Sir Herbert Edward Read, (; 4 December 1893 – 12 June 1968) was an English art historian, poet, literary critic and philosopher, best known for numerous books on art, which included influential volumes on the role of art in education. Read was co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. As well as being a prominent English anarchist, he was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism. He was co-editor with Michael Fordham and Gerhard Adler of the British edition in English of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung.
He was a professor of fine art at Edinburgh University from 1931 to 1933, a lecturer in art at the University of Liverpool (1935-36), Leon Fellow at University of London (1940-42), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University (1953-54).[[1]]
Early life
The eldest of four children of tenant farmer Herbert Edward Read (1868–1903) and his wife Eliza Strickland, Read was born at
Muscoates Grange,
near
Nunnington, about four miles south of
Kirkbymoorside in the North Riding of Yorkshire. In
Herbert Read- The Stream and the Source (1972),
George Woodcock wrote: "rural memories are long... nearly sixty years after Read's father... had died and the family had left Muscoates, I heard it said that 'the Reads were snobs'. They employed a governess (and) rode to hounds..."
[Herbert Read- The Stream and the Source, George Woodcock, 1972 (2008 reprint), Black Rose Books, p. 11] After his father's death, the family, being tenants rather than owners, had to leave the farm; Read was sent to a school for orphans at Halifax, West Yorkshire,
[Herbert Read Reassessed, David Goodaway, Liverpool University Press, 1998, p. 1][A Tribute to Herbert Read, 1893-1968, Bradford Art Galleries and Museums, 1975, p. 64] and his mother took a job managing laundry in Leeds, where Read later joined her.
[Herbert Read: A Vision of World Art, ed. Benedict Read et al, Leeds City Art Galleries, 1993, p. 147] Read's studies at the University of Leeds were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, during which he served with the
Green Howards in France. He was commissioned in January 1915,
and received both the
Military Cross (MC) and the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) "for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty" in 1918.
He reached the rank of captain.
During the war, Read founded the journal Arts & Letters with Frank Rutter, one of the first literary periodicals to publish work by T. S. Eliot.[James King, Herbert Read – The Last Modern (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990.]
Early work
Read's first volume of poetry was
Songs of Chaos, self-published in 1915. His second collection, published in 1919, was called
Naked Warriors, and drew on his experiences fighting in the trenches of the First World War. His work, which shows the influence of
Imagism and the Metaphysical poets,
was mainly in
free verse. His
Collected Poems[Read, Herbert, Collected Poems, London: Faber & Faber, 1966.] appeared in 1946. As a critic of literature, Read mainly concerned himself with the
Romantic poetry (for example,
The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry, 1953) but was also a close observer of imagism.
[Hughes, Glen, Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry, Stanford University Press, 1931 (reprinted by Biblo and Tannen, New York, 1972, )] He published a novel,
The Green Child. He contributed to the
Criterion (1922–39) and he was for many years a regular art critic for
The Listener.
While W. B. Yeats chose many poets of the Great War generation for The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), Read arguably stood out among his peers by virtue of the 17-page excerpt (nearly half of the entire work) of his The End of a War (Faber & Faber, 1933).
Read was also interested in the art of writing. He cared deeply about style and structure and summarized his views in English Prose Style (1928),[Read, Herbert, English Prose Style, London: G. Bell & Son London; New York: Holt, 1928.] a primer on, and a philosophy of, good writing. The book is considered one of the best on the foundations of the English language, and how those foundations can be and have been used to write English with elegance and distinction.
Art criticism
Read was a champion of modern British artists such as Paul Nash,
Ben Nicholson,
Henry Moore and
Barbara Hepworth. He became associated with Nash's contemporary arts group Unit One. Read was professor of fine arts at the University of Edinburgh (1931–33) and editor of
The Burlington Magazine (1933–38). He was one of the organisers of the London International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 and editor of the book
Surrealism, published in 1936, which included contributions from André Breton, Hugh Sykes Davies, Paul Éluard, and
Georges Hugnet. He also served as a trustee of the
Tate Gallery and as a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum (1922–31), as well as co-founding the Institute of Contemporary Arts with
Roland Penrose in 1947. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of
existentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker
Max Stirner.
From 1953 to 1954 Read served as the Norton Professor at Harvard University. In that final year, he gave the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art. For the academic year 1964–65 and again in 1965, he was a Fellow on the faculty at the Center for Advanced Studies of Wesleyan University.[ Special Collections and Archives , Wesleyan University.]
Poetry
Read's conception of poetry was influenced by his mentors T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint,
Marianne Moore and W. C. Williams, believing "true poetry was never speech but always a song", quoted with the rest of his definition 'What is a Poem' in his 1926 essay of that name (in his endword to his Collected Poems of 1966).
Read's Phases of English Poetry was an evolutionary study seeking to answer metaphysical rather than pragmatic questions.[Baro, Geno Review, Actual and Historical, 'Poetry' Vol 77 no 6 (1951).]
Read's definitive guide to poetry however, was his Form in Modern Poetry, which he published in 1932.[Read, Herbert 'Form in Modern Poetry (first published 1932) Vision Press, Estover 1948] In 1951, literary critic A. S. Collins said of Read: "In his poetry he burnt the white ecstasy of intellect, terse poetry of austere beauty retaining much of his earliest Imagist style."[Collins, A. S., English Literature of the Twentieth Century , London: University Tutorial Press, 1951.] This style was evident in Read's earliest collection, Eclogues 1914-18.[Allott, Kenneth, ]Contemporary Verse'' Penguin Poets, Harmondsworth, 1950.
Anarchism and philosophical outlook
Politically, Read considered himself an anarchist, albeit in the English quietist tradition of
Edward Carpenter and
William Morris. Nevertheless, in the 1953 New Year Honours he accepted a
Knight Bachelor for "services to literature";
[UK list: ] this caused Read to be ostracized by most of the anarchist movement.
[David Goodway, "Introduction" in A one-man manifesto and other writings for Freedom Press by Herbert Read, London, Freedom Press,
1994, (pp. 1-26).] Read was actively opposed to the
Francoist Spain in Spain,
and often campaigned on behalf of political prisoners in Spain.
[Herbert Read, "We Protest Against this
Spanish Tyranny..." (1952 Speech), reprinted in A one-man manifesto and other writings for Freedom Press (pp. 199-200).] He was the chairman of the Freedom Defence Committee founded in 1945.
[ Peace News, 23 March 1945] In 1964 Read joined the
Who Killed Kennedy Committee? set up by
Bertrand Russell.
Dividing Read's writings on politics from those on art and culture is difficult, because he saw art, culture and politics as a single congruent expression of human consciousness. His total work amounts to over 1,000 published titles.
Read's book To Hell With Culture deals specifically with his disdain for the term culture and expands on his anarchist view of the artist as artisan, as well as presenting a major analysis of the work of Eric Gill. It was republished by Routledge in 2002.
In his philosophical outlook, Read was close to the European idealist traditions represented by Friedrich Schelling, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, believing that reality as it is experienced by the human mind was as much a product of the human mind as any external or objective actuality. In other words, the mind is not a camera recording the reality it perceives through the eyes; it is also a projector throwing out its own reality. This meant that art was not, as many Marxists believed, simply a product of a bourgeois society, but a psychological process that had evolved simultaneously with the evolution of consciousness. Art was, therefore, a biological phenomenon, a view that frequently pitted Read against Marxist critics such as Anthony Blunt in the 1930s. Read, in this respect, was influenced by developments in German art psychology. His Idealist background also led Read towards an interest in psychoanalysis. Read became a pioneer in the English-speaking world in the use of psychoanalysis as a tool for art and literary criticism. Originally a Freudian, Read came to transfer his allegiance to the analytical psychology of Carl Jung, eventually becoming both publisher and editor-in-chief of Jung's collected works in English.[Goodway, "Introduction" in A One-Man Manifesto and other writings for Freedom Press by Herbert Read (1994), p. 19.]
As early as 1949, Read took an interest in the writings of the French Existentialists, particularly those of Jean-Paul Sartre. Although Read never described himself as an existentialist, he did acknowledge that his theories often found support among those who did. Read perhaps was the closest England came to an existentialist theorist of the European tradition.[See Michael Paraskos, The Elephant and the Beetles: the Aesthetic Theories of Herbert Read, PhD, University of Nottingham, 2005.]
Views on education
Read developed a strong interest in the subject of education and particularly in
art education. Read's anarchism was influenced by
William Godwin,
Peter Kropotkin and
Max Stirner. Read "became deeply interested in children's drawings and paintings after having been invited to collect works for an exhibition of British art that would tour allied and neutral countries during the Second World War. As it was considered too risky to transport across the Atlantic works of established importance to the national heritage, it was proposed that children’s drawings and paintings should be sent instead. Read, in making his collection, was unexpectedly moved by the expressive power and emotional content of some of the younger artists' works. The experience prompted his special attention to their cultural value, and his engagement of the theory of children's creativity with seriousness matching his devotion to the avant-garde. This work both changed fundamentally his own life’s work throughout his remaining 25 years and provided art education with a rationale of unprecedented lucidity and persuasiveness. Key books and pamphlets resulted:
Education through Art (Read, 1943);
The Education of Free Men (Read, 1944);
Culture and Education in a World Order (Read, 1948);
The Grass Read, (1955); and
Redemption of the Robot (1966)".
Read "elaborated a socio-cultural dimension of creative education, offering the notion of greater international understanding and cohesiveness rooted in principles of developing the fully balanced personality through art education. Read argued in Education through Art that "every child, is said to be a potential neurotic capable of being saved from this prospect, if early, largely inborn, creative abilities were not repressed by conventional Education. Everyone is an artist of some kind whose special abilities, even if almost insignificant, must be encouraged as contributing to an infinite richness of collective life. Read's newly expressed view of an essential 'continuity' of child and adult creativity in everyone represented a synthesis' the two opposed models of twentieth-century art education that had predominated until this point...Read did not offer a curriculum but a theoretical defence of the genuine and true. His claims for genuineness and truth were based on the overwhelming evidence of characteristics revealed in his study of child art....From 1946 until his death in 1968 he was president of the Society for Education in Art (SEA), the renamed ATG, in which capacity he had a platform for addressing UNESCO....On the basis of such representation Read, with others, succeeded in establishing the International Society for Education through Art (INSEA) as an executive arm of UNESCO in 1954."
Death and legacy
Following his death in 1968, Read was probably neglected due to the increasing predominance in academia of theories of art, including Marxism, which discounted his ideas. Yet his work continued to have influence. It was through Read's writings on anarchism that
Murray Bookchin was inspired in the mid-1960s to explore the connections between anarchism and ecology.
In 1971, a collection of his writings on anarchism and politics was republished,
Anarchy and Order, with an introduction by
Howard Zinn.
[Boston: Beacon Press, 1971; originally published by Faber and Faber in 1954.] In the 1990s, there was a revival of interest in him following a major exhibition in 1993 at Leeds City Art Gallery and the publication of a collection of his anarchist writings,
A One-Man Manifesto and other writings for Freedom Press, edited by David Goodway.
Since then, more of his work has been republished and there was a
Herbert Read Conference, at
Tate Britain in June 2004. The library at the Cyprus College of Art is named after him, as is the art gallery at the University for the Creative Arts at
Canterbury. Until the 1990s the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London staged an annual Herbert Read Lecture, which included well-known speakers such as
Salman Rushdie.
On 11 November 1985, Read was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner.
A 1937 reading by Read lasting seven minutes and titled The Surrealist Object can be heard on the audiobook CD Surrealism Reviewed, published in 2002.
He was the father of the well-known writer Piers Paul Read, the BBC documentary maker John Read, the BBC producer and executive Tom Read, and the art historian Ben Read.
Selected works
-
Ecologue: A Book of Poems (1919)
-
Naked Warriors (1919)
-
What is a Poem (1926)
-
English Prose Style (1928)
-
Phases of English Poetry (1928)
-
Wordsworth; The Clark Lectures 1929-30 (1930)
-
In Retreat (1930)
-
Ambush (1931)
-
Arp (1931) 'the World of Art Library' series
-
The Meaning of Art (1931) revised 1968
-
Art and Alienation (1932)
-
Form in Modern Poetry (1932)
-
Innocent Eye (1933) childhood autobiography
-
The Redemption of the Robot: My Encounter with Education through Art (1933)
-
Art Now (1933)
-
Art and Industry (1934)
-
My Anarchism (1934)
-
The Green Child (1935)
-
Unit One (1935) editor
-
Paul Nash. A Portfolio of Colour Plates (1937) introduction
-
Eric Gill (1938)
-
Introduction to Hubris: A Study of Pride by Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (1940)
-
The Tenth Muse (1941)
-
To Hell With Culture (1941)
-
A World Within A War (1943)
-
Education Through Art (1943) later revised
-
Icon and Idea (1943)
-
Revolution & Reason (1945)
-
The Art of Sculpture (1949)
-
Education for Peace (1950)
-
Existentialism, Marxism and Anarchism, Chains of Freedom (1951)
-
English Prose Style (Reprinted 1952)
-
Art and Society (1953)
-
The True Voice of Feeling (1953)
-
The Paradox of Anarchism (1955)
-
Philosophy of Anarchism (1957)
-
A Concise History of Modern Painting (1959) 'the World of Art Library' series
-
Anarchy & Order; Poetry & Anarchism (1959)
-
Collected Essays in Literary Criticism (1960)
-
The Grass Roots of Art (1963)
-
Art Now (1963)
-
The Contrary Experience: Autobiographies (1963) autobiography
-
Collected Poems (1966)
-
Wordsworth (1966)
-
Naked Warriors (Reprinted 1967)
-
Art and Alienation (1967)
-
Essays in Literary Criticism (1969)
- Citations
- Sources
Further reading
-
Cecil, Hugh, The Flower of Battle: British Fiction Writers of the First World War (London: Secker & Warburg, 1995) - chapter 10
-
Goodway, David, (ed.), Herbert Read Reassessed (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998)
-
-
King, James, The Last Modern: A Life of Herbert Read (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990)
-
Michael Paraskos, Re-Reading Read: Critical Views on Herbert Read (London: Freedom Press, 2007)
-
Michael Paraskos, Herbert Read: Art and Idealism (London: Orage Press, 2014)
-
Read, Benedict and David Thistlewood (eds), Herbert Read: A British Vision of World Art (London: Lund Humphries, 1993)
-
Thistlewood, David, Formlessness and Form (London: Routledge, 1984)
-
George Woodcock, Herbert Read: the Stream and the Source (London: Faber and Faber, 1972)
-
Herbert Read: A Memorial Symposium by Robin Skelton (London: Methuen, 1970)
-
Treece, Henry (ed.), Herbert Read: an introduction to his work by various hands (London: Faber and Faber, 1944)
External links
