The Herbert Read Conference 2004

Speaker: David Getsy, Dartmouth College, USA
Title: Tactility or Opticality: Herbert Read and Clement Greenberg on the Art of Sculpture

In a 1956 New York Times book review, Clement Greenberg vilified Herbert Read on the occasion of the publication of The Art of Sculpture. The influential American critic questioned Read’s characterization of the sculptural encounter and the intellectual history of sculpture theory. He argued against Read’s emphasis on tactility and set it in opposition to a trait he had vociferously championed in contemporary art — opticality.

Much more than a clash of egos by two of the most prominent critics of the twentieth century, this interchange illuminates a set of issues crucial to the understanding and historiography of modern sculpture. Coming at time when Greenberg increasingly advocated sculpture as the most successful fulfillment of his theories of opticality, his review sought to redirect the history of modern sculpture in such a way that its logical culmination would be the work of David Smith. Greenberg subsequently went on to champion Smith while concurrently attacking the work of Read’s exemplary sculptor, Henry Moore. Moore featured prominently in Read’s accounts of modern sculpture, and his theories about the medium were largely derived from his long-term engagement with Moore’s work.

I will analyze the series of texts in which both Read and Greenberg set out their histories of modern sculpture and discuss those specific instances where each critic subsequently commented upon or alluded to this interchange. This examination will reveal that the battle Read and Greenberg quietly fought was a contest between Moore and Smith and between the concepts of tactility and opticality. Implicit in these debates is the status, in a post-World War II art world, of British versus American sculpture in the face of a newly reconstituted internationalist modernism.

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