The Herbert Read Conference 2004

Speaker: Nannette Aldred, University of Sussex
Title: "A sufficient flow of vital ideas": Herbert Read from Leeds Arts Club to the ICA , London

This paper will explore how the theories of art that Herbert Read encountered at the Leeds Art Club figured in the formation of the ICA in post war London.

The Leeds-London connection was one of artists, patrons, writers and thinkers who formed an intelligensia class committed to exploring new ideas about culture and its relation to society, the unconscious and everyday life. They were committed to supporting and making art, to the discussion and publication of its ideas and its exhibition. That Read was intellectually formed by the ideas he met at the Leeds Art Club has been discussed in other places and here I shall consider their realisation at the ICA.

The ICA wanted to create an environment conducive to a serious and critical cultural climate, in which to nurture an avant garde and, at the same time to reach a popular audience. It aimed to link new ideas in art with a popular understanding and consider the place of art in an industrialised democracy. In some ways it was seen as part of the post war settlement. I think it would be interesting to place Read’s ideas between the years immediately preceding the first great war with their articulation in what would become the ICA immediately following the second. I will also discuss his involvement with projects in the intervening years, projects like Art Now, Unit One and The International Surrealist exhibition, as well as his plans for a Museum of Living Art in 1935.

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