CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/25/2020

The Outwardness of Art: Thomas Evans on Adrian Stokes at SVA

Thursday, January 30 at 6:30 PM, SVA presents Thomas Evans, editor of The Outwardness of Art: Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes (forthcoming from Ridinghouse), speaking on one of the 20th century's great prose stylists and most nuanced aesthetic theorists. Advance copies of the book will be available for purchase.

Immensely influential and beloved by artists, writers and theorists alike, Adrian Stokes (1902–72) was the last of the great British amateur art historians in the tradition of Ruskin and Berenson, and—as the first art theorist to synthesize aesthetics and psychoanalysis—the first of the moderns. For Stokes, the compositional tensions of the art work offered an image of psychic resolution, and exemplified the possibility of “outwardness”—a celebration of the world’s obdurate otherness.

Since the publication of his groundbreaking Faber books The Quattro Cento and Stones of Rimini in the 1930s, Stokes' writing has enjoyed an incredibly diverse readership across disciplines from psychoanalysis to literature and art, from Ernst Gombrich to Meyer Shapiro, Philip Guston to Bridget Riley, Ezra Pound to John Ashbery. The singular breadth of his fan base reflects the diverse milieux in which he moved (whether the Bloomsbury of the Sitwells, Melanie Klein's London acolytes, Ezra Pound's circle or the St Ives artists). On the occasion of the publication of The Outwardness of Art: Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes, Thomas Evans gives an introduction to his thought.

THOMAS EVANS is the editor of The Outwardness of Art: Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes and the magazine Tolling Elves, the director of Pedestrian Thought Theaters, and the author of Furniture without Rest.

The Outwardness of Art: Thomas Evans on Adrian Stokes
Quijote Talk, SVA Art Writing Dept.
Thursday, January 30: 6:30 PM
132 West 21st Street, 6th Floor
Free and open to the public