Art and Its Discontents

"Adrian Strokes (1902-72) wrote some of the most engaging and provocative art criticism of the twentieth century. Stokes's work emerged from a rich dialogue between the legacy of Ruskin and Pater, and intense engagement with the Italian Renaissance, the writings and art of the European modernists (including friends such as Ezra Pound, Barbara Hepworth, and Ben Nicholson), and psychoanalytic theory. In this, the first sustained examination of Stokes's writings, Richard Read investigates how his work transformed English aesthetics when he became the first critical writer in Britain convincingly to relate psychoanalytic theory to art."--BOOK JACKET.