The Image in Form: Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes

Over the last 40 years Adrian Stokes has acquired an almost mythical reputation as one of the finest and most discriminating writers on art living today. His admirers include numerous distinguished thinkers, philosophers and poets.

Stokes's critical writings lie at the junction of three diverse influences: psychoanalysis, the English tradition of aesthetic writing which derives from Ruskin and Pater, and the artist's own special involvement with art. Apart from being a writer, he is himself a painter of distinction.

This selection of Stoke's writing (some taken from volumes long out of print) has been ably edited and introduced by Richard Wollheim and provides the first opportunity ever offered to a wide public to acquaint itself with this strange and fascinating body of work. Extracts, which have been grouped under headings to reflect Stokes's varied concern with the nature of art, the work of individual artists, and the spirit of place, range over the whole of his criticism from The Quattro Cento (1932) to Reflections on the Nude (1967). They include passages from his early study on the Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini and from the exquisite and semi-autobiographical Inside Out.