Adrian Stokes (Adrian Durham Stokes) Biography

British art critic and poet, born in London, educated at Rugby and Magdalen College, Oxford. During the 1920s he visited Rapallo in Italy, where he came to know Ezra Pound, who was instrumental in shaping his thought and who introduced his work to the Criterion. From his studies of fifteenth-century Italian sculpture and architecture in The Quattro Cento (1932) and Stones of Rimini (1934), Stokes developed his fundamental distinction between carving as the releasing of form innate in the medium and modelling as the imposing of form onto the medium. Colour and Form (1937), Art and Science (1949), Smooth and Rough (1951), Painting and the Inner World (1963), and Reflections on the Nude (1963) are among the subsequent studies in which his ideas take on a broader cultural relevance. His poetry, which displayed a remarkable vividness of imagery and considerable strengths of rhythm and form, was included in Penguin Modern Poets: 23 (with Edwin Muir and Geoffrey Grigson, 1973) and Collected Poems, edited by Peter Robinson, appeared in 1981. Three volumes of The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, edited by Lawrence Gowing, appeared in 1978.