Read, Sir Herbert

Read, Sir Herbert (b Kirkbymoorside, Yorkshire, 4 Dec. 1893; d Stonegrave, Yorkshire, 12 June 1968).
British poet and critic, who throughout the middle third of the 20th century was virtually unchallenged as his country's foremost advocate and interpreter of modern art. After serving with distinction in the army in the First World War he worked at the Treasury, then in the ceramics department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1922–31, before becoming professor of fine arts at Edinburgh University, 1931–3. By this time he had published several collections of his verse as well as various art-historical studies (including English Stained Glass, 1926, still a standard work), critical works on English literature, and the first of his philosophical works on art, The Meaning of Art (1931). In 1933 he returned to London as editor (1933–9) of the Burlington Magazine, Britain's foremost scholarly art journal, and his attention turned increasingly to contemporary art; in 1933 he published Art Now, the first comprehensive defence in English of modern European art, and in 1934 he edited the modernist manifesto Unit One. At this time he lived near Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Ben Nicholson, and he acted as the public mouthpiece of the group of artists of which they were the centre. He was interested in Surrealism as well as abstraction and was one of the organizers of the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London. In 1947 he was co-founder (with Roland Penrose) of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Among his many books the most influential was probably Education through Art (1943), which used the insights of psychoanalysis to promote the idea of teaching art as an aid to the development of the personality. His other books include A Concise History of Modern Painting (1959) and A Concise History of Modern Sculpture (1964), both of which have been frequently reprinted. By the time he wrote them he was becoming disenchanted with contemporary artistic developments, but he was known as ‘The Pope of Modern Art’ and was regarded as ‘an international authority and indeed something of a sage. It was not a role to which he ever pretended, for he was a man of conspicuous modesty’ (DNB).