Inside out

By Adrian Stokes. (Faber and Faber, 1947.)

Smooth and Rough. By Adrian Stokes. (Faber and Faber, 1951.)

It is fortunate that an art critic and historian of Adrian Stokes's standing should have become associated with the psycho-analytical movement. He freely acknowledges the debt which his æsthetic insight owes to his personal experience of psycho-analysis. His recent psychological conceptions of artistic creation are already foreshadowed in an earlier book Colour and Form (Faber, second edition, 1952) which has found a great deal of attention among artists. There Stokes expounds the integrating function of colour which links together disconnected object forms. This tension between disintegrating and re-integrating factors is now interpreted in depth-psychological terms. Inside Out deals with the externalization of the artist's internal conflict into the work of art. In merely looking at nature we may project our tendencies towards destruction or reparation into the land-scape. Stokes recalls autobiographically how to him as a small child the park in which he had to play seemed polluted, full of sinister secrets or threatening destruction, and how he felt a desperate wish to 'put it right'. The park scene might have symbolically represented the torn body of the mother destroyed in unconscious aggressive phantasies. In the desolation which the artist might feel in looking at reality the same unconscious phantasies might be at work. But the creative mind has the power to 'put it right'. The quarry which yields the builder's raw material appears as an ugly wound; the architect, however, fits the broken stones again into the organism of the house, representing the inviolate body of the mother, 'as if the smooth body of the wall-face, or the smooth vacancy within the apertures, were the shining breast, while the mouldings, the projections, the rustications, the tiles, were the head, the feeding nipple of that breast' (Smooth and Rough, p. 61).

Stokes anticipate