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Art, Psychoanalysis, and Adrian Stokes: A Biography

Author(s) : Janet Sayers

Reviews and Endorsements

‘Janet Sayers offers a sharply focused, finely researched and wonderfully sympathetic assessment of the extraordinary life and milieu of Adrian Stokes.’
— Tanya Harrod, winner of the 2012 James Tait Black Prize for Biography and author of The Real Thing: Essays on Making in the Modern World

‘Janet Sayers’s sympathetic but determinedly revealing recreation of a now seemingly impossibly distant culture tells of Adrian Stokes’s troubled youth and his transforming experience of psychoanalysis. She explains clearly how he came to write in the 1930s about Italian Renaissance sculpture and the Russian ballet. And in telling the story of his marriages, and how his later writing radically developed his earlier ways of thinking, she shows how his life and his writing were intimately interconnected. I have learned a great deal from this remarkable book.’
— David Carrier, art critic and philosopher, and author of A World Art History and its Objects

‘For the first time the whole biography of Adrian Stokes is richly told from an angle vital to that life – art as interpreted through psychoanalysis – by an expert on his life, on psychoanalysis, and the psychologizing of art. Janet Sayers’s narrative is strongly built on close readings of the foundational material of Stokes’s diaries, manuscripts, and correspondence – together with the art writer’s published texts, and interviews of key associated personalities. Over one hundred images illuminate significant places, buildings, artworks, and moments of the life story. In his Reflections on the Nude (1967) Stokes wrote that “there is the stone and there is the stone that is made evocative”; equally, in this book Sayers has elicited from the facts of Stokes’s history an evocative interpretation centred on his Kleinian sympathies.’
— Professor Stephen Kite, Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University

‘Janet Sayers provides a welcome assessment of Adrian Stokes and his contributions to a tradition of cultural scholarship grounded in Renaissance art. In her careful discussion of Stokes the man, the analysand of Melanie Klein, and the art critic, she traces his development of the approach to art as the externalisation of inner emotions through a focus on early states of separateness and fusion, and an extension of Kleinian accounts through the work of Marion Milner.’
— Lesley Caldwell, Honorary Professor, Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London

Read a review of this title in 'Times Higher Education (THE)'