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HERBERT READ (1893–1968) David Thistlewood1

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HERBERT READ (1893–1968) David Thistlewood1 The following text was originally published in PROSPECTS: the quarterly review of comparative education (Paris, UNESCO: International Bureau of Education), vol. 24, no.1/2, 1994, p. 375–90 UNESCO: International Bureau of Education, 2002 This document may be reproduced free of charge as long as acknowledgement is made of the source. HERBERT READ (1893–1968) David Thistlewood1 In all things, moral and intellectual, we should act on the belief that we really possess only what we have conquered ourselves that we are made perfect by natural habits, but slaves by social conventions; and that until we have become accustomed to beauty we are not capable of truth and goodness, for by beauty we mean the principle of harmony which is the given order of the physical universe, to which we conform and live, or which we reject and die (Read, 1944, p. 25). Introduction Herbert Read was a poet devoted to the evocation of vivid pictorial imagery, especially of his native northern English countryside. He was also a historian of ceramics and stained glass, and was strongly committed to the modern revitalization of industrial design. He was a literary critic, contributing important studies of the English Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley. Twice decorated for bravery in the First World War, he subsequently became a pacifist and theoretical anarchist. His unconventional politics did not prevent his being honoured with a knighthood, nor his belonging to the British cultural establishment, as signified in honorary professorships and prestigious lectureships. But, in spite of this diversity of achievement, he is best remembered as a critic of, and apologist for, the avant-garde art of his lifetime—particularly English and European Modernism (Thistlewood, 1984)—and as a profound explicator and defender of children’s creativity. His interests in art education, though nascent in his earlier aesthetic theorizing, did not develop fully until he was approaching his fiftieth year. They emerged from his interests in theories and practices illuminating the position of the avant-garde within the socio-political flux. The subject of child art was at first of subsidiary importance: arguments about a ‘pre-logical’ essence within avant-garde creativity could be supported with reference to properties apparent in both primitive art and the imagery of children. However, he became deeply interested in children’s drawings and paintings after having been invited to collect works for an exhibition of British art that would tour allied and neutral countries during the Second World War. As it was considered too risky to transport across the Atlantic works of established importance to the national heritage, it was proposed that children’s drawings and paintings should be sent instead. Read, in making his collection, was unexpectedly moved by the expressive power and emotional content of some of the younger artist’s works. The experience prompted his special attention to their cultural value, and his engagement of the theory of children’s creativity with seriousness matching his devotion to the avant-garde. This work both changed fundamentally his own life’s work throughout his remaining twenty-five years and provided art education with a rationale of unprecedented lucidity and persuasiveness. Key books and pamphlets resulted: Education through Art (Read, 1943); The Education of Free Men (Read, 1944); Culture and Education in a World Order (Read, 1948); The Grass Read, 1955); and Redemption of the Robot (Read, 1970). 1 As these titles suggest, Read elaborated a socio-cultural dimension of creative education, offering the notion of greater international understanding and cohesiveness rooted in principles of developing the fully-balanced personality through art education. Child art was the driving force of this philosophy: the heroic task of education was to prevent the young child from losing access to whatever ancient, ingrained, cultural wisdom he or she was able to manifest in symbolization. Reads last years were devoted to the proclamation of this philosophy throughout the world, especially in the proceedings of the International Society for Education through Art, which he was instrumental in establishing under the auspices of UNESCO. Life and intellectual biography Read was the son of a tenant farmer in north Yorkshire, and his first perception of the world was of an utterly stable, conservative, rural community. In 1903, however, when he was 10, his father died and his family was dispossessed of its tenancy. His mother entered domestic service, he being boarded at an orphanage school in Halifax before leaving, at the earliest opportunity, to become a bank clerk in Leeds. The obvious facts of industrial poverty around him challenged inherited political prejudices and, by the time he entered Leeds University in 1912 to study economics (after having matriculated at evening classes), he was a ready participant in socialist debates. He began to read The New Age, among the leading journals of socialist politics and aesthetics of its day. He became a regular contributor to the paper throughout a period in which it was a vehicle for promoting socialist alternatives to Fabianism, a movement dedicated to opposing capitalism by debate and force of argument rather than precipitate action. Read himself differed with the Fabians not so much on questions of revolution as of materialism. In pursuit of improving wages and conditions, and increasing worker’s share of goods, the Fabians appeared willing to surrender fundamental socialist principles, notably the aesthetic and spiritual goals of ‘Arts and Crafts’ reformers, such as William Morris. In Read’s earliest childhood memories, even the most severely exploited workers had experienced the satisfactions of working with the land, with growth and harvest and with animal husbandry, and even the meanest tasks had been acknowledged periodically in thanksgivings, seasonal festivities and other kinds of common celebration. His images of work were of hard toil cheerfully endured in the countryside, of industrial processes centred upon the village forge or, and of urban employment housed in small scale machine sheds—an imagery very similar to Piotr Kropotkins, whose writings he admired. Read’s early contribution to socio-political thought, published in the relatively obscure periodical The Guildsman in 1917, was to propose a theory of economic groupings and networks that would have fused both localized and internationalized interests. Rural industries would have run on anarchistic principles, while the world’s urban centres would have formed such an interlocked system of economic mutual dependence as to have made any future international conflict—such as the war he had recently fought in—impossible. He saw trade unions and industrial federations as prototype economic groups which, with only a little more purpose, could be the regulators of an international economy; and, like the Marxists, he could foresee the withering of the State, though not into extinction but to a size commensurate with its remaining responsibilities, virtually all of which, to Read, would have been cultural. Read political beliefs had roots in these convictions another war is unthinkable; the State has no economic purpose; and the ideal form of government is one which guarantees the utmost equality while preserving individual freedoms, including the right of an individual to become detached from those community interests into which he or she had been accidentally projected by birth. This is precisely what had happened to Read as a result of his father’s premature death, his own dislocation from the locality of his birth, and his having found a role outside the agricultural community. His position was summarized in his critical appreciation of Julien Benda’s book La 2 Trahison des clercs [Treason of the Intellectuals] (Benda, 1928) in which a series of propositions were found to be so strikingly familiar that they came as self-revelations. All real human existence is the existence of an individual, either of an individual person or of a common-interest group, and is competitive and necessarily aggressive. The clerc or disinterested person of learning is one who protests against a morality of aggression by proclaiming ideal values revealed in contemplation of matters abstract, universal and infinite. Civilized humanity is made possible by the coexistence and synthesis of aggressive expediency and disinterested philosophy. A world observing only a code of practical necessity would be barbarous: one that practised only a code of ideals would cease to exist. Real existence admits the gradual softening of aggression with idealism. Read (having left the Army with the rank of Captain, having worked for a brief time as a government civil servant at the Treasury, and then having transferred his employment within the civil service to an Assistant Keepership of Ceramics at the Victoria and Albert Museum) naturally identified with the dislocated individual who, while leading an ostensibly unproductive life, had the special purpose of divining abstract principles for the benefit of the wider community in an age of idealism following, and counteracting, a period of great international aggression. At this time in his life, like his poet friend T.S. Eliot, and the classicist T.E. Hulme, whose collected works he had edited (Hulme, 1924), Read considered the goals of aesthetic contemplation to be formal precision, harmony and elegant proportion principles which, he firmly believed, when evident in literature, art and conduct, offered the world the prospect of an international medium of understanding. This was in the 1920s. In the following decade he also advocated the very opposite of formal precision, harmony and elegant proportion, urging society’s artists and art theorists to cultivate the irrational and imprecise. This new dimension was stimulated by Read’s discovery of the celebration of the irrational creative act in Surrealism (Read, 1936), besides his own liberation from the civil service first in order to be subsequently to be Editor of The Burlington Magazine (1933–39).
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