Richard Wollheim and the psychoanalytic aesthetics of Adrian Stokes


Regular attendees should note the earlier than usual start time and change of venue - enter St John's by the Kendrew Quad entrance. This seminar is joint with the Richard Wollheim Centenary Project -- see https://wollheimcentenary.org/programme-of-events/. Please register at wollheimcentenary@gmail.com confirming your status as academic (includes students), mental health practitioner, or other (please specify).

In her talk Janet Sayers (author of Art, Psychoanalysis, and Adrian Stokes) focuses on the work of the philosopher Richard Wollheim and art critic Adrian Stokes. She begins with examples from Stokes’s account of looking at pictures before turning to Stokes’s role in introducing Wollheim to Melanie Klein and her version of psychoanalysis. Sayers follows this with the very different attitudes of Wollheim and Stokes to abstract expressionist painting; and with the publicity accorded Stokes’s work by Wollheim’s 1972 book, The Image in Form. The talk ends with the relation of Stokes’s objection to abstract expressionist painting to Wollheim’s account of what he described as the ‘two-foldedness’ of ‘seeing-in’.