ABSTRACT
The female nude is "a thing apart" signifying "an undeniable architecture of cool and subtle relationships between shapes and tones and contours," Adrian Stokes wrote in praise of Coldstream's paintings of the female nude. "Stokes's work has been something of a mystery even to the in-group of his admirers," Richard Wollheim's close friend, John Richardson, said in a BBC radio discussion of these paintings. With such intimations Stokes sought, through his paintings, to convey "an interpretation of volume that is without menace, in slow and flattened progressions as of the lowest relief, in which any section is as prominent or important, or is as little so, as any other section". Stokes's writing on art soon after included a lecture he gave on 19 January 1966 at Slade, and an article published that year in the journal, Art and Literature. By then he had given up book-writing due to lack of response to his sixth Tavistock book, Reflections on the Nude.
