Roger Scruton on Adrian Stokes
The Image in Form Selected writings of Adrian Stokes, edited by Richard Wollheim (Penguin 60p) Adrian Stokes published his first book, The Quattro Cento, in 1932, and he has followed it with some sixteen slim volumes of ever more complex reflections on art. Both the content and the style of these works are extremely idiosyncratic, and it is hardly surprising that Stokes's influence has been confined to a small circle of initiates, Nonetheless his works are now becoming more widely known, and the present collection of extracts — skilfully selected by Richard Wollheim — is designed to meet this growing interest.
Stokes's criticism is founded on three enduring pre-occupations. First there is a Pater-like aestheticism, a concern for the subjective impressions aroused by art, which Stokes regards as a main task of his prose to capture. Hence the arch and contorted style, in which the grammatical elegance of Ruskin and Pater — from both of whom Stokes takes his inspiration — gives way to a fulsome and boyish poeticising (" The marriage of cylinder with square abides. Dressed stone is undressed stone that bathes. The dome feeds the sky . . . In front of Venetian palaces the pliant waters crowd.") Secondly there is a profound self-absorption, a desire to nurse each fleeting impression and trace its origin and an almost self-congratulatory pride in his own sensitivity to scenes and objects that others would regard with indifference. This feature, which finds expression in extensive passages of autobiography, does not degenerate into whimsy. For it is given substance by the third, and most striking of Stokes's peculiarities — his penchant for psychoanalysis of Melanie Klein's variety, and the consequent search in every object for its relation to the breast. The Kleinian mythology is invoked to give a more humane, more ' universal ' appeal to otherwise private sentiments, and out of this mythology Stokes attempts to develop a ,complete theory of the creation and understanding of visual art. Art is seen as an instrument in the struggle against fantasy, as struggle on the part of both artist and spectator to overcome envy resentment and guilt, and to find himself once more in the presence of the 'good breast,' both accepted and accepting in a world whose value he has measured and whose objectivity he has come to accept.
This doctrine takes a mystical turn in Stokes's writings, so much so that it is not always possible to follow his train of thought, and even the frequent reference to examples ceases to be a help. When in the course of the Kleinian litany a work of art is mentioned it is likely to appear in a quite unrecognizable form, like a dream-apparition of itself, suggestive and disgusting.
Rembrandt, it seems to me, painted the female nude as the sagging repository of jewels and dirt, of fabulous babies and magical faeces, despoiled yet later repaired and restored, a body often flaccid and creased yet still the desirable source of a scarred bounty: not the bounty of the perfected, stable breast housed in the temple o fthe integrated psyche that we possess in the rounded forms of classical art, but riches and drabness joined by the infant's interfering envy, sometimes with the character of an oppressive weight or listlessness left by his thefts."
The absurd effect of this passage is no doubt deliberate, and occasionally this kind of critical " dream-work" can be strangely affecting, as in certain of the remarks on Turner and Giorgione. But more often the reader is puzzled. It is possible to understand the description of Rembrandt, and also to recognize the reference to psychoanalytical doctrines. But how are we to make sense of the suggestion that Rembrandt painted the female nude as all this, if we cannot see his nudes in this way? What we think of as the profundity in Rembrandt has been described in, a manner that bears little relation to the appearance of his paintings. The psychonalytic fantasies fail to take root in the aesthetic experience, and however hard one studies the paintings the jewels, the faeces and the babies just obstinately refuse to appear.
However, Stokes aims to be more profound than this suggests. His main purpose is not to describe our experience of art but rather to explain it. He wishes to show why it is so powerful and why it is so valuable. He talks of individual works of art only to use them as examples for general and theoretical conceptions. This is most apparent in his studies af architecture. Architecture is unlike painting in that it does not represent things. If it moves us it is because of what it is, because of the forms, techniques and materials that it employs. How is this possible? This is the kind of question that interests Stokes, and it is perhaps not surprising that in attempting to answer it he comes to lean on the theories of psychoanalysis. Great architecture awakens profound emotions, and Stokes believes that profound emotion is necessarily unconscious emotion: what we know of our deeper feelings is no more than the tip of an iceberg. To discover the true effect of architecture is to discover the unconscious origin of the feelings that are awakened by it. If forms and materials are charged with emotion, it is because they remind us of fantasies with which our most elemental passions are linked. If the courtyard by Laurana at Urbano has an atmosphere of sublime stillness, then it is not a thought of heaven that is responsible for this feeling, but a " deeper " thought on which the vision of heaven itself is founded, namely, the thought of the mother's breast.
If we are able to describe our experience of architecture in such terms then Stokes seems to think that we will have said something about its importance. The traditional vapourings about peace, har mony and beauty will no longer be essen tial. Indeed Stokes goes on to draw vast but not wholly surprising conclusions about the value of art: art is a therapy tor the disintegrated ego. But what do we gain by thinking of visual art in this way? For all his intelligence Stokes is unable to give more than very general sketches of the feelings aroused by architecture. The house is a womb; it is "our upright bodies built cell by cell;" a ledge is the foot, the knee and the brow. The smooth wall is a source of health, being the 'good breast' that we wish to appropriate as a source of our own goodness; the wall pierced with apertures is the 'bad breast' that we have torn open with our vengeful teeth; and so on. The building as a whole transmutes. our frenzied longing for ' part-objects ' by presenting an image of the whole — the loved and hated attributes united in a single object. And so beauty is "a sense of wholeness."
Such a description of the effects of architecture tells us nothing that we wished to know. It is a description of the un conscious sources of our feelings towards art and even if it were both meaningful and true, it would still be irrelevant to our enjoyment of individual works. If we wish to know why Laurana's courtyard awakens such powerful feelings, then it does not help to be told of some emotion of which we are unaware, and which is in any case inspired by every great work of architecture. We do not wish to be told of some emotion that is so general that it becomes detached from the particular building that interests us. The fact is that Stokes has not explained the appreciation of architecture at all. For if the unconscious impulses to which he refers are the true source of our enjoyment, why should we ever wish to Visit a building that we had not seen before? Why should we not remain content with what we already had? The fact is that the emotions aroused by buildings are conscious, even though they may be difficult to describe. It is for this reason that the constant tendency of Stokes's writing is to penetrate beyond works of art, to the materials and methods out of which they are formed. In particular he has much to say about the love of stone — why stone and Particular ways of treating stone should have acquired the importance that they have. The predilection for dichotomies that he derives from Kleinian psychology encourages him to reconstruct one of the Classical distinctions in the theory of sculpture — the distinction between carving and modelling, Each of these he equates with a separate attitude to stone (and, at a further remove, with a separate
psychological ' position ' towards the mother). The details of this theory are more interesting; nor is it the only successful part of Stokes's enterprise. In his study of Michelangelo, for example, and in his remarks on Donatello, he writes lucidly and elegantly, the psychoanalytic obsession is played over in a lower key, and the argument is easy to follow.
But all too often Stokes's sensitive perceptions remain crushed beneath an immovable apparatus of psychoanalytical theory. Freud set the precedent for this kind of discussion of art in this study of Leonardo. Since then there have been Freudian and Jungian analyses of everything from Sophocles to Wagner. And naturally art, like any other human product, is open to this kind of interpretation. But where do the conclusions of analysis make contact with our conscious enjoyment of art? Perhaps there is an answer to this question, but until it is produced the work of a writer like Stokes — who combines an extreme subjectivity of response with an allegiance to one of the most eccentric schools of psychoanalysis—will be impossible to evaluate.
Roger Scruton, twenty-nine, is a lecturer in philosophy at Birltheck College, London
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