Our view of modernism in the arts has been largely shaped by the prominence of painting and, in particular, by a succession of major painters working in Paris—from Courbet and Manet to the Cubists. Moreover, modernist aesthetics has come to be equated with the concept of formalism, which has been both advocated and attacked in the critical roster of the twentieth century. Adrian Stokes offered a singular critical voice challenging us to think differently about modernism. Guided by his personal interpretation of the early Renaissance and by insights derived from psychoanalytic theory, Stokes developed his own style of communicating the truths of aesthetic experience.
The essays in The Coral Mind make Stokes required reading for anyone with a serious interest in British modernism; psychoanalysis and art; alternatives to Clement Greenberg’s account of modernism; the relevance of architecture, sculpture, and ballet to our understanding of twentieth-century art; “writerly” art criticism; and the concept of “research” in art history.
Contributors include David Carrier, Martin Golding, Michael Ann Holly, David Hulks, Étienne Jollet, Stephen Kite, Peter Leech, Alex Potts, Richard Read, Janet Sayers, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Paul Tucker.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Bibliographical Note
Introduction
Stephen Bann
1. Stokes and the Architectural Basis of the Sculptural
Alex Potts
2. “A Deep and Necessary Commerce”: Venice and the “Architecture of Colour-Form”
Stephen Kite
3. “The House of the Mind”: On Piero, Perspective, and Psychoanalysis
Peter Leech
4. “We Are Exalted”: Adrian Stokes’s Coming to Terms with Michelangelo’s Massiveness
David Hulks
5. Stokes’s Analysis
Richard Read
6. Portrait of an Analyst: Adrian Stokes and Melanie Klein
Lyndsey Stonebridge
7. Healing Art—Healing Stokes
Janet Sayers
8. “Showing Openly the Inside of Action”: Place, Ballet, Psychoanalysis
Martin Golding
9. The Art Historian as Art Critic: In Praise of Adrian Stokes
David Carrier
10. “Inferential Muscle” and the Work of Criticism: Michael Baxandall on Adrian Stokes and Art-Critical Language
Paul Tucker
11. To Bring the Distant Things Near: Distance in Relation to the Work of Art in Stokes’s Thought
Étienne Jollet
12. Stones of Solace
Michael Ann Holly
Index
“Readers who enjoy questioning their own intellectual processes in encounters with created forms will appreciate the mind revealed in these essays.”
