About this event
This international conference brings together historians of Renaissance art, sculptural practice, and critical thought to engage with key objects of Adrian Stokes’ criticism.
The conference examines Stokes’ career-long fascination with the sculptural practices of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy and their afterlives, from Agostino di Duccio’s carvings for the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini to the late work of Michelangelo and beyond, to Mickey Mouse and the Russian ballet. Contributors address Stokes’ wide-ranging interests beyond the arts, from geology to psychoanalysis, while also positioning his work in dialogue with that of other sculptors and scholarly networks of the twentieth century.
The conference concludes Henry Moore Institute’s Research Season Adrian Stokes, Inside Out, that centres on the critic’s compelling and idiosyncratic sculptural imagination. 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 artmaking in its continual reanimation.
Main image: Agostino di Duccio, Madonna and Child with Angels in the Museo del Bargello.
Tickets
Tickets to this event are free, and can be booked online via Eventbrite.
If you’d prefer to book over the phone, please call us on +44 (0)1132 467 467.
Programme: Friday
Welcome
13:00
Jeremy Melius, University of York
Session One
13:15
Chaired by Alison Wright, University College London
‘‘Packing’ the Block, Expressing the Form: Adrian Stokes on Michelangelo’s Carving’
Baptiste Tochon-Danguy, Université catholique de Louvain
‘With and Against the Elemental’
Alistair Rider, University of St Andrews
‘Reading and Remaking Stone: Geological Time in Contemporary Sculpture’
Laura Chase, Victoria & Albert Museum
Break
15:15
Coffee and refreshments served
Session Two
16:00
Chaired by Jessica Richardson, University of York
‘The Ground and Matrix of the Sculptural’
Alex Potts, University of Michigan
‘Stokes Manifests the Quattrocento: Sculptural Relief as Measure of Vitality’
Henrike Christian Lange, University of California, Berkeley (presenting via Zoom)
Finish
18:00
Programme: Saturday
Session Three
11:00
Chaired by Alex Potts, University of Michigan
‘Adolfo Wildt and the Ambiguities of Direct Carving’
François Blanchetière, Musée D’Orsay
‘Stokes, Hepworth and the Carving Conception of Colour’
Stephen Feeke, independent
Lunch
12:30
Session Four
13:30
Chaired by Liz Prettejohn, University of York
‘”I see all art as architectural, or, if you like, sculptural, including music”: Adrian Stokes’ vision of art through his letters to Herbert Read (1951-59)’
Caterina Caputo, Università Iuav di Venezia
‘Carving, Modelling, Making’
Jeremy Melius, University of York
Break
15:00
Coffee and refreshments served
Session Five
15:30
Chaired by Sam Rose, University of St Andrews
‘The Rorschach Text: Adrian Stokes and the Associative Imagination’
James Williams, University of York
‘Dreaming Dreams of Stone’
Harmon Siegel, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute
‘Adrian Stokes and the Imago Group’
David Russell, University of California, Los Angeles (presenting via Zoom)
Discussion
17:15
Finish
18:00
Research Season
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).
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.
The conference Stokes’ Objects is generously supported by a Lila Wallace – Reader’s Digest Grant from Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.
Getting here
This event takes place at the University of York in The Bowland Auditorium (Berick Saul Building, BS/005, Campus West).
University of York
Heslington
York
YO10 5DD
United Kingdom
T: 01904 320 000
E: conferences@york.ac.uk