The Outwardness of Art

"The Outwardness of Art is a single-volume compendium of some of the best words ever written by this most subtle and wide-ranging of aesthetic theorists." - Michael Glover, Hyperallergic Immensely influential, and long beloved by artists, writers and theorists alike, Adrian Stokes (19021972) was at once the last of the great British amateur art writers and as the first art theorist to substantially synthesise aesthetics and psychoanalysis among the first of the moderns. Since the publication of his groundbreaking books The Quattro Cento and Stones of Rimini in the 1930s, Stokess writing has enjoyed a readership across disciplines from psychoanalysis to literature and art. Contemporary admirers ranged from Ernst Gombrich to Dore Ashton, Ben Nicholson to Philip Guston, Ezra Pound to John Ashbery reflecting the diverse milieus in which Stokes moved. And yet it has been nearly 45 years since a broad introduction to his work has been commercially available. In the wake of a recent biography, new critical studies and reprintings of individual books, this volume presents a substantial selection from Stokess published writings including important posthumously published texts as well as his superb ballet writings of the 1920s highlighting him as a pioneering thinker on art and a virtuoso of the essay form.