Libro

THIS BOOK, WHICH LUND HUMPHRIES has produced in collaboration with The Derek Hill Foundation, is both welcome and overdue. Ann Stokes is an original and inventive artist. Yet She is not widely known and She is not easy to classify. Being widely known is not the Same thing as being well known. Ann Stokes' work is, nonetheless, very well known indeed to many of the individuals, critics and practitioners who have influenced modern British art over the last fifty years.
You can judge artists by the company they keep, or rather the company their works keep. Ann Stokes' work has been owned, cherished, used and, as She would approve, sometimes abused by Such makers and arbiters as Richard Wollheim, David Sylvester, Nikos Stangos, David Plante, Sonia Orwell, William Coldstream, Lawrence Gowing, Derek Hill, John Fowler, John Golding, Catherine Lampert, John Craxton, Barry Flanagan and Nigel Greenwood. Hilary Spurling, biographer of Matisse and a contributor to this volume, is a collector and a fan.
You have to be many times a millionaire to buy a Matisse or Monet nowadays but if, like me, your home is hung with Ann's mirrors and plates, you enter a world congenial to Monet and Matisse and fill the darkest chamber with Sunlight and joy. Ann works part of the year in Italy and it shows. She has, too, Something in common with Picasso, without Sharing any visual kinship with him. It is the ability, in her three-dimensional pieces, to worship the god of things as they are. She sees the fishiness of fish, the movement of boats and horses, and perceives that our eyes are often humorous, our minds drawn to visual puns and metamorphoses. Also Picasso-like is the difficulty, when you find yourself confronted by a significant piece of Stokes, to concentrate on anything else in the room, however fine.
I was introduced to Ann and her work by Mary Day Wollheim, a potter and a former pupil of Ann's, her husband, the philosopher and aesthetic theorist Richard Wollheim, the art critic David Sylvester and, above all, by my wife. For an outlay of a few hundred pounds our rooms have been transformed ever since. All good art, even good gloomy or tragic art, must in the end give pleasure. It has to provide a kind of elation. Ann Stokes' work begins and ends with the pleasure principle. You look at it; it gives light generously back; you can use it to store things in or eat and drink from.
It is entirely and eminently there. When you move a piece or break one your environment seems altered in some way, or bereft.
Ann's work is hard to classify but it has affinities with the painters of Ann's generation or a little older, Roger Hilton especially. I doubt that Hilton is an influence exactly. It seems that Ann took to his late gouaches after his death in 1975. But there is shared sensibility: zest, humour, movement - no other ceramicist, not even Picasso, is more kinetic. Above all, Roger Hilton and Ann Stokes share a belief in Blake's innocent eye. If you wish to see, and make things new, you must employ adult technique and guile to recover an unedited childhood perception.
I have for over twenty years now lived mainly among Ann Stokeses and Roger Hiltons. I bought my first Hilton as an undergraduate; my wife bought her first Stokes in the mid 1980s. The pianist Alfred Brendel has written about humour in music. Also a Hilton admirer, he is a connoisseur of humour in pictorial, mainly Eastern European art. Stokes and Hilton are not comic artists, but they do share a strong sense of the place of comedy in art. Their paintings, on canvas or on clay, are not jokes, which you get and then move on from. But they do provide a kind of governing happiness, a fortress of sensuous pleasure from which you sally forth to face the world. They both love birds and animals: Stokes for what they look like and for what they are, Hilton for their connection with the animal life of men and women.
In our sitting room, high above a large farmhouse fireplace, there stands a range of plates that glow like late Monets; nearby, a mirror; beside it, two jugs and three boxes. In the kitchen, more plates on a dresser; a huge dish in the form of a spatchcocked turkey; a little soup tureen in the shape of a turbot; many soup plates, some of them chipped. Presiding household gods are a face of an owl (his outstretched wings got broken) and a basrelief ofa Homeric battleship, oars apparently trembling in a rough. cobalt sea. In the study, a letter-rack of galloping horses; in the bedroom, one of Ann's Moroccan and very Matisse-like night-lights, always left on at night. It was a proud day, twenty years ago, when the late David Sylvester told us that our round, blue and white small ceramic side table was Ann's masterpiece. I am not sure that it is, but was in no mood to cavil.
Richard Morphet is absorbingly informative about Ann's career and connections. His essay is as clear about her place in modern British art as Tanya Harrod is about Ann's relation to ceramics in our time. Hilary Spurling's prose poem is, I feel, coloured, literally, by years of living among Stokeses. I know that the late Derek Hill, who so admired her, would be pleased that his foundation is helping to bring her work to a wider audience than friends and fans. Like Prunella Clough, another original, Ann Stokes for many years effectively subsidised her admirers by selling her work direct and without promotion. Those who pick up this book will see how lucky we were.

    6 Foreword
       Grey Gowrie

  10 Introduction
       Tanya Harrod

       ONE
  12 Potter as Painter and Sculptor
        Hilary Spurling

       TWO
  32 Ann Stokes: Art and Life
       Richard Morphet

        THREE
  72 Smooth and Rough: The Ceramics in Context
       Tanya Harrod

119 Chronology, Exhibitions and Public Collections

125 Bibliography

126 Acknowledgements

127 Index