Read, Sir Herbert

Read, Sir Herbert (1893–1968). British poet and critic, who throughout the middle third of the 20th century was virtually unchallenged as his country's foremost advocate and interpreter of modern art. He was born at Kirkbymoorside, Yorkshire, of farming stock, and studied at Leeds University before serving in France in the First World War; his distinguished record as a soldier lent an added authority to his later pacifism. After the war he worked at the Treasury, then in the ceramics department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1922–31, before becoming Watson Gordon professor of fine arts at Edinburgh University, 1931–3. By this time he had published several collections of his verse as well as various art-historical studies (including English Stained Glass, 1926, still a standard work), critical works on English literature, and the first of his philosophical works on art, The Meaning of Art (1931). In 1933 he returned to London as editor of the Burlington Magazine (1933–9) and his attention turned increasingly to contemporary art; in 1933 he published Art Now, the first comprehensive defence in English of modern European art, in 1934 he edited the modernist manifesto Unit One, and in 1936 he was one of the organizers of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London. At this time he lived near Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Ben Nicholson, and he acted as the public mouthpiece of the group of artists of which they were the centre; Moore later wrote that ‘In the 1930s he was available to all in the way that he could see both sides of any situation and act as a link between the different things that were going on.’ In the late 1930s Read planned a Museum of Modern Art in London, of which he would have been the first director. The Second World War ruined the plans, but some of the ideas bore fruit in the Institute of Contemporary Arts, which he founded with Roland Penrose in 1947 as ‘an adult play-centre … a source of vitality and daring experiment'.

In 1950 Read returned to Yorkshire, but he spent a good deal of his time abroad as a speaker at international conferences. He also kept up a steady stream of books. His most influential work was probably Education Through Art (1943), which used the insights of psychoanalysis to promote the idea of teaching art as an aid to the development of the personality. His other books include A Concise History of Modern Painting (1959) and A Concise History of Modern Sculpture (1964), both of which have been frequently reprinted. By the time he wrote these surveys he was becoming disenchanted with contemporary artistic developments, and in 1967 he described ‘the anti-art manifestations of Tinguely, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Warhol and Oldenburg’ as a ‘confused but comprehensible form of Nihilism … behind them is a deep despair, a denial of the meaningfulness of life'. In his later years he was regarded as ‘something of a sage. It was not a role to which he ever pretended, for he was a man of conspicuous modesty’ (DNB). His reputation has remained undimmed since his death: in the winter 1993 issue of Modern Painters, David Cohen wrote: ‘ Herbert Read was indubitably a giant in the history of modernism. Alfred H. Barr is his only serious rival as the most influential English-speaking advocate of contemporary art between the early 1930s, when Read first turned his professional attention to the subject, and his death in 1968.’ However, not everyone was impressed by Read and his work. John Skeaping wrote: ‘I distrusted him—his style of writing struck me as a specious use of pseudo-intellectual jargon', and he quoted Edith Sitwell describing him as ‘That crashing bore'.