X-Nico

7 unusual facts about Herbert Read


Benedict Read

Benedict William Read (born 1945) is an English art historian, the son of the eminent art critic and poet Sir Herbert Read.

Huang Yong Ping

Essentially it is two books, one by a Chinese art historian Wang Bomin and another by American art historian Herbert Read, both well established.

Jacob Kramer

Writing to his close friend and fellow Arts Club member Herbert Read in 1918, Kramer stated that when he looked at an object he saw both its physical appearance and its spiritual manifestation.

Michael Paraskos

He went on to attend the University of Leeds and University of Nottingham, studying at Nottingham with Fintan Cullen to gain his doctorate on the aesthetic theories of Herbert Read in 2005.

As this suggests, Paraskos's route into anarchism might have its origins in his earlier academic studies into Herbert Read, but in Paraskos's own work this interest has evolved into a theory of art in which a direct parallel is made between the anarchist desire to free the individual from society and what Paraskos claims is the artists' desire to be free from existing culture.

In 2008 Paraskos also edited a book of essays on the British anarchist art theorist Herbert Read for the anarchist publishing house the Freedom Press, and he has spoken at anarchist studies conferences in the UK.

Taking his cue from the theories of Herbert Read, for Paraskos art becomes a material manifestation of the physical engagement between the artist and the world around them (called by Paraskos 'actuality').


Betty Rea

The children's paintings from this time were included in several British Council exhibitions sent abroad and some are illustrated in Herbert Read's "Education Through Art".

Cecil Stephenson

His other friends and neighbours over the years included Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, Herbert Read, Walter Gropius, Alexander Calder and Ben Nicholson.

Felix Kelly

Herbert Read, the writer and art critic, bought a painting and invited Kelly to illustrate the second edition of his short novel, The Green Child.

Foundation course

This approach to preparing art and design students for degree level study had its origins in the writings of Herbert Read, and Coldstream, Thubron and Read regularly met to discuss their ideas at Read's house in the village of Stonegrave, North Yorkshire.

Poetry and the Microphone

Notable for including Orwell’s sentence: "Poetry on the air sounds like the Muses in striped trousers.", the article mentions some of the material used in the broadcasts, mainly by contemporary or near-contemporary English writers such as T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Auden, Stephen Spender, Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, Alex Comfort, Robert Bridges, Edmund Blunden, and D. H. Lawrence.

Stass Paraskos

Despite luminaries of the art world speaking in Paraskos's defence, including Sir Herbert Read and Norbert Lynton, and messages of support from Britain's Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, Paraskos lost the trial and was fined five pounds.

The Republic of Letters

Herbert Read and T. S. Eliot were both asked to contribute by Aldington, who himself had been approached by Routledge in 1923, but both initially refused.


see also

Tomoji Abe

Abe became acquainted with British modernism, and especially the concepts of intellectualism associated with T.E. Hulme, Herbert Read and T.S. Eliot.