Stokes: The Carving and Modelling Modes

Abstract

Melanie Klein’s ideas are at the centre of Stokes’ view of art. Her two psychical positions of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive, and her major contributions to psychoanalytical theory and practice, came more and more to underpin Adrian Stokes’ theory of art. This chapter discusses in broad terms Stokes’ ideas as they developed from his early writings of the 1930s which were centred on Italian Renaissance architecture and sculpture, painting and ballet and were dominated by his unique rendering of the distinction between carving and modelling, to the post-World War II ‘Kleinian’ books. In the latter this distinction gives way to another duality, the idea of the visual arts comprising integral, self-standing autonomous objects — other to the spectator — which at the same time exercise an ‘invitation’ to the spectator, an identificatory drawing in. In other words, the carving and modelling modes came to be more associated, respectively, with Klein’s fundamental psychical positions of the depressive and paranoid-schizoid modes in which whole-object and part-object mental formations establish complex relationships. In order to develop my argument about film, it is necessary to discuss Stokes’ ideas in their context.¹