ABSTRACT
In the last chapter we saw how Stokes took the tools in his hands and began to paint in 1936. Yet, in contemplating a still life by Adrian Stokes, we are driven to conclude that his paintings actually draw us into intermediary spaces far more equivocal than the carved 'otherness' privileged by his texts. (Figure 9.1) In his paper 'Form in Art' (3:955) Stokes reiterates this lapidary standpoint: 'The work of art, then, because it is expressively self-subsistent, should invoke in us some such idea as one of "entity". It is as if the various emotions had been rounded like a stone.' 1 Yet in the same paper, together with his long-held assertion of the pebble-like otherness of the artwork, he entertains the role that fusion plays in the making and appreciation of art, together with object-otherness. Here he is taking into account two things: his own aesthetic researches into artists of a more modelling disposition, predominantly Michelangelo, and shifts within the aesthetic discourse of Freudian psychoanalysis that gave increasing credence to the creative role of the paranoid-schizoid position. 'Form in Art' appeared in a collection of papers, New Directions in Psycho-analysis, edited by Melanie Klein and others, that reflects debates about art within the object-relations school of psychoanalysis concerning the relative roles in creativity of the paranoidschizoid and the depressive positions. In the same year Stokes published Michelangelo: A Study in the Nature of Art. In the introduction to this work he provides new ways of thinking about the relations between carving and modelling; the latter is now associated with Freud's adopted phrase 'oceanic feeling': that sense of oneness with the universe associated with the 'feeding infant's contentment at the breast'. In this new configuration, carving is not privileged over modelling but participates in a 'doubling of roles — roles that can oscillate within the work, or from period to period, the early Renaissance being distinguished by its Quattro Cento 'love for the self-sufficient object'; the Baroque, of which Michelangelo is the herald, by homogenizing tensions and plasticity. As Richard Wollheim (1972) points out, what up to the writing of works like Michelangelo 'had been comparatively neglected [viz. the modelling tendency], at times indeed despised, is systematically reconstructed, and then in its reconstructed form is brought into association with the earlier of the two positions'. 2
