Herbert Read

Herbert Read was an anarchist who accepted a knighthood, a war poet who wrote the standard books on modern art, and the man who with Roland Penrose founded the Institute of Contemporary Arts. He grew up on a Yorkshire farm, was orphaned at ten and sent to an orphanage, and served through the First World War as an infantry officer, winning the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order; the poems and the memoir he wrote about it are unusual for their flatness of tone. He became a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, then a critic and editor, and he was the principal English advocate of Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson at a time when British opinion regarded modern sculpture as a joke. Education Through Art, published in 1943, argued that art should be the basis of general education rather than a subject within it, and it shaped teaching in Britain and abroad for a generation. His politics were consistently anarchist and pacifist, and he wrote for anarchist journals for decades, which made his acceptance of a knighthood in 1953 - for services to literature, and on the argument that it might help the causes he worked for - a scandal among his own side that he never entirely lived down. He co-founded the ICA in 1947. He returned to Yorkshire and is buried at Kirkdale. He wrote a novel, The Green Child, that Graham Greene called one of the strangest books in English. He was the first editor of the Burlington Magazine to champion living artists. His son Piers Paul Read became a novelist.

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