Volume 21, Number 4 · March 21, 1974
The Eyes Have It
By John Golding
The Image in Form: Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes
edited by Richard Wollheim
Harper & Row, 320 pp., $4.95 (paper)
Adrian Stokes died on December 15, 1972. The headline of the first obituary announced: 'The Modern Ruskin Dies.' Time may well show that as a writer on the visual arts Stokes was of comparable importance; but it is revealing of the cloak of privacy and of reticence with which he was always surrounded and had always protected himself that his death should have first been made public by reference to someone other than himself. For some time Adrian Stokes had been something of a cult figure, and an important influence on a small but slowly widening group of English artists, philosophers, and critics. His books, many of them out of print, were sought after; PhD dissertations were being written about him. But to the general public and particularly in America his name meant nothing. This collection of Stokes's writing, however, should begin to win for Stokes the recognition his achievement deserves.
Review, 3541 words
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