This biography of Adrian Stokes (1902–1972) introduces to American art historians a neglected but significant writer on Renaissance Italian painting, sculpture, and architecture. While the book does not neglect Stokes’s wide-ranging social, cultural, and sexual involvements (much of the latter in detail), it primarily concentrates on his development as an art historian, ending with his first two important studies, The Quatro Cento: A Different Conception of the Italian Renaissance (London: Faber and Faber, 1932) and Stones of Rimini (London: Faber and Faber, 1934). It is for this aspect of Stokes’s achievement that Richard Read’s biography can be recommended, for Stokes created an art-historical style and mode of analysis that brings physical artworks—especially where stone is the medium—close to our sense experience, and in that way raises our consciousness of Renaissance architecture, sculpture, and the cityscapes in which they exist.

The study establishes a broad cultural background in the English world of intellect and the arts for Stokes and his friends. One figure, with whom he had a close relationship that contributed to his thinking on art, was Ezra Pound. Stokes’s circle also included the Bloomsbury writers—whose formalism in the work of G. E. Moore and Roger Fry was rejected by Stokes—D. H. Lawrence, and the eminent art critics John Ruskin and Walter Pater, whose prose set the tone for the early art writing of the twentieth century. In that milieu Stokes struggled to establish his own voice, finding it in part through the help of a lifelong interest in and use of psychoanalysis. A good part of the biography details Stokes’s early awareness of the discipline before its presence became a standard part of critical disputes, and his long psychoanalysis with Melanie Klein, a Berlin psychoanalyst and emigré to England. Her thought offered Stokes several dialectical dualities that he expressed in a major distinction which appears in his interpretations of Italian art: carving and modeling.

By “carving” Stokes refers to the bas-reliefs so common in the quattrocento. Here is his description—and as you read it you will discover his unique language—of the Tempio reliefs by Agostino di Duccio from Stones of Rimini:

The reliefs are for the most part low, yet their forms possess many values of sculpture in the round: while the quickened mass of a human shape between wind-strewn films of drapery, the delicious torture of hair and clothing by an unseen, evocative wind upon the outer and intermediary surfaces of the relief, give to its body the effect of vitality, of that stone-blossom we prize so high. Even carved landscapes by Agonstino are restless, even the countryside is drunk with this dithyrambic draught that impels to ecstatic dance as did the breezes in the sybilline cave, scattering the mad leaves of prophecy.¹

Stokes sums up the difference between carving and modeling: “Carving is a cutting away, while modelling is a moulding or a building up.”² The distinction is then worked into a general psychoanalytic psychology of the art of stone constructions, which Read describes as Stokes’s “internalization” of Klein’s theories of human development. The biographer states the influence in somewhat puzzling terms:

For Stokes carving is an artistic approach that comes closest to a relationship in life which takes the nature, needs and desires of partners into account, whereas modeling rehearses immature and predatory sexual appetites that eclipse the object of desire…. It [Stokes’s definitions] is consistent with what by now is many years of almost daily analysis with Melanie Klein that, when taken as a whole, Stones of Rimini registers the first full impact of her psychoanalytic theories of restitution, for in all the instances we have seen of the sculptor’s love of the stone, the aim is to restore and preserve the original fullness and actuality of the female block. (216–17)

Read’s presentation of Stokes as person, artist, and thinker establishes a biography that is difficult to organize, for the author finds it necessary to mix intimate details of Stokes’s life with his achievements as a scholar and writer. For example, the rather long, twenty-five-page preface provides a succinct and rather successful account of his life, the influence of Pound, the analytic strategies of Klein (for instance, her “attempt to develop heterosexual inclinations out of feminine feelings she believed Stokes had denied in himself” [xxxvi]), the strong support for Stokes and his writing from Richard Wollheim, and a statement of the biography’s thesis: “to disinter Stokes’s formation as a critic from debates now hidden from us by the institutional blinkers of our own time is the major objective of this book” (xxxvii). Also in the preface is a wide survey of our present-day presuppositions about how art history should be written, which sets Stokes’s practice as something of the past, idiosyncratic and wonderfully poetic, a deeply subjective strand in books on the Italian Renaissance artists intended in part as guides to contemporaries wishing to understand this period in its architectural and sculptural beauties, not adequately conveyed, in Stokes’s view, by Ruskin and Pater.

Having read the preface, one is ready to move on to art history as such, but must then confront in ever more detail than one wants in part 1, the “Early Years, 1902–26,” which indeed tell us about the World War I world Stokes grew up in, the loss of an older brother in the war and its destructive impact on the younger boy, his family, and his homosexual affairs of public school and university.

Next, Read looks at Stokes’s early art-historical writing, The Thread of Ariadne (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1925) and Sunrise in the West: A Modern Interpretation of Past and Present (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1926), in which “Stokes looked to art and visual experience as a way out of and away from the obsessive intellectuality of philosophical dilemmas that not only coloured his relations with art but troubled him personally very deeply too” (65). This negative way of describing Stokes’s intentions is complemented elsewhere by an effort to bring out the shaping of his sensibility, most successfully accomplished in chapter 6, “Stone and Water: Canto XVII and ‘Agostino,’ 1929.” How much Pound’s thinking as revealed in the Cantos had an impact on Stokes is difficult to assess. In this chapter Read recreates a complex cultural world that inspired Stokes’s writing on art, a world in which Pound, Ruskin, Pater, John Addington Symonds, the city of Venice, Lawrence, and Sigmund Freud all had parts to play. In analyzing the highly charged metaphors of these writers, thinkers, and places, a central theme emerges, beyond the scope of a review such as this, so a sample quotation must convey an interpretative tone. Read writes, “In an ambiguously vast and minute scale again, this condensed history [in Pound’s Canto XVII] passes from erection to detumescence within the phallic column of speech delivered by a lone sailor who is Ulysses but also Ruskin traversing the Venetian lagoons. ‘Marble leaf over leaf’ [in the Canto] is Lawrence’s sexualization of Ruskin…. Thus ‘Silver beaks’ [in the Canto] from Ruskin align the rhythmical movements of oars through water with sexual intercourse” (138–39). The paragraph goes on to find intertexual references to Adolf Hildebrand, Stéphane Mallarmé, and the Psyche-Cupid tale.

Perhaps this ragout of cultural morsels helps the biography to explain why Stokes moved away from the Ruskin-Pater world on the one hand, and the Fry-Bell approach of art writing on the other. Read pares down these initial influences to that of Pound, who helped Stokes to open himself to his natural poetic impulses and talents. Then, recognizing that he needed to get straightened out both sexually and professionally, Stokes turned to psychoanalysis. A bit of interesting history surfaces here: at Rugby School, where Stokes was a student, some of the masters were undergoing psychoanalysis in 1915–20, when that kind of therapy was known only to a few; those teachers counseled Stokes to seek such help. This encounter opened him to later psychoanalytic treatment, which in turn became a theoretical mainstay of his mode of art-historical analysis. We notice a similar development in the writing of Wollheim, a friend of Stokes whose analyses of contemporary art in some cases rely upon a Kleinean sort of interpretation. (See, for example, Wollheim, Painting as an Art [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987], 305.)

For all of its lack of balance, somewhat defective sense of writing form, and occasional inappropriateness of personal detail about its subject, Art and Its Discontents conjures up a period in British art-historical thought, the ways it fits into allied cultural expressions such as poetry, philosophy, friendships that shaped our own development. We can now turn back to Stokes and the books he wrote with the appreciation of much wider explorations that have characterized both art history and psychoanalytic writing about art in our own time. Some of what Stokes says about stone and water is poetically moving, but also a little extreme in the same way that Klein was extreme in her interpretations of infant behavior. It may seem odd to say, but Stokes was, in a metaphoric sense, a psychoanalyst of the aesthetic, of material objects and forces—one who could see, as it were, the unconscious hidden and latent aesthetic reality that underlies the manifest or surface reality of buildings and sculptures that most art historians accept as definitive. A fortunate outcome of reading about Stokes in Art and Its Discontents would be a return to his best books, those with which this biography concludes, and those to come that will be interpreted in a new volume from Read, which is in the making. Stokes lived many years beyond Stones of Rimini, and in those years wrote a number of interesting studies: I recommend a little book Wollheim put together as a selective anthology: The Image in Form: Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). It should be noted that Penn State Press has just reissued The Quatrocento and Stones of Rimini in under one cover, with excellent introductory essays by David Carrier and Stephen Kite, both of whom have written about Stokes with great insight and sympathy. He’s well worth a read.