Herbert Edward Read

Herbert Edward Read (Kirkbymoorside, Yorkshire, 1893 – Stonegrave, 1968) was an English thinker whose work ranged across art history, literary criticism, poetry, fiction, political philosophy and anarchism. He wrote more than a thousand pieces over his career, and he remains important for his efforts to bring modern art and psychology into English-speaking debate, and for his writings on art and education.

The eldest child of a tenant farmer, Read lost his father young, and the family had to leave their farm. He began studying at the University of Leeds, but the First World War cut his studies short. He served in France with the Green Howards, was commissioned in 1915 and finished the war as a captain, decorated with the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order. Back in London he joined the literary world, co-founding the magazine Arts & Letters, which was among the first to publish T. S. Eliot. He also worked for the Victoria and Albert Museum.

As a poet he wrote free verse shaped by the trenches and by Imagism, but his reputation rests more on his criticism. His essays on poetic form and on English prose style are still read. He championed British modernists such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, helped organise the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London with Roland Penrose, and edited the Burlington Magazine. Drawing on idealist philosophy, he held that art was a psychological and even biological process, and he turned to psychoanalysis, first as a Freudian and later as a follower of Carl Jung, whose collected works he edited in English.

His anarchism, in the quietist tradition of Edward Carpenter and William Morris, cost him the favour of many fellow anarchists when he accepted a knighthood in 1953. He opposed Franco's regime and campaigned for Spanish political prisoners. His most lasting legacy may be in art education: his study of children's drawings led him to argue that children's creativity and adult creativity form one continuum, and he helped found the International Society for Education through Art, linked to UNESCO.