The Outwardness of Art: Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes - Paperback

by Adrian Stokes (Author), Thomas Evans (Text by (Art/Photo Books))

Immensely influential and beloved by artists, writers and theorists alike, Adrian Stokes (1902-72) was the last of the great British amateur art historians in the tradition of Ruskin and Berenson, and--as the first art theorist to synthesize aesthetics and psychoanalysis--the first of the moderns. Since the publication of his groundbreaking Faber books The Quattro Cento and Stones of Rimini in the 1930s, Stokes' writing has enjoyed an incredibly diverse readership across disciplines from psychoanalysis to literature and art, from Ernst Gombrich to Meyer Shapiro, Ben Nicholson to Philip Guston, Ezra Pound to John Ashbery. The singular breadth of his fan base reflects the diverse milieux in which he moved (whether the Bloomsbury of the Sitwells, Melanie Klein's London acolytes, Ezra Pound's circle or the St Ives artists). And yet it has been nearly 45 years since a broad introduction to his work was commercially available. In the wake of a recent biography, critical studies and reprints of individual volumes, this volume presents a substantial selection from Stokes' published writings, highlighting him as a pioneering thinker of art and a virtuoso of the essay form.