Herbert Read

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Sir Herbert Edward Read, MC, DSO (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, where he received both the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order. During the war, Read founded with Frank Rutter the journal Arts and Letters, which attacked conservative values and published texts by such writers as Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot.

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. He contributed to the Criterion (1922–1939) and he was many years a regular art critic for the Listener.

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 also served as a trustee of the Tate Gallery and as a curator at the Victoria & Albert (1922–1939), as well as co-founding the Institute of Contemporary Arts with Roland Penrose in 1947.

Read was knighted by Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1953 for "services to literature". Politically, however, 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). To Hell With Culture (1963) deals specifically with his disdain for the term culture and expands on his libertarian socialist view of the artist as artisan, as well as presenting a major analysis of the work of Eric Gill.

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.

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