The Herbert Read Conference 2004

Speaker: Lee Beard, Courtauld Institute of Art, London
Title: ‘Art without content’: Herbert Read, pottery and the non-figurative.

Judge the art of a country, judge the fineness of its sensibility, by its pottery; it is a sure touchstone. Pottery is pure art; it is freed from any imitative intention.

(Herbert Read, ‘Art without content: pottery’, The Meaning of Art, 1931)


From his contribution to English Pottery: Its development from Early Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century in 1924, to the arrival of his highly influential book Art and Industry published ten years later, throughout the inter-war period Herbert Read would return time and again to the subject of pottery. In this paper, by studying a number of early texts (written by Read whilst employed within the Department of Ceramics at the Victoria and Albert Museum) alongside his later ‘modernist’ writings, I will consider the manner in which the author’s critical response to pottery both informed, and at times framed, his developing aesthetic theories on non-figurative art.

By acknowledging the growing avant-garde status of studio pottery in England between the wars, I will demonstrate that Read’s critical response to the so-called ‘applied arts’ not only represented an attempted transgression of hierarchical artistic boundaries, but was in turn symptomatic of wider inter-war attempts to locate modern English art in relation to a pre-industrial national tradition. With this in mind I will consider the extent to which a craft orientated perception of ‘making’ would continue to shape Read’s presentation of abstract art during the 1930s.

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