Art & Its Discontents

Adrian Stokes is considered to have been one of the most original English art critics of the 20th century. This study traces his development as a critic mainly up to his early reviews of Hepworth, Nicholson and Moore. Prize: Winner of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Book Prize '... judicious and illuminating... a subtle and coherent unravelling of the highly complex, wide-ranging arguments involved in Stokes's early writing... Read is a fine intellectual historian.' Julian Bell, The London Review of Books 'Richard Read makes it clear, through his meticulous tracing of lines between Stokes, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, D H Lawrence and Ezra Pound, that art writing as the twentieth century inherited it was a profoundly eroticised genre. Churning around in Stokes's head was Ruskin's ejaculatory paean to the 'foam' of Venetian marble 'as if in ecstasy...toss [ing]' into the sky, Pater's exhortations to (tasteful) sensuality, and Pound's homophobic vision of the artist as cultural stud...It is something, though, to find yourself back in the mindset where a sense of selfhood and sexual fulfilment could somehow turn on what a sculptor did to a piece of stone.' Modern Painters '...a masterfully written, exceedingly thoughtful, and highly commended study of a singularly articulate individual.' The Midwest Book Review '...a major contribution to the psychodynamic understanding of a significant English thinker on art.' AAANZ Prize Committee report 'Whenever I re-read Stoke's writings, I have the exhilarating sense of being in front of the actual works of art he describes.' David Carrier, The Burlington Magazine