Stokes’s Objects

This international conference brings together historians of Renaissance art, sculptural practice, and critical thought to engage with key objects of Adrian Stokes’s criticism.

The conference examine Stokes’ will career-long fascination with the sculptural practices of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy and its 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.

The conference concludes a research season at the Henry Moore Institute, ‘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.