Herbert Read | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Herbert Edward Read (1893-12-04)4 December 1893 Muscoates,North Riding of Yorkshire, England |
| Died | 12 June 1968(1968-06-12) (aged 74) Stonegrave, North Riding of Yorkshire, England |
| Occupation | Art historian, literary and art critic |
| Period | 1915–1968 |
Sir Herbert Edward Read,DSO, MC (/riːd/; 4 December 1893 – 12 June 1968) was an Englishart 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 theInstitute of Contemporary Arts. As well as being a prominent Englishanarchist, he was one of the earliest English writers to take notice ofexistentialism. He was co-editor withMichael Fordham andGerhard Adler of the British edition in English ofThe Collected Works of C. G. Jung.
He was a professor of fine art atEdinburgh University from 1931 to 1933, a lecturer in art at theUniversity of Liverpool (1935-36), Leon Fellow atUniversity of London (1940-42), andCharles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry atHarvard University (1953-54).[1]
The eldest of four children of tenant farmer Herbert Edward Read (1868–1903) and his wife Eliza Strickland, Read was born atMuscoates Grange,[2] nearNunnington, about four miles south ofKirkbymoorside in theNorth Riding of Yorkshire. InHerbert 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..."[3] 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 atHalifax, West Yorkshire,[4][5] and his mother took a job managing laundry in Leeds, where Read later joined her.[6] Read's studies at theUniversity of Leeds were interrupted by the outbreak of theFirst World War, during which he served with theGreen Howards in France. He was commissioned in January 1915,[7] and received both theMilitary Cross (MC) and theDistinguished Service Order (DSO) "for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty" in 1918.[8][9] He reached the rank ofcaptain.[10]
During the war, Read founded the journalArts & Letters withFrank Rutter, one of the first literary periodicals to publish work byT. S. Eliot.[11]
Read's first volume of poetry wasSongs of Chaos, self-published in 1915. His second collection, published in 1919, was calledNaked Warriors, and drew on his experiences fighting in the trenches of the First World War. His work, which shows the influence ofImagism and theMetaphysical poets,[12] was mainly infree verse. HisCollected Poems[13] appeared in 1946. As a critic of literature, Read mainly concerned himself with theEnglish Romantic poets (for example,The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry, 1953) but was also a close observer of imagism.[14] He published a novel,The Green Child. He contributed to theCriterion (1922–39) and he was for many years a regular art critic forThe Listener.[15]
WhileW. B. Yeats chose many poets of the Great War generation forThe 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 hisThe 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 inEnglish Prose Style (1928),[16] 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.
Read was a champion of modern British artists such asPaul Nash,Ben Nicholson,Henry Moore andBarbara Hepworth. He became associated with Nash's contemporary arts group Unit One. Read was professor of fine arts at theUniversity of Edinburgh (1931–33) and editor ofThe Burlington Magazine (1933–38). He was one of the organisers of theLondon International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 and editor of the bookSurrealism, published in 1936, which included contributions fromAndré Breton,Hugh Sykes Davies,Paul Éluard, andGeorges Hugnet. He also served as a trustee of theTate Gallery and as a curator at theVictoria & Albert Museum (1922–31), as well as co-founding theInstitute of Contemporary Arts withRoland Penrose in 1947. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice ofexistentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinkerMax Stirner.
From 1953 to 1954 Read served as the Norton Professor atHarvard University. In that final year, he gave theA. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at theNational 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 ofWesleyan University.[17]
Read's conception of poetry was influenced by his mentorsT. E. Hulme,F. S. Flint,Marianne Moore andW. 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).[13]
Read'sPhases of English Poetry was an evolutionary study seeking to answer metaphysical rather than pragmatic questions.[18]
Read's definitive guide to poetry however, was hisForm in Modern Poetry, which he published in 1932.[19] 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 earliestImagist style."[20] This style was evident in Read's earliest collection,Eclogues 1914-18.[21]
Politically, Read considered himself an anarchist, albeit in the Englishquietist tradition ofEdward Carpenter andWilliam Morris. Nevertheless, in the1953 New Year Honours he accepted aknighthood for "services to literature";[22][23] this caused Read to be ostracized by most of the anarchist movement.[24] Read was actively opposed to theFranco regime in Spain,and often campaigned on behalf of political prisoners in Spain.[25] He was the chairman of theFreedom Defence Committee founded in 1945.[26] In 1964 Read joined theWho Killed Kennedy Committee? set up byBertrand Russell.[27]
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 bookTo Hell With Culture deals specifically with his disdain for the termculture and expands on his anarchist view of the artist as artisan, as well as presenting a major analysis of the work ofEric Gill. It was republished byRoutledge in 2002.
In his philosophical outlook, Read was close to the European idealist traditions represented byFriedrich Schelling,Johann Gottlieb Fichte, andSamuel 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 manyMarxists 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 asAnthony Blunt in the 1930s. Read, in this respect, was influenced by developments in Germanart psychology. His Idealist background also led Read towards an interest inpsychoanalysis. 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 theanalytical psychology ofCarl Jung, eventually becoming both publisher and editor-in-chief of Jung's collected works in English.[28]
As early as 1949, Read took an interest in the writings of the FrenchExistentialists, particularly those ofJean-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.[29]
Read developed a strong interest in the subject of education and particularly inart education. Read's anarchism was influenced byWilliam Godwin,Peter Kropotkin andMax 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); andRedemption of the Robot (1966)".[30]
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 addressingUNESCO....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."[30]
.jpg)
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 thatMurray Bookchin was inspired in the mid-1960s to explore the connections between anarchism and ecology.[31] In 1971, a collection of his writings on anarchism and politics was republished,Anarchy and Order, with an introduction byHoward Zinn.[32] 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.[33] Since then, more of his work has been republished and there was aHerbert Read Conference, atTate Britain in June 2004. The library at theCyprus College of Art is named after him, as is the art gallery at theUniversity for the Creative Arts atCanterbury. Until the 1990s theInstitute of Contemporary Arts in London staged an annual Herbert Read Lecture, which included well-known speakers such asSalman Rushdie.
On 11 November 1985, Read was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled inWestminster Abbey'sPoet's Corner.[34] The inscription on the stone was taken fromWilfred Owen's "Preface" to his poems and reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."[35]
A 1937 reading by Read lasting seven minutes and titledThe Surrealist Object can be heard on the audiobook CDSurrealism Reviewed, published in 2002.[36]
He was the father of the well-known writerPiers Paul Read, the BBC documentary makerJohn Read, the BBC producer and executive Tom Read, and the art historianBen Read.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
| Other | |
