The Herbert Read Conference 2004

Speaker: Andrew Causey, University of Manchester
Title: Herbert Read and the boundaries of art in the early 1950s.

The paper will examine debates within the art world in the first half of the 1950s, and specifically between Read and participants in the Independent Group within the Institute of Contemporary Arts. To start, argument will focus on what younger writers, especially Lawrence Alloway, objected to in Read, an aesthetic idealism, as they saw it, that maintained tenuous links with modernity. The paper will refer to art writing in general in England at the time, comparing Read’s writing with Nikolaus Pevsner’s Englishness of English Art, a work that seeks to be so encompassing in its comparisons across history that suggested likenesses are barely recognisable. What is lost by art writing of this period where comparisons are made across wide chronological and geographical distances. The influence of Jung on Read will be examined in terms of Jung’s desire to establish cross-cultural links through his theory of archetypes. The argument will be made that Read’s achievement was very considerable at this period and central to the effectiveness of the new, more institutionalised postwar British art world. But there was a downside as well, in that Read’s efforts, especially evident in the Art of Sculpture, to link the present in sculpture with areas of sculpture remote in time and place risked creating a dangerously a-historical picture sculpture. This was symptomatic of a postwar conservatism and the greater institutionalisation of art referred to that wished to enforce existing cultural boundaries. It was in this attempt to support modernism without confronting modernity that Read found himself in opposition to Alloway and others.

This page hosted by

---

Visit Geocities'