New Approaches to Herbert Read

When in 1936 Surrealism reached the shores of England, Herbert Read was already one of the foremost apologists for avant-garde art in Britain. However, he never officially joined the movement; yet a series of factors, including the movement’s anti-orthodox communism political ideology, its interest in Freud’s psychoanalytical theories, its emphasis on the social impact of art, and its vision of the artistic act as characterised by a creative vitalist impulse, led him to take an interest in and promote surrealist poetry in England. Thus, from 1936, Read became the reference critic of the Anglo-Saxon cohort, a status he would maintain until 1939, when he began distancing himself from the group for various reasons, including political ones. In particular, Read revisited Freudian theory as applied to art by French surrealists, taking advantage of his previous psychoanalytic studies as well as his interest in organic forms and socialism.

By analysing Read’s writings of the 1920s and 30s, this paper sheds new light on Read’s contribution to Surrealism in Britain, as well as the impact his aesthetic theories had in developing an alternative canon both to the formalist ideas – which proliferated in the United Kingdom since the 1910s, and were still strongly rooted in British art criticism of the period – and modernist trends characterising some British experimentations of the interwar years, mostly based on literary tendencies and abstractions.

Caterina Caputo obtained her PhD in History of Contemporary Art from the University of Florence in 2018. Her research interests and publications lie at the intersection of collecting, art criticism, transnational exchanges, cultural and visual dissemination related to Surrealism, Avant-gardes, and Modernity. She extensively published on these topics in academic volumes and journals. Since 2019 she has been an External Assistant for the course in History of Contemporary Art at the University of Florence and member of the Research-Lab “Gradiva”.

Regarding Herbert Read, she has recently written two essays: Automatism and Psychoanalysis in the pages of the London Bulletin (1938-1940): From Herbert Read to Humphrey Jennings, «Dada/Surrealism», n. 24 (forthcoming); and Shaping Surrealism in Britain: The London Bulletin, 1938-1940, in MODERN ART REVIEWed, (eds.) Malcolm Gee, et al., Berlin: De Gruyter (forthcoming).

Herbert Read wrote repeatedly and at length about Barbara Hepworth. In published texts and articles, hers were the only art works by a woman Read discussed on a regular basis. Read, however, situated Hepworth within a gendered paradigm – dominated by Henry Moore – which perpetuated the misconception that her work was secondary and derivative. Hepworth frequently accepted the texts which placed her achievements behind those of her male peers, including essays intended for her own publications.

This paper will explore the extent to which Read’s texts on Hepworth are evidence of the misogyny of the modernist project, and the degree to which Hepworth was complicit in the sexist assessment of her work. It focuses on the introduction Read wrote for the Hepworth monograph (1952), and in particular the passage in which he invoked Jung’s conception of the anima and animus in order to compare and assess the creativity of Hepworth and Moore. Was Read’s explanation of binary gender difference and confluence an example of straightforward masculine bias? Conversely, might it actually evince more enlightened thinking? Moreover, does Read on gender affect our understanding of Hepworth’s defence of the ‘feminine’ in the same volume and her own complex notions of gender?

Stephen Feeke is currently researching Barbara Hepworth’s early bronzes for a Ph.D. at the Courtauld Institute alongside projects as an independent writer and curator. Recent articles have appeared in The Burlington and the Sculpture Journal, and he contributed to the catalogue accompanying the Hepworth exhibition at the Rijksmuseum (summer 2022). He was previously a Director at the New Art Centre, Roche Court, and was a curator at the Henry Moore Institute.

Details to follow soon.

Dr Jonathan Vernon is an Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

Last year he was a Leonard A. Lauder Postdoctoral Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where he worked on a book project regarding the cultural politics of the sculptural fragment in the twentieth century. He was also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute, examining the ‘Brancusi paradigm’ in British sculpture of the 1960s.

He was awarded his PhD at The Courtauld in 2019 and served as the Ridinghouse Contributing Editor at The Burlington Magazine from 2014 to 2017. His latest publication, an article for the June-July issue of Sculpture Journal, tells the story of how Brancusi’s sculpture became a tool of Cold War cultural diplomacy.

In February 1938, Herbert Read became chairman of the committee organizing the Twentieth Century German Art exhibition, a response to Nazi cultural policies, and the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition. Critical assessments of Read’s involvement with the exhibition maintain that he appropriated and assimilated German modernism into a depoliticized system of values that followed the appeasement policy of the British government. Yet, Read’s writings about German modernism throughout the 1930s tell a different story.

This paper argues that Read’s interest in German modernism was informed by a concern with the ethical implications of rejecting artistic freedom, viewing it as a potential threat to individual freedom. Considering the hostile attitude towards modernism in England, Read’s support of German modernism and involvement with the exhibition should be viewed as an effort to inform the English audience of the enduring connection between free societies and modern art.

Hemdat Kislev is a doctoral candidate in the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews. Her research offers a revised view of aesthetic autonomy by discussing its ethical underpinnings in the historical context of interwar modern art. Focusing on modern art in Britain, Egypt, and Mandatory Palestine, it aims to show the interrelatedness of aesthetic autonomy to other human freedoms.

In Herbert Read’s wartime essay ‘The Nature of Revolutionary Art’ from The Politics of the Unpolitical (1943), he reflected on the function of abstract art to preserve the core elements of the arts and architecture against destruction:

“Abstract art has a positive function. It keeps inviolate, until such time as society will once more be ready to make use of them, the universal qualities of art – those elements which survive all changes and revolutions.”

This configuration of modern, abstract art as a return to formal principles was taken rather literally by the Belfast curator and art critic, John Hewitt, who in turn interpreted Doris V. Blair’s paintings of Belfast after the blitz as anticipatory of new landscape and figure subjects after the war.

How Herbert Read reconfigures the social utility of art in response to the Second World War across the essays of The Politics of the Unpolitical will be addressed in this paper. Read’s influence on Northern Irish art – from the 1930s Ulster Unit following Unit One, to Hewitt’s application of Read’s ‘social action’ to post-war Northern Irish artists – will then be traced in order to illuminate the regional specificities and universal politics of his 1940s art writing.

Jack Quin is a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the University of Birmingham. His research explores the relationship between poetry and sculpture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on the poet W.B. Yeats. He has articles on literature and the visual arts published or forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, Modernist Cultures, and Irish Studies Review. His monograph W.B. Yeats and the Language of Sculpture was published in June with Oxford University Press.

In 2011, two months after the start of Occupy Wall Street, David Graeber identified “prefigurative politics” as one of the movement’s four characteristic principles (the other three were direct action, illegalism and the rejection of hierarchy). In contrast to an orthodox socialist telos that sees revolution as a future event, “prefigurative politics” seeks to transform social relations in the present moment; Graeber described Occupy as a genuine attempt “to create the institutions of the new society in the shell of the old”.

Prefiguration goes hand-in-hand with the desire for long-term, broad-horizon imagination, but offers a continuous testing of imaginary landscapes against the necessities and flows of daily life. This paper considers Read’s work and modernist temporalities more widely in relation to these ideas, and speculates how these temporal imperatives might be brought to bear on our own political conjuncture.

Charlotte Jones is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at QMUL and the author of Realism, Form and Representation in the Edwardian Novel (OUP, 2021). She is working on a new edition of Conrad’s The Secret Agent for Oxford World’s Classics, and on a project about the influence of anarchist political and aesthetic theory on the history of the novel.

Details to follow soon.

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Herbert Read’s career has been scrutinised from numerous perspectives, but his role as a collector is rarely considered. Read was an ‘accidental collector’, who amassed an enviable body of modern art without intending to. The majority of his collection – around 200 items by 90 different artists – were gifts.  While the core of this collection has featured in exhibitions dedicated to Read, most notably A British Vision of World Art (1993), its full scope and significance are underappreciated.

Focusing on three indicative images, this paper examines Read’s role as a collector and the role of Read’s collection.

Dr Simon Marginson is an independent scholar, and specialist in twentieth-century art.  He carried out the initial research into the Benedict Read Bequest at the University of Leeds.

Details to follow soon.

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