Herbert Read was one of the most prolific, cosmopolitan and ambitious English intellectuals and men of letters of the twentieth century. During his lifetime he was practically ubiquitous as a critic, scholar, poet, advocate and educator. He left a singular legacy of academic and popular publications—more than sixty books and 1000 articles and reviews—which include his own considerable literary achievements, and his relentless political and cultural advocacy for interpreting and understanding modern art and literature. He was a man who championed such world-class talents as Karl Jung and Henry Moore, while becoming a public antagonist of others such as T.S. Eliot and W.H.Auden. While his passion for individual liberty has led Read to be widely characterized as a ‘philosophical anarchist’ (a description which Read would not disavow),2 the man was personally restrained in speech and at least in public temperament. He was indeed a man of paradox and contradiction.
Herbert Read was born in Yorkshire on 4 December 1893, grew up on a farm, and attended the University of Leeds. During the First World War he served as an infantry officer, an experience which, like others of his generation, found compelling expression in poetry, such as in Read’s Naked Warriors (1919). After the war Read worked for a few years at the Treasury (1919–22) and then became an assistant keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (1922–31). He taught briefly at the University of Edinburgh (1931–33) and edited the Burlington Magazine (1933–39), a fixture of the British cultural establishment. Throughout the 1930s he championed such modernists as the writers Samuel Beckett and Denton Welch, and such artists as Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. The magazine editorship provided an open channel to the academic and highbrow community, but Read also proselytized for modernism in a copious series of popular books, magazine and newspaper reviews directed at the general public.
In this ambition Read carried forward the work of John Ruskin and William Morris, nineteenth-century precursors who sought to reduce the distinction between art and life by exploring aesthetic concepts as social value, such as the tradition of craftsmanship, drawn from the visual arts. These might provide remedies for repairing, what they saw as, an increasingly distressed social fabric (imperilled by the Industrial Revolution). Read also emulated Ruskin’s affection for the Romantics, and staunchly defended such English authors as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley at a time when the advanced literary criticism led by T.S.Eliot disavowed the older styles.
Read’s own creative output struggled for time and attention amidst his editorial and interpretive responsibilities. His poems were well received and appeared in several volumes between 1919 and 1966. In ‘Song’, published in 1955, Read identified himself with life’s continuity, and perhaps that of art and tradition:
So long my heart
This little polish’d ball of blood
Has throbb’d in unison
With your immortal flood
In fact, Read appears to have considered it his professional mission to simultaneously but selectively defend the traditional—his own preferences were actually oriented towards the classical—while advocating, educating and preparing society for the new. His role as the proponent of modernism was unparalleled in Britain, where the avant-garde often scrimmaged unsuccessfully to bring the nation into the contemporary world. He took up the cause of new forms of industrial design and other visual arts in particular, promoting movements from cubism to surrealism to abstract expressionism.
Read’s prominent role as an advocate gave him real cultural power. He was, as his biographer James King has written, ‘taste-maker and cultural impresario’, taking all of art and culture as his domain. Read’s sight and insight was lavished on an impressive array of art forms, including painting, sculpture, architecture, design, ceramics, stained glass, prose and poetry. His audience was often the philistine public, who could find in Read a patient teacher that recognized the bewildering variety and incomprehension with which many modern styles burst upon the scene. In such volumes as Art Now (1933), Icon and Idea (1955) and Contemporary British Art (1964), Read examined the motivation (he was one of the first to apply Jungian psychoanalysis to art) and meaning of artists and their works.
Read the writer was reinforced by Read the ‘impresario’. The range of his expertise and scale of his professional contributions was prodigious. In addition to his own literary and critical productivity, Read served as a director of the venerable British publishing house Routledge and Kegan Paul for a quarter of a century; he juried and curated exhibitions, including a major show of the surrealists in 1936 in London and several exhibitions of children’s art in the early 1940s which prefigured his own plans for aesthetic education; he created advocacy organizations, including the Design Research Unit in 1943, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1948, and the UNESCO-sponsored International Society for Education through Art in 1951; and, he appeared widely in Europe and in the United States, where his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard honoured a man who himself had played the role of arts popularizer and cultural entrepreneur while serving as the first professor of fine arts at Harvard in the late nineteenth century.
Ultimately Herbert Read was interested in more than just helping people understand and appreciate innovations in art. He had a fundamental belief in human progress which, like the social aesthetic of Ruskin and Morris, would carry art beyond aesthetics. As Hilton Kramer put it in the New York Times obituary of Herbert Read in 1968, Read conceived of art as ‘perhaps the most essential constituent of an enlightened social fabric…a cornerstone of the attempt to effect a wholesale revision of social values’. And in that attempt ‘education was to play a major role’.
Read’s Education through Art, first published in 1943, was thought by its author to be his most influential book. Although now out of print for three decades, a generation of art and other educators (especially in Britain) from the 1940s into the 1960s was nurtured on the social messages of the book. Written at the height of the Second World War, Read hoped to harness the creative and imaginative energies of art to counter the endless cycles of violence. He saw the artist as an ‘ideal type’ who offers ‘awareness of intrinsic value’.6 In this aspiration Read spoke for art educators and other teachers everywhere who have deeply felt the need to transcend the barriers and encumbrances of nationalism, creed and ethnicity.
The book is instructive without being specific. No programme or curriculum is presented, but the basis for considering art as a framework for general education of the mind and personality is articulated in detailed chapters that examine such topics as ‘perception and imagination’, ‘unconscious modes of integration’, and ‘the aesthetic basis of discipline and morality’. Read saw himself as a philosopher or critic rather than as a pedagogue. His role was to provide the philosophical foundations for an aesthetic education through which the most urgent problem of human society—the unremitting descent into barbarism (the Holocaust was actually underway when Read wrote the book)—could be addressed and a world order based on humane principles attained.
Education through art, Read contended, is ‘education for peace’ (the title of a subsequent volume of essays printed in 1949). It may be true that nations that explore, understand and enjoy one another’s cultural patrimony will be too busy discovering values in common to go to war. But while the hope was noble, the method was not. Read helped develop the frontier between art and psychology, but he put too much faith in behaviourist agendas for transforming human beings, as likely to lead to indoctrination as to emancipation.
Herbert Read had begun his advocacy educating audiences about the artistic and redemptive power of the new modernism. In Education through Art and subsequent writings he turned to ‘the total reorientation of the human personality’.7 The study and practice of art, and the aesthetic education through which it might occur, led inexorably by Read’s calculation to ethical virtue. This alone was not a new idea, but Read brought to the argument the capacities of a polymathic scholar, drawing on sources as diverse as theories of education from Plato’s Republic, principles of gestalt psychology and recent research on children’s drawings.
Education through Art is a compendium of contemporary thinking in art education after the progressive 1920s and 1930s, during which psychology and the power of perceptual faculties began to dominate the field, introducing a twenty-year period of hegemony led principally by Viktor Lowenfeld and Rudolf Arnheim after the Second World War. Read provided philosophical balance.
Herbert Read was unquestionably a productive and sincere scholar. But the contradictions in his character and effort were just as evident. On one hand he was the cosmopolitan who sought to establish Britain’s contributions, especially in art and industrial design, to the emerging international modernist order. But at the same time he was more of a traditionalist when it came to British poetry and he famously embraced the Romantics. Read could simultaneously relish the take-no-hostages role of the ‘philosophical anarchist’ (where, as Kramer put it, ‘the dream of uprooting power persists as a romantic aspiration’),8 while working diligently and comfortably within the establishment as an editor, organizer, or spokesman. Read was, according to his obituary, ‘a familiar presence’ and ‘one of the most celebrated cultural panjandrums of the international cultural bureaucracy’, serving endlessly on juries, boards and symposia. But Sir Herbert Read wasn’t too much of an anarchist to refuse a knighthood when it was conferred in 1953.
Perhaps the harshest judgement that some critics and biographers have made about Read is that he may have indiscriminately endorsed everything contemporary, with the exception of the so-called ‘post-modern’ movements whose forms, like pop art, Read despised. He did seem uncritical of modernism’s excesses and failures, and acquired the reputation of being especially parochial about British art. In addition, an unsurprising consequence of the packaging and repackaging of content for the general public was a lamentable dearth of original intellectual substance on some occasions, as in Read’s best-selling ‘concise histories’.
On the plus side, Sir Herbert Read brought a clarifying tendency for explanation and interpretation to the often confused and dynamically changing world of modern art. He enabled thousands of readers and viewers to apprehend what may have been difficult to see and understand, and he considered the awareness for which he was responsible as a social good, leading to an integration of art and life. Perhaps somewhat neglected in some reviews of Read’s contributions, given his ‘impresario’ role in the visual arts, were his literary and autobiographical entries, notably The Contrary Experience (1963). At least one of his books was a novel, The Green Child (1935). Read also made some significant contributions in literary criticism, as when he elucidated the distinction between organic and abstract form, the former of which Read favoured as more responsive to the needs of the individual artist in a particular context.
In fact, Read’s own life was organized to give organic unity to the various parts of his being. As an author, editor and publishing house director, he could help navigate and chart a course through the powerful currents of British literature and criticism. As a lecturer and commentator on modern art, he served the entrepreneurial impulse of drawing people closer to contemporary painting, sculpture and other art forms. Ready with a quip or a philosophical argument, Read laboured to introduce the new to a public that was not always understanding or approving, especially of the avant-garde.
For educators, he left the legacy of ‘Education through Art’, not just the book but the idealism as well; a humane vision which continues to hold value for animating teachers and others of good will. Students today would look at Read more for historical interest than current citation, but the nobility of that vision and the aspiration for a just society built on principles of individual expression make Read’s prose still worth pondering. The spirit of his ideas survive in the social and cultural orientation which draws on works of literature and art as sources for moral encouragement and instruction, and that continues as a priority in the careers of so many writers and artists, teachers, parents and others (an example in American art education would be the ‘Caucus on Social Theory’ within the National Art Education Association). Read represented the ‘English’ ideal, perhaps best expressed by those Romantic poets he admired, of a life lived with a sense of one’s purpose and fulfilment in the grand scheme of things. Herbert Read knew his purpose and he carried it out with dispatch and fervour.
Read More : Educator Profile - HERBERT EDWARD READ 1893–1968
