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The Herbert Read Conference 2004

The Herbert Read Conference, Tate Britain, London, 25 and 26 June 2004
Jointly organised by the University of Nottingham Institute for Research in Visual Culture and Tate Britain


Speaker: David Hulks, independent scholar
Title: Despair, or Defiance: the double inflection in Herbert Read's geometry of fear

This paper examines Herbert Read's description of a common enterprise in post-war British sculpture, the ‘geometry of fear’, as displayed in the British pavilion at Venice in 1952. The hypothesis of geometry of fear was derived from contemporary understandings of the Cold War Zeitgeist, an all-pervading anxiety produced by propaganda promoting fear of Soviet aggression. Read, who was ill-disposed towards American imperialism and a strong believer in the benignity of artistic expression, proposed that artists were not simply advancing the climate of anxiety by incorporating fear imagery into their work; rather they were combating the general condition of neurosis by exposing, rather than ignoring, the dark forces of global violence. Read’s proposal was not that there was a single artistic strategy that all artists were adopting, but rather that there was a productive diversity in their response. Despite diversity, he felt that there was a common anti-violent message and the creation of an ‘iconography of despair, or of defiance’ - a telling afterthought. Subsequently Read's view has been challenged, with art historians identifying at least three separate lines of sculptural enquiry within the geometry of fear grouping that was misleadingly presented at Venice as a common set of concerns. These subsets of the geometry of fear school seem to have been more at variance with one another than aligned or connected. This paper, however, is sympathetic to Read’s original proposal, re-examining the case for the geometry of fear and extending and re-working the suggestion that the key to a kind of unity might be found in a characteristic double inflection - or as Butler put it, the ‘double image’. Henry Moore is taken as the pivotal figure that Read’s analysis refers to. But examples are taken from a wide sample, including the more recent work of British sculptors where a return to fear work coincided with the Millenium's end.














































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