Art, Psychoanalysis, and Adrian Stokes ─ A Biography

Starting with Adrian Stokes’s childhood and youth, then through his breakdown to his groundbreaking insights about the inspiration of art from the physical materials from which it is made,Art, Psychoanalysis, and Adrian Stokes tells the story of Stokes’s psychoanalytic treatment by Melanie Klein and his growing fame in the 1930s as champion of a carving revolution in sculpture, painting, and in the avant-garde creations of the Ballets Russes. This leads into Stokes’s achievement as catalyst in the 1940s of the transformation of St Ives in Cornwall into an internationally-acclaimed centre of modern art, and into his innovative use of art and psychoanalysis as a means of highlighting the interchange of the outer world of the senses with the inner world of fantasy and imagination. Lastly, Stokes’s story culminates with his experience of being in love and with forging, on this basis, an innovative psychoanalytic account in the 1950s and 1960s of the bodily and psychologically integrating smooth and rough aesthetic effect of art and external reality on the mind.