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 Adria¡r Stokes Estate. Copi'right @ 1978 The Adrian Stokes Estate Arrangement and introducdon @ 2014 Meg Harris'Williams Appendix 1 @ The Ha¡ris Meløer Tiust Appendix2@EricRhode Acknowledgements vll Cover illustrari on. Landscape, West Pentaith Moor (1937) by Adrian Stokes (1902-1972) @ The Adria¡ Stokes Estate. Acquired byTäte 1985. About the authors ix Photo @ Tate, London 2014 lntroduction by Meg Harris'!7'illiams xi The rights ofAdrian Stokes a¡rd Meg Harris \Øilliams 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 ¡etrieval system, or trensmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, The power to communicate 2 mecha¡rical, 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.ha¡ris-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 \Øallis, 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 w¡iters 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 Ballø (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) , Røphael (1956), Greeþ Cuhure and the Ego (1958), Monet (1958), Three Essalts on the Painting of Our Time (196I), Pøinting 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 Imøge 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: Inspirøtion in Mibon and Keats (1982), A many of his pictures are held by the Tate. His earlier writings Strønge Wøy 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 \Øaddell , I99l), A to include sculpture and, subsequently, the art of painting. Thial of Faith: Hamlet in Anøþsis (7997 , new edition 2014), The Although his focus moved on, his vision of the fundamental Vøle 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 Psychoønaþsis changed. But it did develop conceptually, and the most signifi- (2010), and Bionls brrn*, A Reading o¡ ttt, Aaiobíographies cent fector in this was his psychoanalytical experience, which (20 1 0). \Øebsite: www.artlit.info. i See David Carrier, The English Aesthetes (1997). X¡¡ 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, \Øollheim'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 psychoanal¡ic 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.