Herbert Read
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Herbert Edward Read (1893 - 1968) was an English poet and critic of literature and art.
He was born in Kirbymoorside in North Yorkshire. His studies at the University of Leeds were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, during which he served in France. Naked Warriors (1919) was his first volume of poetry; it deals with the horrors of war. His work, which shows the influence of imagism, was mainly in free verse. His Collected Poems appeared in 1966. As a critic of literature, Read mainly concerned himself with the English Romantic poets (as in The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry, 1953, for example). He published a novel, The Green Child.
However, Read was (and remains) better known as an art critic. He 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 trend-setting Burlington Magazine (1933-38). He was one of the organisers of the London International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 and the editor of the book Surrealism, published in 1936, with contributions from André Breton, Hugh Skyes Davies, Paul Eluard and Georges Hugnet. He co-founded the Institute of Contemporary Arts with Roland Penrose in 1947.
Read was knighted in 1953. Politically, he regarded himself as an anarchist, albeit in the English quietist tradition of Edward Carpenter and William Morris. His works on this subject include Anarchy & Order; Poetry & Anarchism (1938), Philosophy of Anarchism (1940), Revolution & Reason (1953); and My Anarchism (1966).
Among Read's writings on art criticism are Art Now (1933), Art and Industry (1934), the influential Education Through Art (1943) and A Concise History of Modern Painting (1959).
His total work is huge, amounting to over 1,000 published titles. His work is still remembered and read - there was a major conference, The Herbert Read Conference, at Tate Britain in June 2004.