ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Sir Herbert Read: Poet, Philosopher

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31726, 9 July 1968, Page 6

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Sir Herbert Read: Poet, Philosopher

With the recent death of Sir Herbert Read, England has lost her most distinguished philosopher. Born in 1893, the eldest son of a Yorkshire farmer, he spent his earliest years in rural isolation but on the death of his father in 1904 he was sent to school in Halifax. It was here that his proficiency at writing and his love of books emerged. Nevertheless, after completing his schooling Read enrolled at Leeds University and undertook the study of law and economics. In an important and personal way, however, his education continued to take place outside the university. His interest in literature continued to develop and he became more conscious of poetry and philosophy. A

small book of his poems, bearing the title “Songs of Chaos,” was published in 1915. In the same year Sir Herbert Read enlisted in the armed forces and subsequently saw active service in France and Belgium. He distinguished himself as a soldier and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Cross. Immediately after the war he spent a few uninteresting years as a civil servant before he was appointed to a position in the Department of Ceramics at the Victoria and Albert Museum. While there he wrote on pottery and stained glass; and in 1931, the year he left the Victoria and Albert, he published “The Meaning of Art” and two years later "Art Now.” These

books established Read as Britain’s most important writer on modern art, but also as a somewhat paradoxical aesthete: for him science was poetic and poetry scientific. “If you wish to reduce surrealism to its foundations you will find the only basic elements on which any useful structure can be built—the basic elements of natural science and psychology.” Indeed, Sir Herbert Read’s concern for revealing the affinity of arts with science helped artists to find their passport into a world largely dominated by technology.

Earlier in this tribute Sir Herbert Read is referred to as an art philosopher rather than as simply a critic—in fact in the preface of one of his books he writes, “What, if not philosophic, is this activity I have indulged in for the best part of a lifetime?” He saw this activity as neither historical nor critical but as philosophic, in the sense that it was the affirmation of a value-judgement. In 1963 Sir Herbert Read was invited to New Zealand to deliver the , Chancellor’s Lectures at Victoria University. These lectures, some of which were also delivered at other New Zealand and Australian Universities, expressed very clearly his belief that art is an activity of prime importance and in fact an indication of the vitality of a civilisation. For him art was much more than something we added to life in small pinches, like the salt to soup—it was life itself in its most intense moments of evolution.

Although with justification he has been referred to as Roger Fry’s true successor, Sir Herbert Read did not attempt to rival Fry’s achievement in the areas in which he alone was supreme. Fry. as we know, excelled at communicating the sensuous pleasures of art—the actual experience of viewing a great work of painting or sculpture. On the other hand Read working in a period of greater and more rapid change, saw the need to confront and render intelligible the apparently unrelated movements which are a part of the contemporary art pageant. But while the Inchoate tendencies of our day underline the continuing energy of creativity and we see them as healthy and vital they can •Iso present criticism with a very formidable task. Sir Herbert Read was certainly one of the few with the depth of understanding and the ability to render them intelligible in terms of a unified and ludd philosophy. —D P.