more radianr. An extreme care of loved and hated effribures. Experience in art and beauty for simple surface, and so, for the smallest change of plane, süengthens the ego, if only because balance, pattern' harmonÁ and so, for apertures, was never lost, it seems, if we consider *.l.om. a composite whole. Beauty acknowledges a binding the continuiry of Mediterranean houses. The monolithic look theme (which art seeks out in any collocation), an identiry of their walls, doubdess borrowed, here as in other parts of the compacted from elements, perhaps conrrasring, that swell the world, from mud consrrucrion, denies manyheaded chaos to the primeval cave. whoi.nes, of the whole. Beaury is a sense of wholeness. From the SimilarlÁ every type of masonry and of brick may sharpen our sensitiveness to surface, to what is rough and to what is conceived to be less rough if only because it conveys an impression of vivid conrrol.

for ouward-thrusting Eros the perfection of arrest. By means Concreted timeÁii of aesthetic pleasure we eppropfiate the material world without

palaces of Venice present to us in terms of space, the hoard of ancient Venetian enterprise. The very substance of limestone suggests concreted Time, suggesrs that purely spatial or objec- tive world which limestone architecture has organized for us. Though they have lacked the knowledge of limesrone's origin, yet the unconscious fantasies of many races have directed "riirt, to attain spatial completeness in their use of rhis stone . Except specifically and continuously apparent to us art though this be in terms of these fantasies connected with limestone we .r.rrrã, in the M.dit.ir"rr."r, culture only' Since the beloved was -ãitt explain either the ebullient life, the stone-blossom of euattro so calmlÁ so perfectly figured forth by the Greek architectural art, paradoxical though it seems' orders, much-of our graphic iii "The pleasures o_ffimesron€: a geological medlef', Stones of Rimini, 1934, took courage to serve naturalistic ideals' pp. 40-43; Crirical lVrirings L pp. I 96:197. 86 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER MOTHER ART 87

Cento marble cerving, or the complete and final revelation, the cervers who in their exuberance conrrived for them the import spectaculer trensletion of time into space implicit in Quattro of momentous emblems. Marine decoration of every kind is Cento limestone architecture. abundant in Quattro Cento art: dolphins, sea-monsters, as well The forms of life that are concreted into limestone, though as the fruits of the earth and the children of men, encrusr rhe apparent enough in many structures and in fossils, were never stone or grow there. The metamorphosed srructure of marble understood as such. Yet by some Pert of the mind their history was apprehended, and thus served to inspire humanistic art. A deeper love of stone than any that obtained in other periods, alone will explain those basic aspecrs of the Renaissance that are Mediterranean here termed Quattro Cento. And what is true of the Quattro arr as a whole. so we must contemplate the entire Cento is true in some degree of Mediterrenean art as a whole. Mediterranean basin in order to interpret the euattro I do not mean to suggest, however, that these obscure feelings cento achievement. The sea and the limestonè dominat. thor. would have made themselves felt so strongly excePt that some lands. The supply of fresh \Marer springs from that stone. On limestones not only have direct aesthetic appeal but also practi- our return from a visit to the south, we remember the lime- for building and sculptural purposes. As is usual stone well-heads and the limestone fountains. cal advantages \we in what concerns the imagination, different fantasies, connected begin readily ro conceive the bond of classical build- ing and limestone. with the same object, go hand in hand, enhance one enother's No other architecrural forms Áemind one so much of the horizontal power. Any great love has many roots, many PercePtions. bedding of srones. The jutting cornice, the architrave So let us consider the gen sis of limestone. Lime' in the mouldings, the plinths and blockr, h"rr..-" definite relation joints first place, is set free by the decomposition of igneous rocks ro the of stones as seen in quarry or criff; and particularly which make up 95 per cent of the earths crust' They contain to limestone, medium between the organic and the inorganic worlds. on an everage, it is reckoned, about five per cent of lime. This lime is carried in solution by rivers to the sea. Except A Greek temple is an ideal quarry reconsrrucred on the hill. under special circumstances it is not then deposited, since the amount of carbon dioxide in sea-water keeps the calcium Myth, stone, and water iu carbonate in solution: it is, however, extracted from the water and plants. The deposits of their remains are by animals T imestone is rhe very marerial of classical archirecrure. into limestone. Limestone is petrified organism' cemented I The Greek temple of limestone or marble is an organiza_ see hundreds of shell fossils on the surfaces of some \¯e may I--ltion, not only of the Greek rock, but of the soil Ãd the fossils rare. The skeletons of coral blocks. Nor are the animal spring ducts and all the fruit that ensues, all the care and labour so the crinoid, a kind of starfish. These are common, too of they have demanded. This immediate kind of building, the continually in the quarries; fossils were, and are, encountered distinct mass of column and column and roof, this ordiñation and science may have and however falsely ancient philosophy of shape and void light and shade, is the order, composed for a more direct way deep explained them, art, which employs in classical man, of his space and of his light, and of his å1.-..rrr, unconscious "knowledge", magnified the truth. Shells were Cento symbol. They have a long history in classi- "The a Quattro iv FÁom Medite'aÁean', Stones of Rimini, 1934, pp. 94_97; Critical cal architecture and sculpture. But it was the Quattro Cento Vritings I, pp. 223-224. 88 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER MOTHER ART 89 all of which have their connecrion with the limestone. The the one I find most profound. In Baroque and Rococo, and, temple is not white ageinst the sky, but golden, a solid tawni- indeed, in most developments of the use of classical forms ,r.ss th"t suggests the strongest concretion of the process by in southern climates, the alliance between srone and water is which the gÇ olive leaf took nurture and dye from the lime- more definitely and dramatically, if more superficiallÁ stated. srone earrh. classical architecture is limestone architecture. classical architecture, in the widest sense of the expression, is The most fanciful, the most poetic and the most obvious the stone architecture par excellence, for just this ,n.ry .."ro.r, connection of limestone with the elements is with water' since stone that wants for an imaginative connection with water Homer speaks of "caverned Lacedaemon". Caves and grot- loses much of its significance. The warer conrenr, of course, toes, lost and disappearing springs, and the sudden meadows was only gradually brought our and srressed and even isolated dependent upon their reapPearance, perPetual rivulets-upon in such exrravagance as the Baroque fountain and grotto. The mountain summits, fresh waters that aPPear from the depths link here is the use to which the Romans put travertine. of the sea, in fact every kind of warer freak and water beauty In the original classic forms, in Doric architecture, .water ordaining the fantastic range and liquid poetry of classical contenr is immanenr, unspoken: it helps the clearness of those .h"r".teristic of a limestone relief. In summer, fresh forms to suit both Medirerrenean sea and sky myths, "i. and land. The *år., was indeed precious. \¯ater always needed care' The temple was not merely a structure but a limestone structure rapid run-off from the mountains saved the Greeks from the that people passed or enrered. Behind it, historicallÁ was the aúysm"l mythology of great rivers, of slow rivers and their regu- channel for flowing \Merer and then the small rain-shrines that l"i s"','age.y. In popular myth, the mountain streams that the made their warer srill and clear and hard and potable. ,nn d.riroyed so early, were the children of Niobe slain by the Greek art and Greek life reveal the original classic attitude. darts of Apollo. Fresh warer was dramatic, a swift visitor, often Protestation comes later. There in the south, in space, archi_ subterranean in his entrances and exits, even submarine. \¯ater tecture has always been the parent art; and consequently far was precious and clear, to be gathered, to be worshipped' So beyond the south, architecture in any grand s.rrse,-".rd storr. the limestone shrine mirrors the deep pool or forms the peren- structure' have been synonymous. This begets a tangle for us in 'sl'hat nial fountain. grearer beauty than the stone instrument the north, one of the many tangles we inherit from the intru- of space ser about the clear pool, or dripping with the fountain, sion of Medirerranean values. For the use of stone in the south *h"t -or. solid thing for warer, for its clearness, its liquidiry was by no means dictated merely by its superior permanence, than marble? as it tends to have been in the north. The ideas of marble and water are closely mingled in our Some wrirers claim to prove that the Doric was originally a minds. This connecrion not only reflects the influence of wood archirecture. But it is an enrire mistake to view the Doric Venice, or of stone fountains galore, of grottoes and Baroque limestone templ a more perme- and Rococo garden plaÁ of Roman aqueducts and wells and nenr and costly od is, and was, ancienr baths: it is áeeper, it reflects the whole vast field of often limited in st Greek states Mediterranean building and Mediterranean influence in every had difficulty in procuring suitable wood to build their ships. counrry of the eafrh. And what beautiful things water does They traded for wood. Srone, on the otheÁ hand, lim.storre, ,ias to stone, just as stone to water; what varieties are possible to the stuff of many districts. \¯hatever the origin of the Doric, it their combination. I write of them throughout these volumes. soon became a limestone expression, in some sense proclaim_ Quattro Cento art is only one espect of that preoccuPation' ing the prevalence of this srone; so that *. ."rr.roi imagine ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER 90 MOTHER ART 91

usage any profaîation by wood within or \Mithout the temple. Again, has somerimes added an aesthetic meaning that corre- sponds "in Iimestone is warm, takes the light: it is the immediate object, the to no conscious aesthetic aim. But it is Italy and touchable mass object symbolizing the passage of the southern other Mediterranean counrries rhat we take rear .o,rr"g. fro- day: andwater closely sips the marble' such evidence of solid or objectified feelings, quite apait from Refracted light through clear water throws marble into waves, the fact that these are the counrries of mãrblå, of w.ll-heads Hence the poignancy and fountains, tempers it with many dimensional depths. of assignation or lounging beneath arcades and marble arm dragged porticoes, of submerged temples, or of an Aphrodite's of huge stone palaces and massive cornices where pebbles by the nets of Cnidian pigeons -over the clear and elongating rramp their red feet. l¯e are prepared to enjoy stone in fishermen. the south. FoÁ as we come to thè såuthern llght'of the Mediterranean, \ /e enter regions of coherence settred forms._ The piecemeal "rd."of The flux of feelings obiectified' of orri lirr., now offers some mass, rhe many heads of discontenr ere less devious in their looks. \ü/hen we stand in the piazzas of southern ro\Ár'ns, it is as write of stone. I write of Italy where stone is habitual. if a band had T struck up; for when grouped at home about n,r.ry Venetian generation handles the Istrian stone of our narive band_ I stand we have noticed the feeble public I *hi.h Venice is made. Venetian sculpture proceeds park to attain a cerrain definireness' similarlyr. prepared in the now) not by chisei and hammer, but under the hands, the 1.. southern light to admire the evidence of lralia'fivìng concÁeted each inhabitant and of a few and ob;eåified feet, under the very breath of in stone. cats, dogs and vermin. See the knobs uPon the Ponte della But exhilaration gained from stone is a vastry Paglia, how fine their polish, how constantly renewed is their different encouragement from the one that music m"y hand-finish. affoid. It is an opposite encoulagement. Or rather it is something Hand-finish is the most vivid testimony of sculpture. People more than the bestowal of a rempo on rhings. For tempo, touch things according to their shape. A single shape is made the"life_process itself, attains concrereness as srone. In vènice magnificent by perennial touching. For the hand explores, all the rårld rs stone. There, in srone, to which each changing lighr unconsciously to reveal, to magnifit an existent form' Perfect is gloss, the human process shines clear and quasi-permanent. sculpture needs your hand to communicate some pulse and There, the lives of generations have made .*t.riors, acceptable wermth, to reveal subtleties unnoticed by the eye, needs your between sky and waret marbles inhabited them. Used, carved stone, exposed to the by emotion, feelings rurned hand to enhance to marble. shape in spatial, immediate, \Meather, re cords on its concrete \¯ithout a visit to^Venice you may hardly envisage stone simultaneous form, not only the winding Passages of days and as so capable to hold firm the flux of feelings. nights, the opening and shutting skies of warmth and wet, but Stone rã,rlpt,rr. apaêt, stone is more often conceived also the sensitiveness, the vitality even, thet each successive in the north as simply rock-like. And who will love the homogeneous touching has communicated. This is not peculiar to Venice nor marble ,håt, in the halls of Lyons' corner to ltaly. Almost everl'where man has recorded his feelings in Houses? No.-hands will attempt to evoke from them a gradual life. shape of some piece, almost everywhere FoÁ nowhere upo., rh.- ii th. stone. To the designed human impress. Few hands have touched them, or an instru_ ment held in the hand. They v From "Stone and water", Stones of Rimini, 1934, pp. 15-20; Critica were sliced from their blocks by impervious Writings I, pp.183-185 machines. They have been shifted and hauled rike 92 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER MOTHER ART 93 so meny girders. They are illumined in their hues beneath the That a stone face representing Vice or toothache should be light; yet they are adamant. an assistance in navigation, rhat misery should be exemplified as in writing now of venice, I have nor in mind venetian sculp- solid, attaining beauty in completeness, lends to all phenomena, rure nor marble palaces reflecting the waters berween them. even the least welcome, an almost positive zest. And see how I refer ro rhe less signal yer vasr ourlay there of the salt-white these stones make permanenr drama of the sþt shifting materi- Istrian srone, every bit of it used; to bridge-banisters and fonda- als! Istrian marble blackens in the shade, is snow or salrwhite menra-posrs made smoorh and electric by swift or groping hands where exposed to rhe sun. Light and shade are thus recorded, by the sudden sprawls of children; to greet lintels seared absúaced, intensified, solidified. Matter is dramatized in srone, -iike"nd eaten wood above srorehouse doorways on the Giudecca; huge stonework palaces rebutting rhe warers. ro the gleaming stanchion on the quay in front of the salute, No: it is the sea that rhus stands petrified, sharp and conrinu- ,r"n.hion whose squat cylindrical form is made all the more ous till up near the sþ. For this Istrian srone seems compact of " trenchant by the deep spiral grool/e carved by the repeated pull salt's bright yet shaggy crystals. Air eats inro ir, the brightness of ropes; to vester stanchions on the Zattere,lying as long and remains. Amid the sea Venice is built from the essence of the white and muffled as polar bears . . . Stone enshrines all usage sea. Over the Adriatic, mounred upon churches and palaces, a and all fantasies. They are given height, width, and breadth, thousand starues posrure, distilled agleam from the whirls and solidity. Life in Venice is ourward, enshrined in gleaming white liquid tresses of the Adriatic over which they are presiding. They Istrian. Each shrine is actualiry beneath the exploring hand, is stand white against the sþ one with a banner, anorher with a steadfast to the eye. Such perpetuation, such instantaneous and broken column in her hands. gives the Yet this whiteness as solid showing of a long-gathered momentum, .courage of salt is not dazzling. On the contrery, to creare in art as in life. For living is externalization, throwing though here the sea is petrified, it still is ruffled or is cur into an inner ferment ourward into definite act and thought. visual successive cylinders and pillars. Istrian stone has always been arr is rhe clearest mirror of this aim. The paintert fantasies hammered. It is a convenrion of irs use which probably arose in become material, become cenvas and paint. Stone the solid, yet the construction of bridges and warer stairs. For this hammer- the habitat of soft light like the glow of flesh, is the material, so I ing, which makes the smallest surface a microcosm of the larger shall maintain, that inspires all the visual arts. Marble statues of growths in light and shade, prevenrs the stone from being slip- the gods are rhe gods themselves. For they are objects as if alive pery. So, we are reminded of the subsrances that batten on slip- which enjoy complete outwardness' pery rocks and roughen rhem, shells with crusted grooves, or In Venice, even pain has its god-like comPass. Masks of tooth- hard sponges. Vhen such thoughrs are uppermosr, Isüian srone itself Venice ache , masks of sufFering, snow-white, incorrigible, overhanging herself; is an incrusrarion. dark waters, these great stone heads line the base of the palazzo Or again at night, Istrian is lace. The Baroque fronts are like pesaro on the side canal. The gondolier who entefs from the giant fretworks that stiffen the brighter srers. Lace, in fact, has Grand. canal will need ro use the masks to correct his black boat. always been an industry in Venice, though more particularly at He thus polishes one or rwo heads, damps the swolle^n cheek of Chioggia where they have woven it large and coarse. anorher, strikes a hollow roaring mouth. The cries from canal Again if in fantasy rhe srones of Venice appear as the waves' and from calli, new noises that are caught to the clammÁ still petrification, rhen Venetian glass, compost of Venetian sand and livid recesses of the srone, released old and thin and ominous as wate! expresses the taut curvature of the cold under-sea, the echo, are as sustenance to these perennial faces ' ' ' slow, oppressed yet brittle curves of dimly rranslucenr warer. 94 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER MOTHER ART 95

ui been Accu m u I ated sea-ch a n ge extracted from the dark places of warer which therefore now appeer lighter. Similarly, the gondolier's rhythmic stroke sums in an orderly succession the crowded flood upon which he T Teniceitself, as we think of it today, was a creation of the works. \ / n e. And it was at the time of the Renaissance ""ot"t t.. l Y and after, that the liston, the thin oblong of the most The richness, rhe salt, the hardness of the warer white Istrian stone, was set as an inlay everywhere, marking has caked into gleaming and hammered srones, particularly on rough days when the Giudecca's sea-green canal is tipped with foam. The past in Venice seems to be the period taken for crystallization: the store of Venetian history is encased by an image of an accumu- lated sea-change. So deeply laid are the imaginative foundations that architectural apertures aloft, appear ofVenice, to such an exrenr has stone abrogated the meaning of less as projection at the mouths of caves soil in our minds, that decaÁ as we have seen, takes the form of raised ,borr. th. onlY from the sea but metamorphosis, and even of renewal.

Venice is a potent symbol of the mother. As we ride the canals we move within her circulation. A_ll we have said of Venetian architecture reflects the same symbolism. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that it worked, that is, the oligarchical Venetian government: worked with more public spirit than did any other foundations are visible, all that is raised above the piles; but these large political organization of those cenruries; and lasted longer. projections, like the roots of trees' suggest a rising sap and strong History gives few comparisons with the internal uniry of Venice. grip captured for growth. Elsewhere political sagaciry has not combated destiny with such t...1 success: no other statesmen haye seen so far ahead: and by means In venice as a whole, tone so easily acquires these values of the supreme realism of correct prognostication. Imperial ascribed to colour. Thus blackness, as well as whiteness, obtains Venice perpetuated herself, artificially as ir were, for some rwo a meaning over and above its tone value, more esPecially that hundred years after her expected death. value fundamental to profound colour relationship, identity- Such artificialiry in astonishing uniry with such realism is in-difference. The gondoliert seaworthy serpent, we have seen, the measure of all Italian civilization, but more particularly in is black between warer and sþ: but rather than as a silhouette Venice where nature in exotic form conspires with good sense. whose character is to stand our, and the character of whose back- Ceaselessly rhe warers must be carved for carrying things, cease- lessly the lagoons must be marked and dredged. The i-r.r.r,r. toil of water porrage is vividly yet slowly contemplated. The ruling classes, however luxurious, could at no time isolate rhem- selves from communal life. Their palaces could not be aparr or carriages rr' pp' ar the door. They took ship or walked with others in F-^ VrrÁr* An Aspect of Art, 1945, PP' 1-1 l; Critical Writings u-, the midst sea. 88-96. of the Here narure conspires also with beaury. 96 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER MOTHER ART 97

Even ostentation here, even flamboyant intricate adornment, are them. Marinetti considered all the beauty of Italy an obstacle often no less effective, no less utilitarian than a racing motor-car. to his harsh idealization of the machine by which alone he felt Thus, no other kind of craft but the gondola, and so, none less enveloped in the unlimited way he demanded. \We beautiful, could navigate as well the narrow canals' will agree that the work of art is a consrrucrion. Inasmuch t..l as man both physically and psychologically is a srrucrure care- Sometime before this general magnification in stone, on fully amassed, a coalescence and e pamern, a balance imposed anorher shoal of the lagoon, ar Murano, sand and water began upon opposite drives, building is likely to be not only the most ro perrii/ er rhe hands of the thrifry Venetians. Aparl from glass common but the mosr general symbol of our living and breath- utensils and ornaments, ar venice, probably for the first time in ing: the house, besides, is the home and the symbol of the Europe, glass was used as window-panes. The very translucence Mother: it is our upright bodies built cell by cell: a ledge is the of *"t.r was fixed to palaces affronting the sea' foot, the knee and the brow. \¯hile we project our own being on to all things, the works of man, particularly houses o, of ".ry the shelters he inhabits, reflect ourselves more The feel of our structtlre'" directly rhan will inorganic material that has not been cultivated thus. of course buildings and the engineering involved, roads, bridges, and rhe ppreciation is a mode of recognition: we recogni'e but rest, are so common as to be a part of a ceaseless environment. we cennot name, we cennot recall by an effort of will: The ordered stone or brick encloses and defines: whether we contents that reach us in the terms of aesthetic form will it or nor, the eye explores these surfaces as if compelled to have the "feel" of a dream that is otherwise forgotten. This consult an oracle, rhe oracle of spatial relationships and of the ,,feel,' roo may be lost until it is recalled by an action in the texture that they serve. Hurr, hindered, and inspired by wall sûeet by some concatenation of movement or of substances: and ledge, the graphic artist has bestowed upon flat surfaces an in just ahi, *"y much modern art offers us the "feel" of our expressiveness of space, volume, and texture equivalent to the own stfucture, sometimes overriding the communication of impact, at the very least, of phantasies, events, moods. particular feelings, Painting Architecture has provided the original terms of this language subject-matter equivalent to - that can rarely be put into words, rhough words may sometimes be in terms of an image of the w fo-und for the simple employment of the "language" by building happiest when surrounded bY when taken in conjunction with the natural scene. For instence, p.åuia.a en assumprion (a living sryle) that made it unneces- in the fascination of gazingalong a dark passage into the outside sary to reconstruct ab initio for every work the rudiments of light that invades an enrrance, in a subjec nor uncommon for th. body and of the psyche. Titian was adorning, not cê.eat- seventeenrh-century Dutch painters, we may become aware that ing, the stone Veni.á Rembrandt the new Amsterdam. "nd we contemplate under an image of dark, calm enclosure and of Ar".hit..t.rre in the wesr has been the prime embodiment not seeping light, the rraumatic struggles thar accompany our enrry only of art but of culture. There are left, of course, meny beau- and our exit' in birth and death. To look along the walls of a cave tiful places, many ordinary houses that are setisi/ing' Particu- into the blinding enrry would be to experience a more dramatic larly ìn the south; but it is not our ruling culture that creates symbol excepr for rhe consideration that a thousand threads of conscious life bring no\M ro the passage and to the pro*'rn. t"tury and necessity-of-painting", Three,lsl¿1s^on the Painting house, ro rhe 'i-itjoïrn*i, r96r, pþ. 6-8; CriricallX/r;ttng lII, pp' 149-50' constricted brick or srone, an appropriare associarion. Seeing that 98 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER the projection of phantasy on to all the phenomena of Nature CHAPTER FIVE i, ceàseÍess, I would not deny that the "language" of form must

Close looking

they are treated as rhe emblems both of ordered beaury and of a psychological tenor, in general as the presiding example of the cónversion of phantasy into substance and for bestowing uPon phantasy an autonomous and enduring body'

Piero's perspective: art and scienceÁ

iero [della Francesca] achieved equation berween rrue science and a majestic raprure from the earth. \¯e sense P geometry and number expressing the amplitude of love: we witness an untorn naturalism: a universal myth that is apart. Love and the love of perspective were one, rhe p.rrp..ìi,ø., for instance, of tilted circular shapes expressed wilh tée slow piety of very exac drawing. Yes, piery but more than piery far more than the Gothic bent for rhe encrusred curve of a gold nimbus, inspired the correspondence that is broad and temper- ìwe ate between his volumes. have from him the widest vistas and therein the equal simultaneous consrency of things; a still- ness that is not archaic, a fullness without boast, a maisive selÊ .'.ery conrenrment in the srreem of adult life. But he delighted also to show the virtuositÁ as ir were, of his rooted shapes in his fondness of temporary srrucrures or of any such ,o "ppãr"r.r, whose related forms he could, like the dying sun on-an aurumn

i From Art and Science, 1949; CriticalWritings il, pp. 195-19g READER 1OO ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES CLOSE LOOKING 101 day, unexpectedly aftribure a durable and selfsufficient sense. If there is an emphasis it is upon the homogeneiry of Similarly his men, even on the battlefield, in virtue of volume, of space ignored by the medieval mind, an emphasis previously affinities between volumes and their intervals, vibrant, earthlÁ unknown to painting. Though a fraternal relaiionship berween engrossed, possess the flux and the chance. Pierot science serves objects appeared in archaic and decorarive arr, thè timeless boih to distinguish exacdy each particular and to embrace it' unity of their space which could have permitted a wider diver- Agitation borrows the broad erc of calm. The geometry is at gence of family traits and a less summ ary organizetion, was peace with a deep-rooted organic structure, product of chro- neither comprehended nor desired. All the ,"-., in the inter- matic sense. Francescan forms are brothers and sisters at ease ests of that simultaneitÁ Piero, as did cézanne whose sense of within the ancestral hall of space. colour was equally dominant in his sense of form, preserved There are, then, three starting points for the critique of the two-dimensional characrer of the picture-space - a cerrain Piero's painting. First, the Potential coincidence of science and archaic flarness, then, of forms - in conjunctiãn with a grear art in th. ."tly Renaissance, founded on the new victories of depth and a great volume. perspective. SecondlÁ his sense of colour as the basis of his Piero suffered no contrast between man, his circumstance r"rrè of form. Although connections are meny between these and his heavy body. The Francescan elders are semiric for the two approaches, only the first has a literature. To the detri- most parr, hirsute, watchful, but it is as if their low raucous ment ;f art-criticism, form is rarely envisaged from the end of fire, subject to the architectural involucre of outwardness, colour. The two roads prove to be but branches of the third, cohered like a squared clod; as if the abysmal contradictions the quality of love by which Piero's bare geometry is seen by us of the spirit were rransmured into rhe densiry and demarcation *"r- and rich as well as noble; a nakedness of love, numbers of a heai,y rurve. A rransmurarion, we feel (though not to the ", that in bareness may thereby be clothed with magnificence as effect of those symbols that are so easily won in dJcorative a*), may the study-object of anatomist and physiologist, shared a transmutation into the simultaneity of space. Space, to a less also by poets and by every human being. degree the perennial subject of all painting, *"r piero's rigid Pierot forms are familiars, we have said. No form accepts concept: whereas conceptual art substitutes a convention for sacrifice to the emphasis of another. Distributed by perspec- mathematical space. tive they converse through sPatiel simultaneitÁ through their affinities that search it out. The postures of these forms When we remember Ìris paintings we first think, perhaps, acknowled.ge the same sublime homeliness. Angels and of broad calm heads, of an oaken calm, of head-dresse, å¿ gestures of a blameless princes -"k. th.mselves known with the slow trees; of entablature, of foliage, linked as if by ."1- p."r".rtry. Noble science gives more than the framework' hands: of tufted ground and feet in profili on a marble floor, gives undying accent to the straight mysterious growing of of open surfaces that bloom from open surfaces, spheres rhat ih. .o.r.r,rysiãe. Perspective separates, colour and form bring respond to cylinders, fibrous hair to non-deciduous rrees. rogerher in family circle the crupper on a horse and the shoul- No other painteÁ excepr Giorgione and Cézanne, rransposed dei of a hill, the fluting of columns and the hanging folds of as completely his love of life into rhe terms of space. other, a dress. To our eyes a slow majesty as of white oxen uPon the and usually predominant values of visual ,r:.Ë as rhythm, "rr, white ribbon of a road between the terre-verte hills, belongs contrast, stress, movement, arabesque, are common to all the ro rhe valley of the upper Tiber where Borgo San Sepolcro lies, arts however differing their sensation in each. The grear poer Piero's to\ /'n. Botticelli, for instance, to orrr exploring tactile ,.rrr. .rpor., CLOSE LOOKING 103 102 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER

the wood is held visions, sometimes restless. The transposition lacks the final- berween rwo tousled rrees, rhe link, it has been suggested, between the Old and New iry or any rate the immediacy, of space' Compared with Piero' Testaments, berween the many words that thus unstealthily would Bãtticelli is as sea ro land. One might say of all, or nearly all, the fructif'. If clothes are somerimes bark, hair pictures in the National Gallery: compared with the Pieros they is breathing foliage. Man, measure of the universe, on ceremonial occasions manifests are as sea to land. the worldt geometry. Hence \¯e are bound to attribute to Piero a deep contentment' The the towering volumes et Arezzo of the hats. But considerarion pure loggias and halls are nor embellishments of princely life, but of form, in the case of such lyri- cal .rrÏirg.-.rrts of an Italianate street, innocent of genre' His archi- genius as possessed both Piero and Cézanne, men of roots and strong sensuous tectuäl backgrounds possess grear beaury; but it is less likely we feeling, leads to no short cut, no summary artifact. Their geomerry exhibited shall recall piãro when looking at St Paul's, or even San Lorenzo, the condensarion of their far- reaching rhan at the sight of a black-timbered farm building in the sun, love. (since has As is so often the case, Piero's a sublime demonsrrarion of architectural meaning he theorerical writings mislead in the marret for he wrore caused us to see it thus in element), with open doors and windows only of values responsive to rule, scientific rule. revealing e greater and more simple darkness' Outside' the sun' to These values, however, were in divine conjunction with his sense inside darkness beyond the edges of neutral-toned of the warmth between parent and ""g.ã.ror^ The thought occurs of the square mttzzle of a cow offspring, between polychrome pavement and shod feet that "p.r,rrr.r. create the spaces thereon, between As well as his shelds, Pierot magnificent buildings are stalls of grooved entablature and the creases in a band that rounds the greatest contentment. Their shelter is dignified, complacent' the head, between arm and peeled tree-trunk, horse and like'the gesrure of the virgin in the Monterchi fresco, point- cloud, a small rich pendant and the wide spreading ing to h.i pr.g.t"r,r rto-".h. There is sufficiency and amplitude of lake and low hills, between a circular dark-toned hat and a porphyry bo"th within a=nd without the womb. Hills lie with heads, foli- disk, between har, hand and faces' battlement. Connection is always architectural age with thorny hair, massive mouths on calm rounded in the sense of a division of an order: fh.r. remains e srrong ligament between light and dark, the mailed apple of a closed vizor and "l*"y, the rounded face of a trumpeter berween what is spread and bark-like folds, between the rounded with his length of thin tube extending from his lips; the and the pointed. Each interval constructs an exPressive-pattern' ring of a skull-cap and the spring of an arch; the darkness In the ,iillrr.rr, apprehended at one glance, there is fire' The of an aperrure circled with stone and the dark centres of eyes flanked men and women à? bo,rin. lips and bovine eyes are gripped to with their whites; the consum- mation expressed an emperor's their ourward showing like treès in broad leaf. Above them stand in conical hat surrounded by heads of coiled, pleated hair against the self-confident treei, circular, pyramidal, of thick foliage, nut, a background of arches and circular disks; the spiral grooves acorn, chestnut-bearing. of ears and the straight grooves of a transparenr covering \¯e may attribute a ionscious application of such oaken char- that falls from the head; the winding river with light paths and white belts acrer ro the spatial settlement. Indeed, the Arezzo frescoes depict or curving ourer hems extended fingers the story of ih. Tiue Cross, grown from a branch of the tree of and the feathered points of an heral- dic eagle; the horses' hooves Good B,,,il planted with Adam in his grave to sprout from of opposing armies like wide- "nd observe bottomed chessmen on the board; the acanthi him as did his cirestn,rt-h"ired children. Further on, we of a Corinthian capital and the fearures this stubborn wood in a bridge and in a grained cross against and fingers of the Virgin, the beads and structure of her vestmenrs; the dark the sþ. At the last episode, rhe rerurn of the cross to Jerusalem, head of a cross-bearer 104 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER CLOSE LOOKING 105

ii againsr the sharp walnut-shaped centre of the grain and the Gi o rg i on e: catastroph i c ch a n g e ,i"bb.d clouds bãyond; in a crowd, head growing from head' neck or a white hem disappearing bad pictures are equivocal in their is half a mouth against a I tf ^ny subject. It against the whité of an eye; the mounting risen Christ and a I \ / I unlikelv that their painters for the most part have därk knoll in the dawn light; the hill-protuberances beyond J. Y I r..n oí .rr..r heard of the Tempesta; yer rhey are Battista sforza's ivory face and the diaphanous hills beyond among the mindless emularors of this unrivalled masrerpiece. her husband's warted cheek . . . The catalogue is mechanical, The feeling of suspense belonging to the Tempesta..r.or.rrrg., eesthetic since the connections are not single but profuse, ramifring in contemplation in him who sees it. stillness. Piero's colour exploits the affinity to which we have - Dramatic though it be, the background does not ser a srage. referred in terms of shape and tone. Indeed, the figures do little. They are well to the front of the All art exhibits connection, a bringing together. In visual art landscape, encased in separate thought. It is the scenery which alone, and then solely in visual art deeply founded upon this enects the scene. But this is not a landscape with figures: the figures colour-cum-architectural sense of form, an aesthetic communi- are insisrent. Nevertheless, we havent any ideaiho they are or why cation may be explicit and immediate to the point of rebutting they are there. They do not belong to rhe landscape in the after-thought. It is the réaliser of Cézanne. Such demonstration sense of shepherds, owners or husbandmen. They belong in of intelleci and feeling was rhe crown of the Quattro Cento the sense of human beings belonging to the world. That is nót a personal, but compulsion to make manifest. Thereafter the same chromatic an almost universal, impression. It follows that the ,.rrr. of form to some degree persisted in post-Renaissance Tèmpesta is one of the mosr exrraordinary of man's crearions. The relationship between figures art refurbished., if we consider painting onlÁ by Vermeer' for and landscape is revelatory; rhough neither landscape nor instance, by Chardin, re-enacted by Cézanne' Yet there has not figures are simplified into a concepr. Giorgione's picrures, relaxed been, and still there is lacking, a generalized apprehension of both in subject and in tr."t-..rt, are the opposite ro hieratic. this side of visual art, eminent not only in painting but also Above the landscape in drawing, in sculpture and more particularly, in architecture to which the figures have their backs there is lightning, day and night whose ,r.i'df"r, forms and rexrures (not colours) have so often near to each other, before heary blue clouds taut sunlight that illumines endowed that sensibiliry with archetypes' the sides of buildings as for some memorable occasion. Piero reveals the family of things' His art does not suggest a The new Renaissance buirdìngs of Venice stand with the old, leaning from the house of the mind' He shows, on the contrary' with the signs of war and ancient feud. Immediately behind the th. becalmed, exemplified in the guise of the separateness figures rhere are fragments of rwo -ird small columns on a brick plinth; the cylinder and of ord.ered ourer rhings; he shows mans life as the outward state the cube, the bare bones of the new Venice. to which all activitY asPires. The two figures commune The family of things. It is as if the poetry of de_ep affinities only in the profoundest sense as despite the new-won naturalism of their delineation. were identi."l *i,h those objects and with their formulae; A süeam divides them. They do not look at each other. The if deaths calm separation lent nobiliry to the pressure of each man looks past the women who looks our ro the spectator, glancing heart-beat. slightly down. She sits higher than the man who is stanãing, There can be no art without something, however minute, of .o.rfiã.rrt, becauseArt, mirror of each aim, conspires to win for From "Gioreione's this qualiry; ii Ti:mpesta", Wnice:"--' An'"'r-- Aspect of ArL 1945. pp. 52_61: CriricallVriririgs expression the finaliry of death. ll, pp. I il-ll+. 106 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER CLOSE LOOKING 1O7 romanric, et ease. Though their positions would be uncomfort- There has never been an art less mannered, at the same time less able for any length of time (the womans pose, indeed, is an formalized. Accent was superfluous. The Tèmpesta is dramatic in almost impossibie one), they suggest an enduring strength, e the want of tension, it is lyrical, supremely lyrical by this lack of srrengrh oi yorrth and a bond beween them that will endure, tension, by what the Italians call ozio or ease. Tension of some they are more abiding than the sort has otherwise always existed in art; and art will need ;,rst Is they are more complete, it again fr"g-.r,,"ry building of the middle distance' The woman suck- immediately. For all other times an art without some tightness in les"the infant. The landscape in which they appear unruffled, organization, or even some looseness as the tightening bond, has even the impending thunderstorm, afe in one sense subservient not been art at all. Since Giorgione's rime, \Mestern art is often to this firm-on-the-ground human vitaliry. verticals of the trees skirting an abyss. incline slightly to the right, verticals of the buildings slightly to Once at least, rhen, a lack of tension was affirmative. The the left. The landscape is no decor, but the figures are at home thunderstorm brews in rhe background, yer throughout the here: it belongs to their substance. There are many affinities picture there is an equal and total insisrence. Action of the land- and approximations expressed between them, an organization, scape balances suspense ofthe figures, a balance to the effect of utter a philàsophy, a romanricism which have ensued primarily from pariry in their diversiry dependent as well, therefore, upon ,..r,.^.olour sense. And it is, in part, Giorgione's jewel- reversed links; for insrance , suspense from the flash of lightning like"r colour that determines the organization in a menner too (we await the thunder and the storm) and action by one of complicated for exposition at this point. chromatic conception the figures in the very recenr past. The woman has obviously of this kind may be broadly apprehended apart from its colour, bathed in the srream and is nor yer altogether dry. She suckles from a photograph. the infant, an acrion of primal importance, for the mother as for O".;"dg.i the vertical by imagining a line down the centre the onlookeÁ inducing a sense of calm and selÊsufficiency. of the -"n', .r.., yet turned body, that in itself is extraordinary. A painting with a dominant "effecr" is jazz to this symphony. It is the architecture that inclines ro receive the dazzling white Both figures and landscape afford superabundant images of their light and it is the üees rhar incline before the air which goes interpenetrarion, and indeed identification, withour any sacri- \X/ithout as'yer softly to meet the thundercloud. central posi- fice of their contrasting "normal" character. tion in the picture, without looking beyond any tree, here is the It is time ro ask: what were the conditions of this unique art mesrer of his fate. on the other hand, it is significent that the for this ease or ozio that art has nrely enjoyed before or since, title of the picture is The Tþrnpest. succeeding generations heve never to the same degree? not found b.,r.t title. Yet, although there are counter-balances, The first consideration is of lyricism expressing interchange. " in one sense rhe calm of the figures outweighs the value of the Giorgionet man belongs to the landscape, not in the sense of one impending storm. They are Present' future and past, whereas of Hardy's peesanrs: on the contrary, in the sense of being the storm is momentary. They are these things without pride at home in the world. Confronted by the rigours of life, by the opiate of place in the picture, without the guise of gods or symbols' of of thousands of years of religion accumulared to make pri-i,irr. forces, or even of sempiternal peasants' They are young life bearable, how came ir that in the Renaissance "being ar home and buoyant people, without strain, without straining, harmoni- in the world" \Mes not but a one-sided commotion, noi an ous. Thåy thã classical gods in even more human yet lyrical affirmation merely of youth or pleasure or defiance? An answer "rá form. Gíorgione had no axe to grind: but he was foremost of must be deferred. First, we must consider what is meanr above "interchange". originators ì., He broke down all the systems of insulation. by No less than the soul of poerry and, indeed, "r,. STOKES READER 108 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN CLOSE LOOKING 109 of all art; since the poetic is the essence of art' Often more they really are" and when the hush of rhis revelation induces succinctly than a "direct" statement, encompassing a vest range of meaning which otherwise would be incommunicable, Poetry expresses something largely in terms of something else, owing to the association of images, of sounds and rhythms. Poetic synthesis, characteristic of all art, is a multum in parvo, a trick invented under the intensiry of the stimulus. Any metaphor is an interchange of meaning. 'W'e have seen â principle of interchange inspiring Quattro Cento architecture; we have seen that Venice herself inspires a lively sense of poetrÁ metamorphosis, of interchange, of inner in terms of outer. Giorgione's art, in turn, synthesizes the images learned at Venice. Nature, building, man, the Tempesta, shows all three impartially. Nature is more especially expressed by the sþ, at its largest in Venice. From the Venetian air itself rether than the foliage we discern the seasons. ofthe cycles esses added poignancy Leonello Venturi has remarked that Giorgione ascribed to the beneath the Tempesta landscape a drama of the sþ that is common in Venice. whore ordo ilffi Ï,f:gdi,T"i; At sunset the sþ in the \Mest is sometimes clear while banked-up cloud of a threatening blue holds the east. Houses looking west are perfectly lit, utterly revealed from the side by the sinking sun. Night strides on from the east. Giorgione has added the lightning, the impending storm. He has shown the utmost drama of the soul as laid-out neglected features. He,nce the diviniry of the ease of his spiritual things. But it is poetrÁ calm poetrÁ not melodrama. He dreamt disclosure, hence, by_ the lack of any stylization, the full .mploy_ of the soul revealed, without stiffness or contortion, in the slow ment of a sense of affinities that has not been equalled. and durable forms of space, of relations between forms es the long contact of familiar minds, changing with the ebb and flow \¯ithout resorr of later painters to a uniform flourish from of light yet constant in their local colour. The two figures are the brush, evenness co-exisrs with the broad changes of tone not in e trance: they are amiable and serene, yet like the other which Giorgione, and Leonardo, were the first ,o ir.. Unlike Giorgione figures, instruments of evocation. Their thoughts Leonardo or eny other painter excepr chardin before the French meet, their minds meet, not their eyes. There is a pause in ol, afrer choosing a kind of light for living: there is an interchange between past, future and the pres- to local colouÁ Giorgione harnessed ent, befiMeen the figures, between themselves and each esPect chiaroscuro to the service of chromatic of the landscape, between a deep-set wordless dream and an organization. Changes of light, as a quantitive range, less subtle outward world. Giorgione chooses a moment of utmost revela- but infinitely vaster than the ,angé of colour, tior. g..r.rrl tion, in visual terms sunrise or sunset when things stand "as and diffused changes in lighr .rrrkro*, ro his pr.d.årrorr, 110 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER closE LOOKTNG 11 1

Giorgione dedicated to the service of local colour' None of his followers were equal to this subtlery. Although the Venetian school as a whole, headed by Titian, may be said to have used his discoveries, it was neither to the end of a greeter realism nor en equal poetry but to the articulation of masses. As for the definitely Giorgionesque periods of these and other painters, they emulated and sometimes caught the poetry with differing degrees of vulgarism: sometimes light and shade were exagger- ated, sometimes ignored, and the treatment was Bellinian. At the end of the sixteenth century, Caravaggio quite consciously broke up the Ttianesque srylization of Giorgionet tonal inventions which had finally become a mannerism. Proclaiming a return to Giorgion e, Canvaggio produced a dramatic realism. Yet Giorgione had employed chiaroscuro for exactly an opposite effèct, for the contemplative, the Poetic, peuse. That is why his Giorgione's poetry has an unforced ease, an uncontorted by colour. He is the father of beauty. use of chiaroscuro is so enriched He put the soul into Nature and he did it with a modern painting. Unlike Leonardo, more than one aspect of tonal painting springs from him. Not only did he help to make possible the huge achievement of Rembrandt but he enlarged the scope of equal insistence. Venice, as we know, excels in black and white. Colour comes between, uniting them, uniting the vastest differences. It is a description also of Giorgione's achieve- and the ourer . .. ment, a child ofVenice. i..l In wriring t.l . of venetian fifteenth-century architecture and wastes throughout He who has learned to find man's image in the wide these volumes I have attempted to show rhat the the pleasant part of the lagoon will he completely at home among of early Renaissance art I have called euarrro Cento foothills of the Alps. I dont know how much is due to the inten- possesses as a compulsion the characrer of all art to make the siry of Giorgione's vision of this men-accustomed landscape, and how much on leaving Venice for the slopes after a long sojourn, one would in any case he of similar mind - something of the vision is common to meny who come from Venice to Asolo, to Bassano, to Castel Franco. It is no surprise to see the grove and the blue distance, or a Palladian temple at the foot óf hill, to feel that delicate detachment, that pensive, lyrical " detachment, allied to an embracing identification which char- acterizes Giorgioneb dream, touched with a little sadness. His was a young yet gestureless nobiliry eftentive to all the long partook, the old frightening home revisited in maturiry. once READER CLOSE LOOKING 113 112 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES

Turner is said to "Indistinctness it was spirit forces, but now the fantasy of man' informing have replied: is my forre." Nature. By means of expression, his perennial activity' the t..l If the deepest wes mind of man vies with tháworld in ourwardness: deeper things aim rranscendenr, Tirrner employed for it the his vast experience come forward. An expressive token of all expressiveness, of measure. There is small appearance of the the stone; and in the arbitrary in his drifts of mounrain, sea and s : they formulate face of the stone is -"ã. .o show through þ an erratic architecture evening light there is a moment when mind seems to become or a superb natural habitat, no less than an irresistible extension, stands revealed to the eyes' phenomenon; soft and tenuous, warmed as well as as for cold. was as Nature is the mirror of man for the mature artist as well It if catastrophes were carvings on rhe sþ: they stem the child. But, rather than a symbol conceived from an object' from the delicate use of the pencil in thousands of drawings, slight touches one the most adult occasions of western visual art' the observed to enrich the paper as if it were a volume invoked of an object successfully provided an aesthetic mode' by this touch, remarkable not only for delicacy but for selective- "fp."rrr..ih, n*pnto ron none of the tension of conceptual art nor ness, even in so early an architectural drawing as the sketch of ^in Stamford, Lincolnshire, yet a minrrte chasing of detail uncharged with a general Poetry' of 1797. Uniry of rrearment is matched Â., i--an.nce is thire while the whole is relaxed' by that of feeling: what is grasped from the subject is accorded Any contemplation of the visual world is a scanning of the with the projected strain of feeling that encompasses and adjusts no soul. \¯here conremplation is properly aesthetic there is each detail with another. "mystic" reading into Nature' The fantasies evoked by texture t.l and chromatic interchange, purely aesthetic matters' expressed A price had to be paid for the homogeneous effec, a price in terms of the senses, can piovide an immediate yet profound on which Tirrner's critics were agreed; not only that: his flat- of commenrery upon life. Giårgione's arr is not the expression tening of figures and tempering of foreground in the interesr philorophici o, mystical idea' On the contrary' by imbu- of overall effec corresponded to a lack of inevitable interest in "i.rg ob;..;, and their relation with aesthetic value he created a relief, shown by the playing down of figures as a resuk of his today' \X/e ph"ilosáphy which I have affirmed to be relevant growing concenrrarion upon the enveloping landscape. shall find that these attirudes are possibly linked in deeper layers of the mind also. On the other hand , early studies of buildings, Turner: beneficence in s7ace "' hills, and especially rocks, are often very notable for their relief, Türner was e phenomenal draughtsman in several genres, but in Turner's art' lTlhere is a long history of indistinctness particularly for choice and disposition of accenr and bare space have called I .or,.t..,.d ihro.,gho"t with what I in a finely controlled sea of detail; for a pointilliste employ- not least of the I an embracing or"enveloping qualiry, ment es a youth, in company with Girtin, of the pencil's point in Turner of isolat- . The power grew within a parrern of short strokes. His drawings of the figure at to a event that belongs Passing the Academy schools were no more than adequate. Some later the interest of of definition in drawings of the nude are considerably betteÁ but do not obtain one who comPlained, lity. To high significance. Except in the case of cows and of the early selÊ portrait in oil, his delineation of faces seems wooden. \¯e cannot 1963' pp'-5'0' From "The art of Tìr¡ner", Painting and-the lnnerWorld' discover in Türnert ';;iii 242-243' 245'24e' art much affìrmative relationship ro rhe 6;," æ-6;:-zits; cüt¡'r't w,ttn|' III, pp' 237 ' whole bodÁ to human beings. They tend be ') <') -) \\ to sticks, or fish that ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER 114 CLOSE LOOKING 115 bob or flop or are stuftèd. The prejudice is sometimes allowed aware of experimenradon with paint, yet of discoveries suffìcient meny figures who should be dignified ePpear to themselves, such freedom, that though they can often be read without difficurry as unconcealed first to be rustic, to be approached by the artist with sketches in colour oflandscapes and seescepes or as records because untutored naivery though this is in fact very far from the of natural effects for which his memory was phenomenal. case. To use the psychoanalytic term, they suggest part-objects. But it is impossible at this poinr, the lr,r,. of rhe Turner is an that on enigma, (A part-object, it may be recalled, organ or function ro remove his technical and aesthetic probing, prob_ from ings the analogy of the first object, the breast, has been split off into landscape design, from pressures anrerior to them. an object's other organs and functions: a part-object, therefore, A-ll obsession has a vivid aspect of selÊsuffìciency. Anyone who is a concept at a great distance from the one of a whole, seperate looks through items, other than the earliest, of th. ,rárt Trr.r., ,,beginnings,, person for whom, in a regression, it may come to stand). Bequest, will be amazed at the number of these and pencil t..l sketches, ofren monoronous in sirnplicity;d same- relationship to a part-object has the ness I must recall that the in regard to a raining downward of a top upon a envelop- "r." character of a complete identificetion, of a whirlpool receptive area below; so many sheets in later times have no other is Tirrner's more feature, ment into which we are drawn. Of such kind while others have a reverse surge from the lower section usual conception of doom and disaster 1...], the conception, made up of vibrant stripes parallel to th. picture plane, or of the omnipotent and piercing in one aspect, of the infant who believes in forms as from an uneven sea. It that with the "pp."r, scalding propensity that belongs to his stream of yellow urine as larrer years, Tirrner brushed in large oil painiings for exhibition an object it envelops the object so closely attached to himself upon such preparations, somerimes rhèir entiiery es represen_ split off in his mind from the good breast with which he is also tations during the varnishing days. One elemerri th. tVherees Turner's art, he "rr",rlt, one. the two trends are integrated in other in the simple, zoned beginnings. Concentrating upon must emphasize with less vigour the long-studied separateness sþ with land or sea, rhe artist was ,r.rá., compulsion tã ,.ård as of self-sufficient and whole objects, other than the pictures faithfully and repearedly a srark inrercourse, ,Ë.r, ro reconcile, .,Studies themselves, with a viewpoint, maþe, from above, now removed then to interpose, perhaps wirh a rainbow. Among the from the artist. The overall emphasis upon the canvas is predom- for vignettes" of the 1830s (T. B. 2g0) there is ã warercolour inantly the one of envelopment. \¿e are likely to think first of sheet of rose with touches of ochre, saturated at the boftom, late Tirrners in this connection. Though the approach be tradi- thin above. underneath this apparently abstract design of melt- any but the earliest ing ,,Sauve tional the same qualiry is rarely absent from colour, Turner has written - so runs th. g,.r.J, _ qui drawing and watercolour sketches. peut". It is to be expected that such dericate iÃerplay of rwo t...1 colours enfolded already for him the rerrors of flooi, .q.r"l " to After considerable and continuous success as a very young the chromatic balm in vi.ue of which the inevirable alternation man, Turner's first great triumphwas in 1801 with the Bridgewater of the rerror could be allowed ro appear. (elected R.A.) he is accused of lack of \With comparable sea-piece; already in 1802 _ obsessiveness in his middle and final years, mere blotches. These, Turner finish; later, it will be of offering his public would draw rapidly a rower ensconced on a hill_top, over some cases, attribut- and es a matter of fact, he kept to himself. In over again from every angle, perhaps six linedrawirrg, o., able mostly to the years 1820-30, of what Finberg in his Turner one small page, doubtless with an eye rã the best design"fo, "Colour (espe- painting, " Bequest catalogue calls beginnings" watercolours but also to make far more than certain from evãry long ciallyT 8.263; there are also uncatalogued oil sketches), one is approach how the one element fitted into the other: he often ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER 116 ART AND CLOSE LOOKING 117

this fervour. An drew next day another tower and hill-top with side in a dark and insecure age; it was a fear that must always an identiry approximation, a drawing together, the forging of have existed everl'where for irrational reasons alone, since there ,å ,o ,"Á out of evident differences as is revealed by a fine use of colour, was a constant aim. In his catalogue Finberg wrote of sketch-book 281 in the Tirrner Bequest: "A number of these pages have been prepared with smudges of red and black water- .olo,rt, the colour then being dabbed and rubbed, with the was sixreen, he soon visited the burnt-out pantheon in oxford

form attributed to the block. Turner often used a rough blue or grey peper on which his panoramic pencil drawings (even more ih".r *ãr.t.olouring) suggest messages that have appeared from within a wall upon its surface. An eloquent surface in this sense was integral to his art and became increasingly an influence uPon irs conrenr. Divorced from that bent, his flamboyant confronta- tions would have lacked their union, the ease of interchange and coalescence, the issue of light, so often sunset, that floods' In a region of the mind, as I have indicated, Properties of fire (scalding) ar variance but united, the hose of night far ,.rd *"t.i are nor sþ too light. Another writer said that Juliet and Nurse initiates. 'All the fireman with the fire he inflames and, indeed, was nothing more rhan a further conflagration of the Houses passages to which I his life," wrote Kenneth Clark of Tirrner in of Parliamenr. Turner exhibited in rg32 Nebuchadnezzar at the "he the conjunction ,,heat,' ,.blood,, am much indebted, had been obsessed by Mouth of the Fiery Furnace. "Fire" or and were "He loved the brilliance of steam, the words of fire and water." And: commonly used in conremporary writing on him. It is chimney and the dark diagonal of smoke blowing out of a tall surely unnecessary to remark, in respect to fire and wateÁ the the of suggesti; of hidden furnaces made visible at mouth meny watery sunrises and bloody sunsets or R¿in, Steam and i*.r.l." Earlier, in Landscape into Art, Clark had a heading: speed and Fire at sea. TuÁner himself wrore "Fire and Blood" in " "Throughout "Fire in the Flood", e quotation from Beowulf the sky of a drawing that may be dated 1g06_g (T, B. t0t). The painter's thelandscape of fantasy'', hewrote, "it remains the onrush of ivy and otheÁ leafage in his best architectural drawings mosr powerful weapon, culminaring in its glorious but extrava- are profoundly related with effects of rock and water ,.r.h upon fire in the flood ", g"rr, ,rl. by Turner." I think he enlarged the wonderful watercolour of 1795, Melincourt Fail, where the a Nature that was feared on every unbroken iar beyond this context of slab or wedge of water licks the fractured rock like a STOKES READER 1 18 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN CLOSE LOOKING 1 19 flame. Soon after reaching Rome for the first time in October 1819, Turner hurried to Naples where Vesuvius had become active some days before. Allied with the one of fire there is often conveyed by his work a sense of explosion, in the famous Snowstorm (exhibited 1842), for instance, or even in the earlier snowstorm of Hannibal Crossing the Aþs of t}tZ. One sees from afar an atmosphere of paint and detonation, then one searches for the benighted human beings who, when found, remark the processes of meteorological might rarher than of individuals who endure them. On the other hand, Olympic vistas, calm temples, survive in our general impression of Tirrner's art: in view of a ceaseless lyrical bias it is a humane of the mind were achieved. In the great last period, not only is art. \¯e learn from him that calamity is asymmetrical. the world washed clean by light, but humidiry is sucked fÁom Ruskin deplored Turner's lack of interest in the detail of water, the core of fire through Gothic architècture (despite the numerous, astounding studies which we witness an ereupon of, say, Rouen cathedral). A brooding atrachment ro rhe classical space and light envel d under orders is strangely suggested by bawdy lines he wrote eroticiz- the aegis of a boat at dawn berween Cumaean headlands, or a ing the Ionic. (It is not altogether surprising to discover there a yacht that gains the coast. punning use of words that could reflect the infantile oral phan- Together with Tirrnert whirlpool of fire and water we experi- tasy of the uagina dent¿t¿.) ence beneficence in spece. There abound calm scenes that wàuld In connection with my mention of scalding attacks I think be sombre or forlorn without the gold, without the agitated it relevant ro remarkTurner's liberal use of yellows. Dido build- pulse and delicacy in so light a key. ing Carthage was originally thought too yellow. Tirrner himself Beneficence is very widely scattered; encompasses from afar. a friend in 1826: "I must not say yellow, for I have (64-69;245-249) *.]r., to t..l I must enlarge upon clefts and clumps before referring to the counterpoint. If these be allegories of feminine form frrr.- ".rã

of chrome" is how Scarlett Davis described to Ince the Burning of the House of Lords and Commons' (Yan Gogh, a more aggres- pressing it as he works a considerable canvas at the Academy or sive handler of everlthing fierÁ and his passion for yellow, are British Institution, without srepping back. Though it is writ- better known today.) ten by an arrisr who was usually hostile and malevorent about I find it fair to say rhar the compulsively unitarÁ forcing side Turner, some of the account, confirmed in the main elsewhere, is of Turnert art srrengrhened, indeed largely inspired, a further worth remark ofTurner and his Burning ofthe House of Lords and linking by his late paintings of elements already long harmonized commons on a varnishing day, 1835, at rhe British insritution. ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER 120 CLOSE LOOKING 121

a reminis- berween "He was there at worl¿', wrote E. V. Rippingille in nipple and phallus. The above description of Tirrner at "before cence of Callcott (Art Journal, 1860) I came, having set work in 1835 at the British Institution may recalr the couplet to work at the earliest hour allowed. Indeed it was quite neces- twice used in his incomprehensible verses entitled "The origin of sary to make the best of his time, es the picture when sent in vermilion" or "The loves of painting and music,,: was e mere dab of several colours, and "without form and void" As snails trail o'er the morning dew (Hazlitt), before the creation." Etly was working et his like chaos He thus the line of beauty drew. side, on his picture The Lute Player: He sought daring expedients for his sense of fitness: in the case Little Etty stepped back every now and then to look at the effect of persons especiallÁ I repeat, they were based on part_object of his picture lolling his head on one side and half-closing his models. The companions, the siblings, he project.d, oft.r, eyes, and sometimes speaking to someone near him, after the "r. like shoals; as mere members, mouths p.ih"pr, they approved manner of painters: but not so Tirrner; for the three "s may flit about the declivities and rises of an hours lwas there - and I understood it had been the same since encompassing tr."rr, much of it out of reach as he began in the morning - he never ceased to work, or even palace, torrent, ocean, mountain or murderous sky. once looked or turned from the wall on which his picture hung. All lookers-on were amused by the figure Turner exhibited in No wonder Turner criticized poussin's Deruge in the Louvre for lack "currenr himself, and the process he was pursuing with his picture . . . of and ebullition" in the w"t.i, though he was Leaning forward and sideways over to the the right, the left- much influenced by Poussin at thar time (rg02). RuJkin wrore his blue coat rose six inches higher than as follows hand metal button of for the first volume of Modern paintersabout The slaue right, and his head buried in his shoulders and held down, ship: "-[he the whole surface of the sea is divided into rwo ridges of presented an aspect curious to all beholders . . . Presently the enormous swell, not high, not local, but a low broad h."rrirrg work was finished: Türner gathered up his tools together, Put of the whole ocean, Iike the lifting of its bosom by deep_drawn them into and shut up the box, and then, with his face still breath after the rorrure of the ,r,.-.,' turned to the wall, and at the same distance from it, went side- These are mounds, clumps, ofrerror and benignity;within ling ofl without speaking a word to anybody. one of the shapes, a pyramid of pearly monsrers h", b1..r .onfounded in the act of painting, even his vast distances with the black, \¯e can take it that disappearing bodies. The pyram id of Fire at se¿, uPon the huge, were pressed up against the visionary eye like the breast massive, is thrown upwards against a mound of cloud. mouth: et the same time it was he who fed the infant picture' swart, irregular pyramids characterile the famous snowstorm figures glue whose In these embracing conceptions, no wonder that ship is like a broken carerpiilaÁ whereas the engulfed mari- bases, variegated figures, salmon-like, ners of Fire at Sea themselves on banks and are near_ro having become, as if irotectivelÁ dully flashing films of colour, perhaps floating beneath a cloud- globular, saffron-coloured fish. A sublect for TurneË arrenrion, like architecture, perhaps pressed to the ground like the catch in particularly in the neighbourhood of plymouth during 1g11, baskets upon a quay, glistening at dawn. Ruskin remarked on the accumulations of bric-a-brac in Tirrnerian foregronnds - I would include bodies and jetsam in seas, or on an eerth so flattened in some late cenvases as to suggest a Pavement of rippled water - and referred them to the grand confusion of Covent Garden where Turner lived as a child. An equation persists' as is well known, which it is tugged, to which it is 122 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER CLOSE LOOKING 123

It would be tedious to enumerate the recurrence of a fluidiry Tirrner was no srranger to the manipulation and perhaps even I to the confusion that possesses clumps, mounds, pyramids and clefts, though of conrrary fa*ors. I cannot help remarèing, as am fascinated by this theme, especially in paintings that Turner shown ro me by B. A. R. carter, rhat two d.-onìtr"tion shãers, showed at his last Academy of 1850, Visit to the Tomb and illustrating a triangle fitted into a circle, that he used for his Dep¿rture of the Tiojan Fleet, emong his ultimate Punic paint- Perspective lecrures, are each headed "circle (or circles) wirhin infs. I -.rrt ,.-"rk the extraordinary volume of such unmoored a triangle". ,hãp.r, since there was earlier mention of poorness of relief in A motif more consrant in the work of rurner even than a figure painter in the one context. Had he been primarily - of clumps with their clefts, is the rhythmic use of a "noth.t this matter it is no contradiction to imagine so - Turner would rebuttal, very commonly of waves blown b".k they ", break have attained poignant compositions in rerms of that theme: the on a lea shore, epparenr already in early sea pieces and in so-called Costurne Piece at the Täte suggests it. mountain brooks whose drums of shallow warer rolling over To summarize Tirrner's clump or mound conception would boulders provide the effect of a reversing power, b.."i. H. or seething often represents " be , I think, to isolate a Parting of the ways' a rustling the force of natural by demonstrating th^at "g.rr.y withdrawal as in the biblical Passege of the Red Sea: to meny it is engaged, somerimes thw"rted by another. The Fails mythological scenes an opalescent, werm Passage is common of Terni drop as one bodÁ then are broken, buffetted. A stoic through ih. ..n.r., and on one side, maybe , the silent arm of pathos, inherent in the beautÁ sustains those great last light a tall pine. canvases wherein hardly a boar interrupts the giappling ofì." It remains to speak of the tension, the counterpoint, the with skÁ wherein naked oppositions á"d thei, ,låor,.ili"tio' bringing together of storm with sun, disaster with beautÁ supply overall bareness to the opulence of the effect. yet even m.lancholy with protected ease in many' many, parkland in narrow paintings of flat scenes) chichester canal or petworth expanses, and, in general, the good with the bad' Formal Parþ uith Tillington church in the Distance (sketches at the Tâte contrivances thât suggest their union are not of course them- for the Perworth landscapes), ar rhe meeting of ground and selves symbolic in the immediate conscious sense of the sky there is the effect of a scooped-out pomegrenate or apricot perworth rainbow, for instance, of The Wrecþ Buoy. More significant, common-ro the pictures of interiors, a benign appli_ however, even here (as deep-laid symbol), the high, lit, sail- cation of rhe whirlwind principle, at the picturet .1."rå, ", tops, ghostly against a sky that falls in curtains of rain, cleave the cenrre of interest. (The theme is at reasi as old as exquisite to thJrainbo*t h"lf-.ircle triangularlÁ in contrast with fore- studies for The Sun Rising through Vapour.) Maybe lo* ,r., ground weter, \Mastes rich in light flanked by darker mounds is there to help us seize upon the otrrerwise faintly "indicated ãf ,.", that topple over towards the sPectator yet seem at the fruit, both soft and fierce, romanric in promise as in muted back to climb up to the boats and to the falling sky' The meet- danger and elusive distance. Amid th. of hugeness, "Ëbr".es ing of these movements occurs neer the centre of the cenvas we have seen that figuration, men more than cattle, so times "r.io-"_ frJm where one has the sense of exrrecring the heart of a startling varianr, like fossil rraces that vivi$z a rock. The infant's vertiginous, so desert, yet so various a scene, in terms of the experiences have been similarly engraved ûy him upon ,.d-Ãr. jib on rhe nearer sailing boat: at either side verticals the sudden breast. incline orrt*"rd, and thereby stress that centre' Awareness of Clasping natural immensiry Turner lent a hard_won grandeur contrary to the disrance, a centr€ in great space will favour a rencontre of so irregularly spanned by each of us, i.*..., factors in whatever sense. selÊdestruction and forgetful, infanrile love. 124 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER

As he elaborates an insight conditioned by his time, the CHAPTER 5IX artist, I have supposed in the first essay ["Painting and the inner world"], may project images that need not correspond altogether with his most native bent. Naturally, the correspondence will have been very close in the case of superb individualists. All the same, it is impossible even to guess how potently Turnert uniqueness could have survived abstraction from the historical context, and it is impossible to know how deeplÁ how widely, the primitive obsessions that were exploited by his art, qualified Construction of the good mother the structure of his ego. In making an end, therefore, not only to this brief examination of his peculiar genius but also to wider issues in this book, a word or two are required for the other side of the balance. A broad issue has been the artistt ambivalence, the bring- ing together he imposes on it. Tìrrner pre-eminently dramatized that renconfue when he applied it to a state where it does not truly belong, to the earlier emotions of overpowering alterna- tions before ambivalence has been admitted, embracing the lnside out: an autobÁographical then current notions of "the sublime", of what is rapturous, narratÌvei transporting yet often vast and terrible, in a word, envelop- This is not a book ing. Through chromatic wealth, through the brilliant identity about childhood., except for a little of my own. The "working-out,,, as the between great differences that colour can create, an equation title suggests, a certain Áelation to the external world, provides the subject. habitually survives in Tirrnert major work between dissolution, (From the preface to Inside disruption and suave continuiry berween richness and the bare- Oat, 1947) ness of distance : neither term suffèrs from their union; neither oing down is overlaid, disguised. Vhile light that dominates so many of /- Lancasrer an his landscapes is rich and bounteous, it obliterates also, flood- \rïilfr: orange ing building, water and mountain to the length, sometimes, of said And s.ure enough, that afternoon there was a thunderstorm. their near-extinction. Accepting his sublimity, entertaining thus At..nearby stanhope Gare, an ord woman sord coloured a merging experience, the spectator shrinks as a complete or balloons. It was as if the lot had burst. I think Áemem_ seperete entity but regains himself as he absorbs the stable selÊ I ber well this small evenr since it symbolizes ."..f,ior"l inclusiveness of the art object. happening. "r For once the glowerirr! susp.nse, rhe f.åi.rg of things hardly redeemed, *"..o.r.ridictèd by ,i", came " -..r".. ro violent fruition. The thing *a, don. and finished with: the srorm happened p".r.ä, and the "rrd ,_"il ;;;;;. FÁom i Inside Out, 1947,7_32; CriticallVritings II, 142_15g ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER 126 CONSTRUCTION OF THE GOOD MOTHER 127 cloud had shown it was to happen. None of the other The underneatlt of the seer, at aîy rate, wes my discoverÁ omens I can remember was either read or fulfilled as was this space benryeen the seat and the low rail in f.orrt of the this. The year would be i 908 or so, when I was six. grass, almost roofed by the sloping of the seat's back. Those I used to single out the cars in the processional traffìc on the who had forbidden it, had not examined that side. courd I road round the park, and count them' Their cautious, noisy keep the underneath alive and thus cause the animation of explorations without an objective, without an arrival point, a the whole? trundling round the park, helped to create the atmosphere This occasional game helped me very iittle to endow of grinding suspense. Meanwhile, beyond the cruel railings, the park and its inhabitanis with health. There were the scarlet horse-buses with Tätcho advertisements roared vasteÁ engines than my seat which I could not control. down Bayswater Road. The railings were cruel, I think, The machine house of the founrains, foÁ instance, had seats in waste-paper an ominous because of the ffamps who sat on outside, air. A scouÁ of mysterious steam hung over a sunken and drowsy filth: and whatever wes railed within the park, tank at the back ofthe engine house *.i appre_ "rrd suggested a burning-cold, a searing prohibition against those hended at rhe same dme as the sËeil ofoil and th. .rr.rèirrg who would slink away into the iron ivyness of copse or plan- of the lethal cylinders. The cold and grinding mechanism tation. Other single railings were isolated in the open parts was housed in Portland stone of .l"te viäorian sryle, of the park. Their usefulness would seem to be confined to both white and darkened. The fountains themsel.res êrad that of e threat against the couples who blundered in the little grace owing to the pretentiousness ofeverydetail ofthe dark, choosing an exposed and therefore isolated place in ell ofdecay was freshened by which to lie. There seemed to be no love in that love-making. d like pellets on the surfaces To the small boÁ the immersed, in-rolled couple suffered Áarer from the final basin poured away from a still greater poverty than did the single drunks who into the Long \¯ater. FIere was the inky_dark medium of slumbered face to the sþ. The evil was poverty, not crime the park suicides. My governess and I used to read outside the or drink. Poverty itself was destructive. Dirt, smell and the parkpolice station the notices recounting, in the hope of bleary eye, all to my mind, smart and noisome activities, were further information which brought . ,.*Ird (prirrtà i., the predominant performances of poverty. large letters), a-ll the crimes thaì had ,....rtly'^occurred, I was forbidden to sit on the seats with complicated cast- chiefly suicides in the Serpentine. A police description of iron sides frequented by the destitute. Nevertheless, regarding a dead_ body exactly e*prèssed my pr.dorni.r..rr'imprer_ the sion yet these seats as forlorn homes, I was fascinated, not only by of the park as awhole. I did rrot give up "ltogether danger imputed to them, an infection, as it were, of Poverty' hope of infusing rhese remnants with life. Iïould"..t.rr., but by the possibiliry of constant acts of restitution.Iwould again and again to the fountains and hope against hope ban, to that therefore implore my governess, in spite of the .the engine-house activiry would rp.li o.rt"ro-.thirrg use these seats; and I would get behind' between the low good. Itwas indeed worse when, ,, ,o Jf,..r, the fountains seat, and were railing at the side of the walk and the back of the nor working and the werer licked the lichened sides was making this last refuge, for all the bare blackly without imagine that I T"r: the bombardment of pellets. To see ness of board and of cold, jarring contortion of cast-iron, to the fountains turned on - es I often did _ *å, . firr. siglt, since "work", whether as a ship or car orwhatever purposeful vessel the r^p"y§ grew from a trickie ro an inch, to a foor, took my fancy. to ayard, finally reaching a grear height, sustained there by AN ADRIAN STOKES READER 128 ART AND ANALYSIS: CONSTRUCTION OF THE GOOD MOTHER 12g an eager, pumPing Pulse: at the summit, rainbow colours encampment of mo.thers and poor children and tramp could be discerned; a thin elegant summit somedmes torn women who seemed to watch every straying movement: by the wind but formed again immediately. The wind might and-perhaps, wellarmed with a stick, I would run halÊway tear off thewhole summit or bend the column like a tree, but in their direction, resring the evil in comparative safety. the compensating power returned in the end. This entirely Sometimes the positions of the opposing camps *ould b. mechanical restitution did not please me: the Power behind reversed. \¯e would be in the fo,rrrt"ins, and the less intent parkees (since it was blind, exact and faithless in the sense that it did not they always inhabited these seats) would be the obiects deal in faith. Perhaps, indeed, the relentless mounting of of apprehension as they sat on a srone seat wirh a curious the fountains when they were turned on, propelled by each Áound rerminarion on the walk above, or in the high, dispropor_ stroke of the very extensive engine, was really most frighten- tionate alcove on the hill, down from Victoria Gaie. The ing to me. .tall, disproportionare alcove, shallow, high and cold, basin The fountains played. Dirty children rushed from with toddlers squirming on a low brown sear, was, and is today (though to basin: suspicious park-keepers stalked their antics, gener- ir be attribured ro /ren), an image ro me of brind- ally from afar. The keepers had boxes scattered in the park, ness. This kind of ethical ugliness in the use of a classical form, so that their emergence could have something of the sudden- parricularly the cruel denial of shadow or depth in proportion ness associated with the paratroop whose landing has not been to the height, afflicted me ro such an exrenr thar r ,irirrl i, h* a helped observed. The keepers carried whistles. Emergence from me in later life to find good archite-ure to be a particular symbol telephone booth is always associated by me with the fingering of life. Nearly all the monumenrs and buildings in the of something tucked away on one side of the chest, a cold, park, including the fountains, professed for me th. s"ir. cruel punishing little organ that it was e positive dury to handle. discriminarion. -Wh.n a park whistle was blown near the fountains, the shrill It was little better with the forms of life abounding on the eagle journeÁ piercing the water lake, or with sound seemed to travel on an the dogs allowed to race and bounce abãut fo, a pellets whose clattering was considerable- In fact, you had to liverish hour, or led to lamp-posr or rail on a lead. obscenely shout to make yourself heard near the fountains. different in size, they fought each orheÁ raced and wrestled. In -ùØe called the elderly ragamuffìns and tramPs ofthe park conjunction with the drawing-room salutarions of their owners, "parkees". I had wandered away from my nurse who was their curiosiry about each other appeared particularly morbid. chatting on the walkabove the fountains. Amongthe basins The animal world seemed a sheer-import"tiorr, a walwardness Iwasseizedbyapackof parkees and my shouts could not be controlled with distaste and severiry. heard even a few feet awày.I managed to break loose - I It was the same with the birds, largely fed by hand. An had the wooden handle of a push-cart with me - and old man would be feeding sparrows. rrr.ii hoppiág and twit- regained the nurse who had noticed nothing. In spite of tering and mass scurries of flight seemed ,o êrpr."r, his own my remembrance, I have little doubt that no such actual accumulated evasions. thing happened. Probably the context existed; parkees There were the peacocks which could be watched spoke to me and I had been warned against such intercourse between the bars of the ra_ilings at the side of the Long by having the fear of being kidnapped instilled in me- But \¯ater. These disconsolate birdi would somerimes ,pr."ã a kind of feud was invented. \¯hen the nurses and their a tail' A keeper fed them and to him was attributed ,h. children congregated, I would glance across at the other powers of their control. "il AN ADRIAN STOKES READER 130 ART AND ANALYSIS: CONSTRUCTION OF THE GOOD MOTHER 131

Yet occasionally, at times of post-luncheon winter sunsets, waterfall-termination of the Long \¯ater. The flow, in fact, there was an atmosPhere of Nature in the park. Smoke from was small. But the dangers of the park as a whole could not bonfires and a decreasing light suggested some limit to thus be disproved. -where control, and the yelling of peacocks from a nook surprisingly did the water go? At the other end of the lake there was distant, dislodged for a time an imputed curriculum. a.low white bridge whose several arches were perhaps not more Nevertheless, the ducks and other water-fowl seemed no than a foot above the level of the warer. Did the *"rå, flo* "*"y less chained than the sPerrows upon the neat paths. There are here where, even a swimmer, still less a boat, could not penetrate rwo gaps by the side of the Long \¯ater, where the railings and the mystery? This white stone bridge had a cerrain gr".., th. .oncã"ú.tg shrubbery cease, where the path comes to the edge exceedingly low arches, howeveÁ were associated in ty mind of the *"ì.r. In these two small bays the ducks are visited and with a challenge ro any inquisitive and anxious head whåther of fed. Even here, there is akindoffencing,thoughitisinthe water' water fowl or man, who tried to share the fate, whatever it might Theducksenterthrough gaps. The shore is edged by a sloping be, of the water beyond the Serpentine. stone kerb. A thin line of scum, feathers, soot' twigs, laves the On the furrher side of the white bridge rhere was a sharp lower edge o etted bY the decliviry and a high though meager waterfall. I dont think that I slitherings o Sometimes, conneced this water with a flow from the serpentine. Later, I was too, the.. is n foreheads, to hear that most of the Serpentine *"r., p"rr.d underground -be needle eyes and evident ill-temper. The easy floating of the and came up in the park of Buckingham palace . I was to told birds on water ceuses the uneasy trundling and shooting necks that the serpentine could be drained, that everyrhing flung into of the birds ashore to apPear painful. The swans particularly it could be brought to light. All the miseries of the toi.r, "rã.k.d and divided mother without me and within, she who was the park and all that happened rhere, ro be known, controlled and restored? No wonder that in many later enquiries I have sought for the clean sweep. I have had an absurd faith in the effici.y of generalizarion and, ar times, a neurotic subservience to the behests of an apparent logic. By this wourd-be control i have The swans I knew to be fierce. There were stories of a been subservient to the same relentless animus that informed, to blow from a wing smashing a man's leg and of the useless- my mind, the face of the park. ness of an opened umbrella as a guard. Sometimes they The park, of course, was nor the first desolation but it is the moved on the water with ruffled plumage. Once, in mina- one I remember first, the setting down in the external world of tory Edwardian stateliness, a swan was seen sitting on a the sum of earlier desolations. Narure, in man and beast and nest below the fountains, just to the side of the dangerous flower, was a thing chained and divided. It would seem that each overflow from the fountains into the Long \¯ater, a minia- blade of grass, smelling of London even when it grew rankesr, ture eddying waterfall whose downward suction or pull was could be examined. There were no weeds. Sheep lãft droppings challenged, but not refuted, by the even keel of the giant on the grass, left them rhere, so ir appeared, l,rr, ,å*"rà, bird sitting on her drY nest. sunset some living bundle of rags would seem ro be left", forlorn and on a Just as itt the case of the parkees, when I was older green chair for rhe use of which a penny should have been able to row a boat I used to come as close as I dared to this paid.It was nor usual for us ro sit on these chairs. If we did, often 132 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER CONSTRUCTION OF THE GOOD MOTHER 133 the ticket collector would come unseen from behind us, cufting And so, rhe candles of the beautiful chesmut trees were grass with a town gait, with his roll of tickets and his sullied across the and dangerous in my eyes. only the coundess blossom of moving loosely in front of him like a sporran. This ship the may clippers trees with their-sweet dusry town smell, seemed poised of the park was enother examining agent' and. without potential disaster. In a polite and a yo,rrrj for_ flowers were viewed through rail- Banked-up by gardeners, the bloom of these rrees was the micråcosm of the conriient of array in spring near Victoria Gate, just in front ings, a splendent endless brick where hope lay emong the crustered varied chim- of which you could obtain one glance from ney of the dogs' cemetery pors. I remember picnics under the may rrees near vi*oria a bus bound for Road. Berween you and the Gate: the top of Queent I remember the brown osier lunch basket with osier pin military rows of flowers was a wide gress verge and a high railing. like a giant hat pin, and the contenrs spread on the rame grass. In the course of time I grew Nearby there was e rustic cottege. Two. older girls with rheir nurses used to join our p"rry ofih... concerning this end other cottages, and a well- brothers very curious and a nurse. Sylvia had a reddish ia.. è.rii*", p"r., middle of Kensington Gardens. I had never with "nd sized house in the freckles, green eyes and lo rg legs. A saga about prrk .r^*r, anyone go in or come out, but most delicious wood smoke begun at_those seen picnics. Heat glitter.á b.yorid the tossed_up may and their was often climbing from the chimneys. These cotteges trees in flower: beween the trees tr"ffi. glinted, ,..r, fro_ th. small enclosed gardens, far more than the park grass or the trees ey-e-level of the grass. This circular flow of"traffic served as a kind flowers, suggested to me the open country, unknown to of watchful or the coasting on the fringes of consciousness: at rimes, window on the me except for the landscapes I saw from the uain also, as vehicles whr.ch carried ãorrerpo.rdence ro th. d..p., Later used to imagine myself inhabiting the way ro the seaside. I depths of the mind, bringing thence ,h. ,,'"rr., for new the middle of Kensington Gardens;walking the park in ties. "ffì.ri_ house in And yet this upward, as ir were, and downward movemenr the early morning, watching the dawn and later seeing the lines was expressed by a steady low-lying morion along a flat surface. of ffees, an unspoilt natural Iiving in the country in There is pleasure, Panorama; there is life, when movemenr, particularly even the middle of London. From adolescence onwards I did what i movemenr in space, when the ourward world ar large takes for with my imagination to restore the park. Standing at the us the could form of the jagged, shifting promonrories of the mind. It Pond, looked across the Long \7ater and conjured up is notable, Round I howeveÁ rhat the firrJgìimpre of the sea, rhar closer vista of an eighteenth-century park, a royal park having no parallel the to the tossing mind, h", ,rr."rring of limitless release; with the lives of children. and " essential connection words wrested from a life at sea ring true of the mind. But it was dust-laden; every blade of grass wes discerned for As I walked at the side of the trafficlrom th. bridge over the a metropoliten purpose. The sheep would leave wool on trees' a serpentine ro victoria Gate, the extended .,,orr.-..rrîfvehicies in a well-known sPot on all sides of which London would express dubious trail for me the hostile, unforgiving expanse of the roared. In summer there was the clipping and a brand- traffic ground with a deep ditch, the down near the police stetion. The startled shorn ing and a dip, and Kensington Gardens. The "nature", a nakedness, an bodies suggested a touch of exüeme itch epitomized the depth of sudden production of the pale bodÁ a exhibitionism, even, a ere. I think, after my brothers a suicide, a thousand little boys running child's emorous game, d to make casual friends by join_ Serpentine on a hot summer evening, allied some- ing to kick a nude into the football. Aìso, ar the end of this bit of gro,rrrá, by of correctitude, railings and park-keepers; th1 going how with the world Rath down to the founrains, I had confro.r"t.d a litde parkees and violent dirt, no less. girl with a doll-like face with calred Heren who was the sister of a 134 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER CONSTRUCTION OF THE GOOD MOTHER 135 boy at my kindergarten. I longed to get to know her' I think a kind of warning. \¯hat else was to be made of the sharp, pale, ,,A1ma", tháre were ,o*, fights with possible friends on this piece of granite obelisk in the Long Walk, with the one word "rrd the scene of failures in early attempts at For with two steps and a platform edged by a decorous iron chain? ground, -sociabiliry' Le, oth., children, like the rest of the furniture of the park, were I think it might have been different if I had been allowed objects of potential danger. Any difference in upbringing and in routine indicated a lost soul: for I was wraPt by the prohibi- tions and rituals in which I was educated and in terms of which I still hoped to make ultimate resrirurion. Projected on to the face of the park and there apprehended, the struggle was ugly, torn, stern, harrowed and dirtied, redeemed slightly - and here a halÊconcealment of the most profound anxiety by figured - ^ morbid melodrama. I was a h"ppy boy. By that I mean thet both elders and found it diffìcult to decide where were the exact limits. A sense contemporari.i h"rr. told me that I gave them the impression of being happÁ healthÁ energetic. From my Perents I hadlove and gr."i."t.. There were occasional screaming fits, I am told, when Lts.d to shout without end, "I want it all right"' \¯hat did I want put right? I had best say the park, since there is very little else that I remember either of the pleasure or the pain. The park I remember well. I shall ìoo.t ,ry to give a picture of the other side of this predominanr srare but in a subsequent form. i shall show how mother was finally consrrucred, in the external world " good ,rÇll as in myself. Art has played an important role' This is perhaps foreshadowed by my vain scrutiny of the monuments i" ,h. park the giant Achilles statue at Hyde Park Corner, for instance, and, latér, the \¯atts equestrian statue in the middle of the Long \¯alk. I had high hopes of the'watts because it was new; I remember it veiled and then unveiled. such figures were to me stern yet impotent: figures of a father, then, who both attacked and. had been attacked. These srarues attempted to affront the sþyet theywere recipients of fog, of bird droppings and ofsoot: nd death were guarded with care- they seemed unconnecred with light. The Albert Memorial was senrryt footfall rhere was a silence of th. caregory, with vain groupings and pseudo-sacred steps. the greatest potential noise. Those stronger Here was I gir t fuss about solid matter; here wes a thing of walls held the greater danger. I delighted in the sentry; I delighted in all arrest which, unlike the prohibiting railings, protested as well as soldiers. He was controllrngihe explosive po#.r, within by his forbade. It took many years for me to discover that art was not drilled movemenrs. STOKES READER 136 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN CONSTRUCTION OF THE GOOD MOTHER 137

-üØhat I remember most would seem to belong to autumn and winter. But singing of birds, in spring especiallÁ the burst- ing buds on the trees, were not unnoticed: even a certain ..r,"ry in the air in early spring. The heart was not freed for long: the overlay of town smell and dirt, the very encourege- mettt by the onlooker of pastoral things, denied them a real- ity that was supreme. Railings, decorous iron chains and the park-keepers controlled such marionettes. I did not know thundeÁ lay upon the slight hill beyond the Rotten Row, seared of the earth. A row of hyacinths growing at Victoria with paths like slow rolling tears -G",.power of shame. He was a kind man -.r. "fixed" there by the authorities like the diminu- tive cockade in the top-hat of the coachman-like keeper of the Gate. And there was no horizon, no horizon at eny time' I associate Kensington Gardens most of all with years before I was six, Kensington Gardens rather than Hyde Park. From the time I was three until I was six, we had a very strict governess, a most patriotic Irish lady. If shoelaces came undone while out for a walk, there would be no jam for tea: if they again came undone, no cake either. This penalry fell particularly on my second elder brother to carch whom it was doubtless designed. I dont remember that it happened to me; nevertheless to this day I am extremely bad at improvising knots' After my broth- .rr h"d gone to boarding school, Miss Drew was dismissed for maltreating me, so it is said, in the park. My mother has since told me that she had a letter from someone who witnessed the bad temper. I remember nothing about it: indeed' I remember little about Miss Drew excepr that she had a watch in the shape of a sword pinned to her breasr, that she had moods ofvivacity as well as of hot remper and that she painted pictures of battleships in moonlight. After Miss Drew's time, the scene is more esPecially Hyde Park. My next cereteker was a Miss HarleÁ a morbidly reli- gious middleaged woman. Miss Drew had also been religious, ã C"tholi.. But now I was alone, without my brothers, as if come to represent a blindness. the war were already starting and the Edwardian world were already crashing. I had myself read in the Old Testament and had been deeply impressed by the effrontery shown by one side or the other in 138 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER CONSTRUCTION OF THE GOOD MOTHER -I39

as Design, lay in the effortless racing of Time itselfl Vision, as well glasses, the disrant passage of the King's funeral, seen in sþ alone. the distance from the balcony of the house. I had the makings of a true and terrible fanatic for whom a Both Mathilde and I worshipped the soldiers. For a time I universe; was single string of argument could trap the whole I clung to military pomq and discipline as a "solurion" of the park later at one with the more inhuman speakers at Marble Arch. and its environs. In earlier years I had tried to order the uni,n.rse At another period every secret of the universe was contained by the arranging of lead soldiers. If one fell I was inconsorabre. for me on the walls of a big bookshop' And so, the face of the park came in part to be symbolized There were, however, rare moments when the purlieus by a hybrid image of soldiers in scarret jãckets úy Marble Arch "nd known to me had stature. They were moments of Pageantry orators standing on soap-boxes. At this time, Matlilde and preceded by weeks of preparation. 1910 was the year of I sought the press of the crowd, in Rotten Row on a Sunday George V's coronation. saw morning Edward VIIt funeral, 1911 of I or around the bandstand of a summer evening. I have both processions. Vhat stays in mind were the long thin festive a pictorial, almost a Renoir-like, image _ the only on.'of ,hor. spear-heads, times, poles swathed in scarlet cloth, tipped with golden based, I have limle doubt, on much later experiences. For Even railings were is that lined both sides of Bayswater Road. it night, a dark, still night wirh rain in rhe air. The speak_ tipped with gilt. It was not the gaudiness so much as the pick- ers at Marble Arch are lit with their torches; rhe outer fringe of London ing out of features, the slight reerrangement of the whispering couples are lit by the ramps. \¯here it is densã the saw, as forgetfulness, which gave the street a life to me. I it crowd is dark. Hats are in silhouett., ,o too the railings behrnd that Bayswater Road was a thorough- the speakers. Beyond, were, for the first time unwhispe where a fare: some kind of plan appeared. But for a long time to come' beam of lighr rurns an outer frin melling apart from extreme religious fears especially for those I loved, grass that orherwise would have reveal some I relied principally on the reading of history to A soldier in a red tunic detaches himserf from the connection in the surrounding scene' ::o*9, takes the path across the park, probably making for The coronation brought soldiers to the park; thousands Knightsbridge barracks. I warch hi- goìttg bet*e..r th."frr- Harley had been were encamped. A year or rwo before, Miss flung lamps, making for the cenrre ãf ,n". p"rk so it Mathilde. I seems' "nd, succeeded by a Swiss, French-speaking governess, for the cenrre of the night since the iark symborizes She brought a think she must heve been a fairly normal girl. all. I watch him go, getting less icarlet. steadiåd uy irr. lamps, But the park held swaÁ and when we ate my thoughts homesick warmth. follow him into an immens. ,p"..; for he èas cream-filled chocolate bar which I had been forbid- t\.open space raspberry leachÁd where the enfolding iulse of the traÊ seats, my fic is den, sitting in the park on one of the forbidden besr felt. The lights, both near and disiant, srare: an iron some pleasure was not entirely sweet. I remember particularly urge is to be attributed both to the soldier and ro the preacher. bedroom slippers on which had been spilt an extremely sdcþ Once and for all, I.now pur up the railings inside myself. I jelly. sweetness in spread which I liked, called Frame food This have an inspired feeling of Destìn¡ of Duty. I wir follåw out the wrong place was agonizing. I used to wear those slippers the most exacting inner imperative. \ü/ith consistenr dutiful my because the nursery stood over my parents' bedroom and fire I will equal the coldnessãnd steadiness of the lamps; with father, at that time, lay fighting for his life although his imme- a cerrain inner talisman I shall part the murmuring Londo' diate death had been prophesied by doctors who were crowding sea; I shall prolong a selfless path with such resohition that through the the house. Later, he was to watch in a dressing-gown astonishing hideous pile oi the Hyde park hotel, so often 140 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER CONSTRUCTION OF THE GOOD MOTHER ]41 figuring on the limits of vision, shall fall defeated below man's horizon . . . Mathilde and I sought the crowds. Cross, genteel scents became familiar to me of a Sunday morning' The scene was shot with violent colour, of soldiers or perhaps of rhododendra. I think i attributed to these strong colours the power to strike, to hit out with the po\Mer of a dazzling wing. \¯ewould often go to feed the ducks, either in the Long'Water or in the Serpentine, taking bags of stale bread. I was aware of the possibilities of a certain ritual in the throwing of bread on the waters. The crumbs bobbed about and soaked; whereas the stale dry bread, particularly the brown, I found very apPetizing' It made me hungry; I grudged the food to the ducks. However, lay in trying to arrange for in the feeding, the interest partly on the near side of the tunnel there had been the parisian the ducks, or for any misguided bird on the outskirts, to have a share. Geese and baleful swâns were the enemies. The ducks were defenceless and kindhearted, unmackintoshed mothers fed on sodden crumbs. Their surrounding water looked extremely desolate. Sparrows were at our feet, gulls in the air' There \Mas no haze of delight in this rapacious hunger. FinallÁ the empty bag having been burst, the paper was Put to bob on the murþ water in accordance with the wind. The walk home was marked by the pessage underneath the Serpentine bridge. The dirry echoing tunnel with its lingering airs was cold at all times of the year. It was as if the Pessage lay beneath the dark water, here at its deepest according to a notice of warning. A dog would be barking like Cerberus. In view of the thunderous echoes, additional heads would have been in keeping. I think to this obscene hole I attributed the home of the animus that tore the body of the park to shreds; the parkee spirit that made the park poor, hungrÁ desolate.

Each man invents a myriad states to counter his inferno. They exist abreast of the inferno; compensations, mitigations, transfer- ences, controls, stern deletions, reparations. And so it has been with me. I have already referred to some of the priority repairs, as it were, by which an immediate patching uP was attempted' But ADRIAN STOKES READER 142 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN CONSTRUCTION OF THE GOOD MOTHER 143

Itis a scrubbed, sturdy, deal kitchen table, very bright: the towards the gay washing hanging below. lJnder the roof fact that it is solid, that it stands on the floor is beautiful. there is a broad band of fresco. (Gigantic mermaids wreck The mensa table - or rather, a nexus of such experience, since the fisher boats and tritons blow blue horns.) In a window it is most unlikely to have been in isolation - was a revolu- a birdcage dangles At first I think there is but one bird, tion in my life, an image the "feel" of which corresponds but the hops are now frequent and I see the cage is over_ with an adult image of a simple table prepared for an al fresco populated. The tiny movemenrs are so vivid that the great meal, the family midday meal under a fig ffee, with a fiasco damp sheets which hang from the side of the balcony -With "p"p.", of wine on the table, olives, a cheese and bread. one greÁ and the bundle berween the iron bars, nor a littlå girl. 'word I possessed in embryo the Virgilian scene: a robust You were young rhen too, and over the clamberirrg t.rrã... and gracious mother earth. of houses, each with a flat squere roof you had-arranged Although I continued to love Latin, and later Greek, until a cord. that joined,you ro my house, a little higher up on I came through the Mont Cenis, I did not rePeat this experi- the other side of the valley. By jerking thi, .orã we åuld ence so vividly. exchange exciting messages, words which the roar of the Even as a small child I took particular note of barrel-organs, mills on the brook berween could not silence. Inside the of their effect upon the neighbourhood. If their tunes were room is bric-a-brac, parricularly ornamental feathers dusty no substitute for the mensa experience yet somehow they had with canary seed. The breeze softly lifts the light wooden a connexion with it; an intetest, it would seem' in another frame of a mirÁor on the wall. As you jerk the-cord, sirens Italy, in the Baroque ltaly. are screaming in the harbour, rugs scurry and hoot, white From what I have attributed to the traffic in Hyde Park it figures below labour with sacks offlo.r, *hile, above, smoke will be obvious that I found in sound a most effective qualifica- rises straight and blue from the black volcano. tion of the visual world. A street became informed for me by The tune changes . . . Sometime rhe old men sat upon the the sounds of a barrel-organ. Everything had a new angle of mounrain, each upon a srone seat. Their heads touched ih. bl,r. light upon it, a new errangement with a centre pulsating like sþ. Night clarered on in valleys below and over nightt invisible a heart. Thus the street wes not only organized; it became an back a porrenr leaped. Another darkness, a cloud oi"rh.r, o,o.r_ organism, it came alive. The images of dismemberment and whelms the feeble day. some jump from rerrace to rerrace; from anxious aridity that haunted me \Mere not in this way dissi- vineyard and from vineyard, mothers round up their children, pated: but an element of drama, even of "healthy'' catastrophe, m_oving like Hecubas; while below upon the lowest road the fire was e relief. Aided by the pictures on my father's cigar boxes of the dying sun draws scarlet bands about the feet of fugitives, and on the barrel-organ and by visits to the pantomime, that is now extinguished by dust, now clutches et a ."r, .rporr"*hor. frame distant, anglicized cousin of the Commedia dellArte theatre , the winnowing petals open . . . a cefiemong th. ,"i' of ashes music in the street could provide me with a vaúety of scenes, and overtaken women bundled into fantastic attitudes: a cart, o1 on,. cerrs piled with -populated, Baroque, catastrophic. .and toppling bric-a-brac crowned by It is now a Neapolitan tune the Italian grinds; which sobbing childÁen, by basket and spring that last saw the full light says: the tall casa has painted shutters and each window a of day srrong in the early markett on ãnd on to the ,." th"t ,[., painted rococo entablature, brown uPon the pink stucco of from the bosom of a gully ahead like a gown that opens its velvet the wall. Families cluster at the rickety balconies. A man grasp and leaves the shoulders bare. Cruel, .rr.r, ,å", you throw no rescue beats a carpet; the flotsam floats and swims in the sunlight ropes. uprooted olive trees festoon the road as it rocks. ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER 144 CONSTRUCTION OF IHE GOOD MOTHER 145

Light of this last day is butchered by lava and steam: yet, every either side of the train, purple earrh, rerraces of vine and olive, shoots emong the bright rectangular now and then, a bloody ray of seared sun-fire houses free of atmosphere, of the passage of fugitives. time, of impedimenr, of all the qualities which rr..p misi,oe 'W'e and there, "rrd survivors, as \il'e approach the gullÁ look back roofs connote in the north. The hills belonged ,o in this his the -"., sure enough, above the black of the earthquake and of momenr. The rwo thousand years of virgili"n p"rt that carved red vepour, above the well-established night that glows with and habituated the hillsides did not opprÃr; th.y *.r. gathered against a blue In this illicit warmth, the old men sit agleam sþ. in the presenr especr. At the stations bllore Tirrin, th. p",.rr. ,rot. they still possess the day. Surely we wake of the guardt horn , cursed double night but sustained and reinforced the p.o..s, by to their tomorro\M when at dawn, stiff after dead sleep uPon the which dme was here laid our as ever-presenr space. search deck of the rescue ship, we pluck the morning air and \¯e arrived at Tirrin in the late afternoo.r. Th.r. was a change- deep . . with sudden glance the shimmer of the cold and velvet ' with a wait of half an hour. on a row platform in the clean electric spece - shadowless, it would seerrl- I stood enraptured. It is noticeable that not only were these fantasies provoked I watched the sþ berween the trains and the edge of th. ht,g. sound but contain in them the projection of e deal of gradual curve of the station by Sreat roof. The sþ was 'paler blue noise. Even the scenes of my early childhood sustained their life but was still close, like the near round of '* " -Vhere ,..r-p.rr. through movement, the circulation of traffic. there is Day gave wey ro night without misgiving. Soorr, in the new movement there is noise, and from the noise we fashion images train, ir was enrirely dark. Although foÁ thi last hours of the of movement. Iear, the air was soft, tendeÁ a darkness as of a perfect_fitting other- In our urban life, sound qualifies visually scenes which lid. After dinner in the resrauranr car, mosr of th. passengers wise are confusing and meaningless to the eye. Vhat the eye had left, the tablecloths were removed. on the other sidã of alone might perceive is inhuman to a degree. The arts today the gangwaÁ one table ahead, I again saw the mensa table. Not concerned with interrelationship of sound and movement, the plain deal table, it is true. But two Italians sat there with life-giving particularly ballet, are able to draw uPon e wealth of instant faces. Between them in a fiasco was the wine, and to f"nt"ry which in one form or enother is common to millions. my ears they talked like Romans. Their warm precipitation of Thus, the barrel-organ did not restore in the fullest sense life sustained, as it seemed ro me, by the glowini reflected light the visual world for me. Such was my anxiery and consequent of thousands of sunlit years, banished -.-ori.Jof Hyde paik. less than an ambition that it could be satisfied with nothing Instead of the Serpentine, I saw the Mediterran.".r, ,h. end of sound and my journey. instentaneous, silent manifestation, independent of In their eyes I read the pleasure of housetops and of a dramatization of the passage of time: a happy co-existence, of different levels. mensa the table. It then, of things in space after the manner of l¯e were in an elecrric train. \¯hile we stopped ar Genoa, is possible, following an older habit, that the intrusion of sound I could imagine a giant taut ciry above the M.àiterranean. A be serv- young will still provide apoint d'¿ppui, but it will nevertheless man with a red scarf escorrs his sweetheart to the train. He ing an entirely different effect. is uglÁ but he, too, holds in his eyes the pleasure of the housetops and the different le As the train came out of the Mont Cenis tunnel, the sun shone, painted walls that float in the sha the sþ was a deep, deep, bold blue. I had halÊforgoften about The train began to move thro my table for more than ten years. At once I saw it everywhere' on the many lighted windows of cl STOKES READER 146 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN CONSTRUCTION OF THE GOOD MOTHER 147 apartment, I felt, there is this h"Ppy evening return' a state of the a revealing of things in the Mediterranean sunlight, beyond any nìght which is sheer acquisition; in which, like the men in the previous experience; I had the ne\M sensarion that the air was train, the inhabitants take up the night by expending the strength touching things; that the space berween things touched rhem, of a Latin day. Their talk is now the balustrades' the terraces, the belonged in common; that space itselfwas .r.,.rly revealed. There balconies spread out uPon the harbour, the radiant open places of was a nearness in the light. Nothing hid or \Mas hidden. soon, the town. The ebb and flow of conversation, still more, of gesture, an. electric train passed, gliding with ease on the hard way just reconstruct the thoroughfares. As the train glided on' more and below, entered a tunnel. unlike the electric rrains on Londonk more peep-shows appeared at every angle to the line. The inhabit- metropolitan railway which had always been a disturbance, this ants had no need for blinds; since no dominant misery and no train and the tunnel did not prolong themselves inside me. It surfeit of unexpressed emotion lurked inside them, there was seemed thar for the first time things were happening endrely nothing beyond the houses to be shut out. outside me. Existence was enlarged by the miiacle oithe ne"t Meanwhile in a straight passage the train was passing houses defining light. Here was an open and naked world. I could not on every level to the line, now above them' now on a level with then fear for the hidden, for what might be hidden inside me and the second storey, now at the foot, now crossinSegreatviaduct. those I loved. I had, in fact, incorpoiated this objective-seeming I had the sensation of passing through the inside as well as along world and proved myself consüu-ed by the general refulgence. the outside of the houses; never before had I been so much at Nothing, for the time, lurked, nothing bit, ,rothi.rg lurchá. home. There was every kind of light, perhaps a darkness excePt As I think now of that valley at Rapallo thar goes up to Mont from the windows, perhaps a lit campo with ever-busding h"PPy AJlegro, as I think of the afrernoon winter ,rr.rIighr, i h",0. th. ûees tenacious of root, silent and soft, or a terraced garden sensation of a sound which contains .',,r.ry ,ror., prolonged, with an easy iron gate and steps uPon the prospect' There was a entirely sustained, as good beneath as above, " *,rrrd ih", conspiracy abroad of universal triumph informing even the roads, provides every aural wanr; ar the same time it is itself the epirome the pavements and the harshest stucco. And when we stopped of complete realization. Nature spreads and mounts b.for. m., fixed at stations beyond Genoa, at Nervi for example, and finally at and growing, changeless in the crearness of its cycle. I have Rapallo, the air held scents of flowering trees and of eucalyptus here the means of action, a demonstration, not of the purpose of en-losing and disclosing the villas mounting on their gardens. I life but of the power of life to be manifesr; nor of o.r. thing but drove in a carriage through the town to the pension. Echoes of of the calm relationship of many things, concrere things,"each the horses' hooves upon the cobbles brought with them from the bound to each by an outwardness that ailows no afte.tho"ught to walls a sensation of their diurnal brightness. At the end of the the spectator: an ourward showing goes within him. An ing "rr"r*.r_ ride, the horse was walking up a steeP incline through the garden life wells to the surface, and he feels - hence the great beaury The of Mediterranean to the pension, a large fuviera villa set behind a balustrade. landscape - that the process of a mant exis- scents intensified; there was the sound of waters falling to the tence is ourward, giving shape, precise conrour to the few things sea. Church bells began, and then reng out from every side, from that lie deepest; wharever the d sromion they murually endow, overhanging levels as well as from distances; swift, hammering, making the expendirure in terms of a surface we call expression, light bells. It was midnight, the new year. be it in acrion, art or thought. On waking in the morning I saw through the open French windows, over the top of a russet-red villa with green shutters, The outside world, our own bodies, other people and mate_ the Mediterranean, the place-name of our civilization. There was rial things point the goal of ourwardness. The rt{editerr".re"r, 148 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER CONSTRUCTION OF THE GOOD MOTHER 14g

scene invokes the universal aim. In adult life, my models have world afflicted. Give over everything ro science without a qualm. been things rather than persons. For a new glory illumines the imaginative life, a purer imagina_ degree, whatever the distortion, all But whatever the tive life whence ir is conceived anã cailed ,o the vicåries surroundings. The broad "ftå, men impute themselves to their of science. Yet it will be rhis imaginative life, aesthetic "rrurh',, distorted aspect of the innermost informs every of fantasÁ which Pafticle will define by contrast the truth of science. Let us the huge outlying space. not be frightened to apply that word "fanrasy'' to what we value Even a sense of duration or succession discovers itself occa- mosr. Fanresy cannor be undermined if utier devotion is arso sionally as a simultaneity, as forms arranged in space. I do not paid to truth. . The most profound object of contemplation is the think that e more direct account of my relations with people relationship of fantasy with realiry berween the partial and the would reveal as much as this sperse account of a contempia- impartial. .,r"1,.,. To make the distinction absolut., ,o both of its relation the external world. Doubtless it is a proof tive with terms) will be the highest achievement of man. of neurosis. It determines, however, without prejudice, the The longer flights of fantasÁ of course, attain aesthedc aesthetic aim to cause surroundings to describe matters less "trurh". Science and art, that is pror. and poetry: and what immediate, perhaps, but often more profound than ere a relief "il, it is, the rele_ase from mumbo ;,rmbo ofi.,,.ri kind, from revealed by reminiscences; further, to illustrate (given the the. prose-poetry of the ages which iears miserabÇ thin, weft biological essence) that the human process is aesthetic in so and warp tearing each other. outwardness the far as it is outlined against the beckoning of It will be asked: what of religion? external world. The belief in durable good is essentiar to well-being. Bereft of Of course it is basic human relationships, above all, it altogether we die. The orÁginar essence is a berief in ti..ffi.".y that my two landscapes describe. Hyde Park is especially a of love. ve need a sense of ãptimism armost at the cenrre of our destroyed and contaminated mother, Italy the rapid attemPt beings if we are to sleep well. It is far more important to us than to restore. In their terms, and it would seem to me in their truth. How much truth can be borne? ìØe lào*, all of us, or rerms alone, could I re-create succinctly the division, the are capable of knowing apart form the compulsion of neurosis, incorporation of opposites. that religion is simply nor rrue. Bur can *. áo wirhout it, and if so, how? For assuredly in everyday life and in cerrain situations EnvotiÁ in particulaÁ the feeling of uldmate soricitude is indispensable, even if the strength that ensues is not much drawn up;. It is at Again \Me must reach a new communion between the inner and worsr a shield from exposure ro Nature in the raw. The the external worlds. This time it is a godless outside world. \¯e only way ro do without religion or without any substi_ tute rarionalization are would-be gods in a godless world. is to welcome and foster rhe original sense Give all over to science. It is the way of truth, the only way to of interior goodness both as a fantasy and as f"ir"ry ,h", corresponds " peace of mind. And science will grow to proportions even more with the.very working of life: for there is onÇ lo.,re and death, -.r.".,rr., monstrous, monstrous that is, were they to be seen by the eyes of and it behoves living for their *.1á.. to carry deep our generation uneasy and miserable in a halÊway house amid a inside them the love of love. It is possibre and desir- able, then, to subsist on something nearer the original i-;;ir. rather than ii From "Envoi" to Wnice: An Aspect of Art, 1945; Critical \Y/ritings II, on its more extensive rationalization which so often t34-r38. challenges truth and so often is paralysed by truth. A"y d%;" ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKE5 READER 150 CONSTRUCTION OF THE GOOD MOTHER 151

makes impossible demands upon the intellect. The private mFh, known to the owner es a myth, can possess something of the beauty of organized religion, although for the most Part it is voiceless and incommunicable. In future ages it will be seen that the ordinary mant concePtions of his mother' in her good and bad aspects, are, where formulated' more profound, more touch- dialectics of Good and arrogance ing, more poetic than all the systems and and sadism finds expression in dogma, the stress is Evil. It may be found that the belief or trust in the good object shifted to guilt. ' inside, as one might call it, entails some degree of aversion from realiry. Some degree of dissociation in personal metters would seem inevitable. Now, I would not claim that such belief in the good inner object can equal the pervasiveness of living religion which exist: there can be no other explanation for mant conceiving of diviniry' possesses a god or gods who walk the eerth, where the outside But we are in a positioì ro say that since we harbour the idea world is dizzy with an actual presence and with the miracle of a good object (i.e. God), and since without it we should involved. Such exteriorization carries the familiar process in a most dramatic form. Still, much meaning is destroyed; much prosaic meaning is lost in the zest for an all-consuming poetry. And this same poetry soon settles down into a dull and distort- ing and enslaving prose-poetry, the greatest of all shackles on 'We object. we human progress. too must exteriorize the internal who are the gods in a godless world. And as it is with God, \¯e must follow the process of life knowinglÁ and the more so it is with the Devil. willinglÁ above all, the more consistently. Because of its false- hood, too much evil is done in the name of religion. But for us, the death instincts will play a smaller parr in our exteriorization of love except admittedly es serYant. \¯here they equal or are

unlike religious belief which, for the most Pert, is divorced from religious experience. And even religious experience is often dominated by fear and sense of guilt rether than love. The good object, too, no doubt, is largely built upon a foundation of guilt feeling. It is there to fill the frequent void. \¯ithout it we should be at the mercy of our aggression. Nevertheless it is a good object, it is a repository of love and generosiry not the 152 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER CONSTRUCTION OF THE GOOD MOTHER 153 and contemplate in comPleteness men's desire. I should say, the awere that neither his mother nor the surrounding world is an rest of man's desire, since some part of feeling finds expression in extension of himself. Henceforth, to his dying daÁ there remains impartial thought. the huge division berween himself and objects, people or things. There is, thãn, again today a Pungent dualism, as in the days Throughout life we seek to rival the externaliry of things. The of Giorgione, a more vivid current, as it were' passing beween world as we perceive it, our animal habitat, is the language of the polãs of subject and object. Fantasy requìres fact and vice every passing mood or conremplative state. Indeed, without this ,r.rr". Th. uneasy masquerade of a ftenzied fact is played out' canves, as ir were, on which to apply ourselves, by which we proj- 'We will seek truth and "aesthetic truth"; we will increase the ect and rransmure as well as satisfy more direct biological nèeds, importance of art. \Me cennor conceive the flow of the mind any more than the For we come to realize that artistic creation - and this point activity of the body. The body is obviously meaningless without has been stressed over and over again - is the epitome of all a further exrernel world; but so too is the mind. Mental as well living processes. Stimuli conjoin as e parrern; action no less than \Within ,.rr,.r-"rr.. obtains its definite form from the mental flow' the terms of a particular stimulus the whole of mans experi- ence is expressed anew each moment of consciousness, just as in art the petterns of the mental life are made known through our errangement the exquisite errangement of space. the data of th. senses. Like a work of art, consciousness is a kind of concenrrating reflector of the manifold spirit. By means of the perspective of a Particuler stimulus' every aspect has a place' ho*.rr.i minute. There proceed ceaselessly correlation, rational- ization, distortion. Always, something is expressed in terms of other things. Substitution is the constent factor of mental activ- iry.To.r."r. is to substitute. Consciousness is made up of realiry sensarions and of substitutions, of reality and its image. Man is alive rwice over: he has the power both to live and to enlarge upon living. He is alive in reality and in image. construction 'an \¯ith the aid of reason, man constructs images from the in character. orì, ceaseless material of a few primary emorions. Each fresh comPo- satisfying of t the sition uses anew rhe material of all previous structufes. To me I repeat: it is obvious that fantasy should not have part in it is strange that no mysrique has attached itself to this process. science. Yet it has done in all thought anrerior ro science, has Every philosophy is based uPon an opposition of terms' Its aim is either to áescribe their interaction and find the absolute in the inreraction or combination itself, or else to reduce the one ro terms of the other and thereby creare an absolute. It is worthwhile ro conremplate in a. way that philosophers have not done before philosophizing, the generic pair of opposites that hold in duress the fluid emotions. Images encese thought in which our lives are casr. The newborn baby soon becomes and are articulated by thought, but they are nor primarily ihe 154 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER products of thinking. Consciousness is no more of the mind APPENDIXONE ihan the surface is of the sea. And just as the surface of the sea lies opposite to the sþ and, indeed, is thus defined, so does consciousness lie opposite to the external world. Mental processes, unknown in themselves, obtain entry to conscious- ness through speech. Symbolic substitution, even before speech, is natural to the infant. The basis of speech is substitution, the To create is to substitute. basiz of all projection. Donald MeltzerÁ The external world is the sounding-board of the emotions. That is selÊevident: nevertheless, in contemplating the eternal poetry of Giorgion e's Tempest¿' it has seemed a discovery.

n 15 December 1972, in a lovely terraced Georgian house in Church Row, the -ori b.",rriful streei in Hampstead, the country playground of eighteenth- century London, Adrian Stokes (1902-1972) died quietly and with great dignity, painting to the very last despite the impair- ment from brain metas tases of a rectal carcinoma. His life was both a private and a public one of unflagging devotion to art and to psychoanalysis - and to b uilding a bridge berween the two that will stand for genera tlons He was born in London and educated at Rugby and Magdalen College, Oxford. Handsome and sociabl., ä rrrp..b tennis player and gifted speaker, his life was equally divided between the scholarship of an hisrory, painting, ånd participa- tion in the worlds of art and psychoãnarysis. He numb.ied meny of the mosr distinguished figurés of both worlds among his personal friends: Ezra pound, Naum Gabo, D. H. Lawrence, Roger Money-Kyrle, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, and manÁ many others. He served the Täte Gallery nore i.^1 ,þi:q*fhical . on AdÁian Stokes,,, Contemporarlt psychoanalysìz (1974), l0: 342-345.

1CE STOKES READER 1s6 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN APPENDIX BY DONALD MELTZER 157 for several years end saved the work of the Cornish primitive' Alfred 'sV-allis, from destruction ar the time of the artist's death in poverty and obscurity. He was among the first Padents of Melanie Klein when she came to England, and this experience coloured his life and activities thereafter. In 1950,with the musi- cian Robert Still, he founded the Imago Sociery of London'

collections. so much then for his status. To define his stature is less simple, for his thought was deep, his aesthetic intuition sure, and his mode of expression poetic, but not easy. His chief areas of study were the Russian ballet, art and architecture of the Italian Tiecento and Quattrocento' painting of the impres- sionists, and culture of the Greeks. From this mélange, with the theories, chiefly those of Melanie Kle preoccuPation with the inside and out dy, he fashioned an aesthetic theory' Although its evolution was slow and irs eventual structure r.*r., ã"pounded, it has been pulled together in Professor Richard \¿ollh.i-'r edition of a collection or rarher selection of the works of Mr Stokes, The Image in Form (1972).

(1963). To Adrian Stokes emodon \Mas thecentral phenomenon of mind, and art the central record of emotion in civilization. constant operation and oscillation of these two processes was 'When he embraced psychoanalysis, and the developments of es necessary for the development of a work of art as itwas for Melanie Kleins thinking, in particular, he did so because the the evolution of mental structure in the child. theories seemed to him to throw an unparalleled light on the In consequence of this emphasis on the thirst for knowl- as what \¯ittgenstein has called "a edge, art and science were absolutely fused phenomenology of art . in Adrian stokes' ior- of life". \¯hile he decried the psychoanalytical tradition view, and must be fused if creative work was to supplant initiated by Freud in papers such as Leonardo, Gradiua, and mere skill. It seemed to him absolutely natural that pierå ieila Dostoyeusky, in which the personal aspect of the content of the Francesca should have been interested in mathematics, for 158 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER

Newton to be a theologian, and for \¯ittgenstein to be a musi- APPENDIXTWO cian. Nor did he ever doubt that in the most skilled hands, a cultured mind could make both a science and an art form of psychoanalysis. Had other interests not called him so urgendy and other talents not so early found their means of expres- sion, he would have made a splendid psychoanalyst. He was a splendid man. Eric RhodeÁ

from being Olympian, Tl "r Adrian Stokes was among the þ most hospitable of men: alert to distress in others"and

both receptive to ideas and able to enjoy the pleasures of small talk. But even on a first meeting with him it became clear that the essential Stokes was a viry private person. He was involved in some communion with himself that could not be intruded into; at the same time, and in no manner, could this communion be ignored. It shone forth in his aspect: in crowded rooms his look of vurnerable nobility set hiÅ apart. And its richness spilled out in conversation, as in his som.- times obscure stating of a viewpoint that fascinated by the breadth of its connecrions, or inìhe lucid, casual ,.m"rÉ th"t could cur ro the quick of an argument. He had nothing to do with what he describes in one ãf th.r. papers as the "rinceas- ing expostularion" of polite society. It would be natural, yer roo limited, ro see the content of his thought in rerms of his life-long allegiance to the a*s or, more

"IntÁoductioti' i to A Game That Must Be Lost (Stokes, 1973), pp. I_5. 160 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER APPENDIX BY ERIC RHODE 161

rigid and overcontrolled rypes of thinking that sometimes (and misleadingl/ go by the name of reasoning. "The question is whether reasoning itseif, as a process, is shorn away from the rest of the mind." Stokes not only acknowledges, in a quotation from one of R. E. Money-Kyrle's .rr"yr, ,h", the first time. However, on a later visit to the National Gallery the power to differentiate, so crucial to reasoning, comes into 'W'e he gave every sign of being at home. wandered among the play at the same time, if not before, the capaciry for displace_ Venetians. \¯henever he made an observation on the paint- ment and condensation (two of the mechanisms ascribed to 'ings, as when he referred to Titian's deftness in suggesting the the primary process: the logic of whose operarions, it has been .or,onrc of an old man's shoulder, he did so sparely' His plea- thought, is primitive in the sense that it evades the exigencies of as sure was intimate. Although he sometimes \Mrore about art the human predicament), but he also demonsrrates thát arr es a cultural institution is, like culture itself, "witness ro an unceasing concern' whatever the reasonableness of which we are capable, with inner life", that 'ïisual perception, in particulaÁ involves a sorting out, â grasping, of relevant differentiation" as subtle and who work everything up into a frenzy, he sensed the enry yet es forceful as the most impressive kinds of reasoning. Art,. underlying the post-Romanric idealization of the artist that he writes, "revivifies, enlarges upon, the link berween all irental' attends so much modern PublicitY' and active apprehensions of outside things together with rheir But his communion extended beyond art, or even the most introjections." sensitive forms of aesthetic response, to the widest concern with In later years, and with characteristic generositÁ he did enter- wholeness and the ways in which intelligence can bring together tain the possibiliry that some of his ideas might have been trans- senserion and thought. Indeed, the theme that threads together posed into a more eccessible sryle. In all fairness to him, though, these papers, so rhar each reinforces rhe other, gently delineates it should be added that his wish to apply psychoanalytic .or,..þr, the intricacy of this communion, consisting as it does of a to art $/es in keeping with the wide-ranging idea of intelligence that he had acquired from the psychoã.r"lyrt Melanie Iil.irr, which he both celebrates in these pepers and develops by the emphasiz he places on the peramounr importance of co.rt.mpl"- tion. No aspecr of experience need be excluded by .ontemplr_ tion, he surmised; and no one wes less touched than he by the Shavian nodon of intelligence as a walking head. A, yo.r.rj-"., " he had been an athlete, and he w"s aware that to ,.i"r"r. "lw"ys the integration of the athlete or ballet dancer from any definition of intelligence could only weaken that definition. úu. work- ing for long periods at his paintings, he found it herpful to take timlo{to__watch spons programmes on televisiorl ih. grace of the footballer or rennis-playeÁ he used ro say, stre.r[thened his capacities ii See extract above, ChaPter 1 for co-ordination. And he liked to tell of häw Ben AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER -163 162 ART APPENDIX BY ERIC RHODE

Nicholson and he used to be stimulated, when playing billiards' maintained, derive many of their attributes from the abiliry of by the changing petterns of the balls on the green baize. both artisr and spectator ro commune with such objects. Neither In the opening section of this book he covers three subjects wor\ oj an nor good objecr coerce; they invite. ih.y .rr,r.lop physical- that, at first sight, seem disconnected: the unconscious us while at the same time remaining other. Ugliness, on thè use of language; iry and shapeliness inherent in the least sensitive contrery' is strident. one of the reasons why "baJsmells" offend some of the reasons why social conventions are so restricted; p.olite sociery he argues, is that they overpower, stifle, do not and the significance of certain ball games. Yet in each case he allow us the possibiliry to discriminaie. wes the shows how aesthetic contemplation - which for him By seeing how the act of disinteresred contemplation rein_ 'most thought, ^ unforced way of experiencing the blossoming of forces our identification with all that we find inspirrng and good a common source in these perception and feeling- could discover fe waÁ able, through an understanding of the *id. å."r,iíg of different themes. He enacts what he means by contemplation in this idendficarion, to bring e range of-.,.r.*p..ted allusion írro revised many "Form in art", e paper first drafted in I93l and his thought. Many readers coming to his writing for the first times. \¯hile evoking the Rembrandt portraits in the National time are most impressed by the wit of these alluiions without GallerÁ he lays stress on the muscular resPonse that comes about quite recognizing how securely they depend on argument. yet and sees this movement towards he was- with the correlating of vision being more than fancifi l, o, .r.r, perceptive, when he n'rhe integration as mobilizing and bringing together some of the least recalled rhar smell of Madeira ."ke .an be identical with of this accessible aspects of the mind. But he defines the qualiry the smell of cold roast chicken" or that "ir is ro drink in with "Primary thinking and integration most succinctly in Process' conflict e sunny day that a crowd arrives at Lords: for cricker a that popular rePresenta- art" when he describes how scientist, seems to make the day even sunnier, and similarry the width of considers a landscape: tive of reasoning at its most abstract, sþ the size of green." The act of contemplation, he proposes, always carries with His thoughts before the landscape are by no meens circumscribed it the poignancy of renunciarion as well as with considerations of strata or density of population. The shapes an underrow of conflict. It is far from the "good form" of polite society "average at which he looks, whatever the object of his immediate attention, where convenrional behavtur keeps b.for. ,r, inner landscape. I have not in mind a dulled image of are bound to encounter the the good and bad, the orr. -,rddied by the the other. here the perception of a phallic symbol, saÁ in a tree, but If the bad can be held in strict resrraint, so can the gåod." the total configuration as a symbol, an aspect of is "good impingement of It fàr from the form" of the sporrsmen: too often the n uis-à-uis the outside world at large, to which psy- 'þood s)Árnbolizatio loser" in sport screens "the danger of absolute loss with are not inclined to prolonged attention. the.easy choanalysts Pay acceptance of conditionar rossJ An importanr concern in the three His Tävistock Press series of books has investigated some of essays on the death instincr, rhat -"è. ,rp the second part of this the ways by which art distils this process. He thought that the collection of papers, is indeed to show håw the act of co_ntemplation contemplation of art encourages the sPectator to recognize the is related to- the capacity for bearing "rhe danger of absolute "total configuration as a symbol" through the structure of what loss". The death instinct, he surmises, is more than en aggregare he called "the image in form". And he believed that the contem- of the desrructive impulses in the self; it has its own life-giving plation of art, even more than the contemplation of landscape, componenr. He sets gr."t ,ror. on the possibiliry that iould bring the spectator to an intuitive understanding of i.n all life-gìving and life-preserving responses there is mingled inchoate self might identi$' with those internal how the often an impulse, however faint, o refusa_I, in virtue of whicFino call "good objects". \¯orks of art' he crearure figures that psychoanalysts needs to be taught about death ... I think that from the 164 ART AND ANALYSIS: AN ADRIAN STOKES READER

other very beginning the impulse of refusal is felt within REF ER ENCES AN D B I BuOG RAP HY instinctual responses and tends to increase them, as might a slowly departing train the response of a man who would catch it. Against calculation, feelings of triumph or indifference and other denials of loss, he places the experience of resignation, the sense of reconciliation with onet lot, most vivid when we contemplate:

'We shall have found that a beloved place never looked so beauti- ful as at the moment when we had to leave it, probably for ever . . . To gaze et the garden is no longer to include in the impres- sion our concern: the moment has come when the struggling fower or weed demonstrates fully a singular peace. All perfec-

tion is close to death . . .

To wish to die at a moment of fulfilment contains the thought' perhaps, that in so dying it is we who depart and leave the scene undisturbed. Readers of the Tavistock Press books will have realized that in the last years of his life Stokes' views on the future of art' technology and the community were bleak. He thought there was little hope. At the same time he acknowledged that the impending threat of his own annihilation distorted Percep- tion and he treasured the little hope he could perceive. His last sustained piece of writing "The future and ert", first addressed Car rro d fts Aesthetes: as a lecture to young audiences in Camberwell and Chelsea, bf p¿ter Adri¿n all conflict he was able to hold onto discloses how in spite of sP a steadiness that neither counselled despair nor (and it can be equally cruel as advice) manic utopianism. "Maybe even the journeys to the moon will prove to have fixed our feet the more firmly on this various planet." As the final days of his life ebbed his friends of his newly found peace of awaÁ he told many of Freud, S. (1915). The (Jnconscioas. S. 8., 14: 166_204. mind: he had rediscovered, with an added conviction, that this Freud, S. (1925). Negation. S.8.,19:235_239. place never looks so beautiful as at the moment when Freud, S. (194i beloved [1938]). Findings, ideas, problems fmarginal notes]. we have to leave it. S. E.,23:300. GloveÁ (2009). N. Psycho¿naþtic Aestbetics: An Introduction to the British School. London: Harris Meltzer Tiust. Cowing, (1978). (Ed.). L. Critical lVritings of Adrian Stoþes.3 vols. London: Thames 8¿ Hudson. AND BIBLIOGRAPHY 166 REFERENCES REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY 167

Read, Grazianí, R. Adrian Stokes and the psychoanalltic' Adri.an Stoþes. R. F.-L, r;c of^1 Adrian/ ) http: //www. pstokes. demon. co. uk. stoþes 7!{'* Read, Hulks, D. (2001). Painting, atom bombs and nudes: symbolism in the R. nd Adrian Stokes,s Iater psychoanaþic writings of Adrian Stokes. Journal of asy, providence and isolation in post-war Psychoanaþic Studies, 3 (l): 95'109. History, Z5 (4): 77 S-79 5. the Langer, S. (1942). Philosophy in a New Key: A Stady in Slmbolism Rh d introducti on. A Game That Must Be Lost: of Reason, Rite, and Arr. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Collected Pap shire: Carcaner press. Lewin, B. D. (1948). Inferences from the dream screen. Intern¿.tion¿l Reprinted in Joarn¿l of Psychoanaþsis, 29 : 234-241. Sayers, J. (2000) Out. Oxford: poliry Kite, S. (2008). Ad'rian Stoþes: An Architectonic Elte' Leeds: Legenda. Press. Smith, Kite, S. (".d.).The affìrmation of the eye. Adrian Stoþes. http://www. P. (2002). and Adrian Stokes (on Cézanne). pstokes.demon.co.uk. In: s.), A Companion to Art Klein, M. (1957). Enult ¿nd Grati.tud¿: A Study of Unconscious Forces' Tbeory,pp. 19 London: Hogarth Press. Stokes, A. (1925). The n: Kegan paul Stokes, (1926). Klein, M., & Rivière, J. Q937). Loue, Hate ¿nd Reparation. London: A. Sun Interjretation of p¿st Hogarth Press. and Present. Londo Clunie Press' Stokes, (1932). Meltzer, D. (1973). Sexual States of Mi'nd. Perthshtre: A. The Qu¿ttro Cento: A Dffirent Conception of the Reprinted Harris Meltzer Tiust, 2008' Itali¿n Renaiss¿nce. London: Faber & Faber. New .¿i,io.r, l. Carrier 6¿ Meltzer, D. (1974). A biographical note on Adrian Stokes. S. Kite (Eds.), The eu¿mo Cento and Stones of Rimini. Contemporary Psychoan¿þsis, l0: 342-345. Reprinted in this Farnham: Ashgate, 2002. Stokes, volume, Appendix 1. A. London: Faber & Faber. New (1983). Life.Perthshire: Clunie Press. Reprinted edition MeltzeÁ D. Dreatn .), The eu¿ttro Cento ¿nd Stones Harris Meltzer Tiust, 2008. of Rtm; z. Stokes, (1934). Meltzer, D., & Stokes, A. (1963). Concerning the social basis of art' A. Tonight the Ballet. London: Faber & Faber. Stokes, (1935). In: A. Stokes, Painting and the Inner World, pp. 19-46. Reprinted A. Russian B¿llets. London: Faber & Faber. Stokes, (1937). in D. Meltzer & M. H. \¯illiams, The Apprehension of Beaury' A. Coloar and Forrn. Revised edition, 1950. London: Perthshire: Clunie Press, 1988. Faber & Faber. London: Stokes, A. (1945). Milner, M. (1950). (1950). On Not Being Able to Paint. Wnice: An Aspect ofArt. London: Faber E¿ Faber. Heinemann. Stokes, A. (1947). Cézanne. London: Faber 6¿ Faber. Milner, M. (1955 ll952l). The role of illusion in symbol formation. In: P Heimann, M. Klein & R. E. Money-Kyrle (Eds.), New Di.rections in Psychoanaþsis. London: Tavistock; reprinted in M. Milner, The Suppressed Maàness of Sane Men (1960), pp.234-240. Money-Kyrle, R. E. (1968). Cognitive Development. International (with Stokes, (1949). Journal of Psychoanaþsis, 49: 691-698. Reprinted postscript) A. Art ¿nd Science: A Study of Atberti, piero delk in D. Meltzer (Ed.), The Collected Papers of Roger Money-Iþrle. Francesca ¿nd Giorgion¿. London: Faber & Faber. Stokes, A. (1951). Perthshire: Clunie Press, 1978. Smootlt and Rough. London: Faber & Faber. (1955). Read, R. E. (19S8). "Art today'': Stokes, Pound, Freud and the word- Stokes, A. Michekngelo, A Study in the N¿ture ofArt. London: image opposition. Word and' Image, 14 (3),227-252. Tavistock. 168 REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stokes, A. (1956). Raphael: 1483-1520. London: Faber & Faber" INDEX Stokes, A. (1958). Greeþ Calture and the Ego: A Psitcho¿naþtic Suruey of Greeþ Ciuilization and ofArt London: Tävistock. Stokes, A. (1958). Monet: 1840-1 926. London: Tâvistock' Stokes, A. (1961). Three Ess¿ys on the Pai'nting of Our Time' London: Tävistock. Stokes, A. (1963). Painting ¿nd the Inner World (includ'ing ¿ dialogue with Donald Mehzer). London: Tâvistock. . Stokes, A. (1964). Living in Ticino. Art and Literãture, li 232'238' Stokes, A. (1965). The Inuitation in Art' London: Tâvistock' Stokes, A. (1967). Reflections on the Nude. London: Tävistock' Stokes, A. (1972). The Im¿ge in Form: Selected Writings, ed' R' \¯ollheim. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Stokes, A. (1973). A Game That Must Be Lost: Collected Papers, ed' E' Rhode. Cheshire: Carcanet Press. Stokes, A. (1973). CriticalWritings, ed. L. Gowing' 3 vols' London: Thames E¿ Hudson. ed. P. Robinson. Stokes, A. ( 1 93 1 ). With Alt the Views : Co llected Poems, tWorthing: Littlehampton Book Services. aesthetic conflict xiv, rociv and .s7'illiams, nature of aesthetic infantt experience 63,49 M. H. (1988). Holding the dream: the aesthetic criticism 'S7illiams, Áori nurrured by architecture 62 appreciation. In: D. Meltzer, D', 8¿ M. H. The aesthetic effecrs72 and sexua_l parallel 45,47 Apprebension of Beauty, pp. 178-199. Perthshire: Clunie Press' see , ako carving and modelling archerypal figures 60, 104 Reprinted Harris Meltzer Thust, 2008. aesthetic truth 152, 153 architecture (2008). A post-Kleinian model for aesthetic criticism. aggresslon 'Williams, M. H. and the body 34, 39, G4,74, PsyArt Journal. http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/shod and envy 3 I 8rff,g5,96,118 fear or 42 harris-williams-a-post-kleinian-model-for-aesthetic-crit' carving/classi cal, 52, 79, BI, \¯ollheim, R. (1965). Preface. A. Stokes, The Inuitation in Art and guilt 150 94, g7, gg and idealizarion London: Tâvistock. 7 and composition 62 infantt \¯ollheim, R. (1969). The mind and the mind's image of itself' 4I,56, 63 and eating 80, 82 andlove 4,84 limestone fn turn atio n¿ I Jo u rn a I of Psy c h o an a þ s i. s 5 0 : 209 -220. 85-90 necessary xv, xix, 4,74,76, \¯ollheim, R. (1972). Ed. and introduction. The Im¿ge in Form: 157 as mother of arts Áo

1^O 17O INDEX INDEX 171

106, ll3, rr7, r20 Bellini, G. 37, II0 Chardin, J. B. S. IO4, tO9 zs manic trend 63 \¯. R. xii, xix, tooriv, 18, 21,22 Clark, afüst P^ssim K. 36,116 ofotherness 32 13, 65, 8 1, 106 analysis of 16 body/body-image colour and projective identifi cation as appreciato r of art 40 and art 35tr, 6I, 96, 98, II3 "beginnings" (Turner) 1 14, 68 baby's experience of 20, 63, exhibiting 46, 47, II5 tr6 transcendenral qualiry of 30 expressivenes s of 97 80, r57 compositional qualities of l Z, counterpoint 63,73, I\G, lI9, identiftingwith object 12, 67 and mind i53 106,109,119 l 122, t4r l mothert nriii, 48, 56,156 in "identiry integration of realiry 8,40,68 in difference" crearive process xix, >o<, 6,33,49, parrs 22, 140 intentions of 47, 55, 160 persecntory xviii, looorii, 105ff strengthening the ego 84 162 feel o[ in form 96 Cézanne, P. 42, 67, 101, 103, 104 and incantation see also form, aesthetic 72 and inrernal relationships 6, 15 INDEX 172 INDEX 173

r52, r57 and and perceptioî20,29 super-ego 22 Klein, M. xii, xv, xx'¿i, 5, 8,27, plastic 44, 51, 52,53,54, 56, see also and represent ability 23 object, psychoanalytic 4r,72, 156, r57, 161 screen (Lewin) 33-34 6r,82 Imago Sociery xii,156 Iandscape pre-existing 53, 55, 56, 81, incantarion dualism 152 63,7l-72 and architecrure 81, 82 90,116 and reperition Egyptian statuary 55, 85 157 in art 42, 105-108, 113, ll5, envelopment xix significant 49 infant, in the artist/a dult xiv, 2, 3, rt6, r24 symbolic24 in artt invitation s.tti,72,73, 6,35,44,56, 120, r27, contemplation of xvi, 15,49, r63 wholeness of xt, 14,84, 160 r23 r32,762 and formal qualities 34,53, se€ Llso beaury ego of 6, 23, 28, 32, 33, 41, counrer-/contrary I4I, I4g Freud, S. 8, 2I, 22, 23, 27, 33, 69,73,74, ll2 5, 7r,84, r24 see also neture I r56 omnipotence and identific arions 32, 4I , 7 , of 36, Il4 LangeÁ S. xiv, xvi, >oori Giorgione >oociii, 8, 17,20, Matisse, H. 160 fantasy s¿¿ unconscious phantasY technical revolution of 109 28_31, 53, 59, 69, 70, 76, Mediterranean values xv, >oooriii, g,14, r48, r52 16,79,22,25,28, inside of 56, 82 16,2\,59 39, 45, 47, partaking of 44, 68,70,7l 48, 68, 7 r, 161 whole/independent 30, 63, form xvi, xix, 10 pattern in 3, 15,28, 34, 42, image in Keats, J. n< 74 r02, imago 15, 18 Kite, S. xxiv 63, 68, 71, 82, 84, 97, see also object; imago 174 INDEX INDEX 175

xix, Mozart, W. A.42 otherness/outwardness xiii, and art >ori-xxii, |, 48, i.55 see ¿lso inneÁ and outer musical qualities/sound 13, 63, 14, 32, 34, 47, 6r, 63, 68, and mental function 24,25, worlds 133 68 69,76,91, r28, 742 71,79,8r,92,101, spectator see appreciation, aes_ in poetry 108 aspiration toward 104, ll2, theories of xvii, w., 156, 16l thetic and speech 3,21J2 r47, r48 Quattrocento 34, 156 Still, R. 156 naturalistic art 10, 30, 42, 67 , 7I, and compulsion 12 "Quattro Cento" art xvtji, 52, Stokes,,A.., works noooorii, 4,36,38,39, primary process xvii, 1 6, 19 , 2I, "beneficence in" nociv, M. H. x