Adrian Stokes, Inside Out

Autumn – Winter 2026

Who, confronted with the firm elasticity of Michelangelo’s David, would think to compare its curves to a well-sprung car? Who would take the removal of twigs concealing a bird on a nest as a figure for the master’s subtractive technique?

This Research Season reckons with the idiosyncratic sculptural imagination of English critic Adrian Stokes (1902–72).

Cover of the book Adrian Stokes: Stones of Rimini.

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About this season

A key voice in mid twentieth-century sculptural and architectural criticism, Stokes uniquely combined a disparate set of compelling concerns: modernist values of direct carving, speculative psychoanalytic thought, a sensitivity to the vitality of natural materials, and a deep understanding of pre-modern sculpture in its continual reanimation.

Taking as its starting point a re-engagement with Stokes’ writings about quattrocento relief, this season explores the generative potential of his distinctive critical metaphorics to address a wide range of sculptural phenomena.

Black and white photo of a man in a light suit standing outside by a stone wall.

Adrian Stokes in The Scared Way in Crete, 1969. Photo: Ann Stokes. Courtesy Adrian Stokes’ estate.

Sculptural Values: Carving, Modelling, Making

Wednesday 30 September 2026
13:00–18:00
Early Career Research Symposium
Henry Moore Institute

Bringing together scholars working on premodern sculpture to re-assess Stokes’ primary distinction between ‘carving’ and ‘modelling’ as part of a larger discussion of sculptural values.

Stone-carving demonstration with Alan Micklethwaite

Wednesday 21 October 2026
14:00–17:00
Demonstration and hands-on lecture
Henry Moore Institute

Exploring the techniques, processes, and tools involved in stone carving, picking up themes of place and geology that run throughout Stokes’ writing.

Stokes’ Objects

Friday 20 & Saturday 21 November 2026
Major international conference
University of York

Engaging with key objects of Stokes’ criticism, and especially with his career-long fascination with the sculptural practices of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy and its afterlives.

Main image: Book jacket for The Stones of Rimini by Adrian Stokes, designed by Ben Nicholson.

The Research Season Adrian Stokes: Inside Out and has been conceived and organised in collaboration with Dr Ruth Ezra (University of St Andrews) and Dr Jeremy Melius (University of York) and kindly supported by Villa I Tatti.