Conclusion: Herbert Read and aesthetic education

Summary

The flux of life is pouring its aesthetic aspect into your eyes, your ears – and you ignore it because you are looking for your canons of beauty in some sort of frame or glass case or tradition. Modernism says: Why not each one of us, scholar or bricklayer, pleasurably realize all that is impressing itself upon our subconscious, the thousand odds and ends which make up your sensory everyday life?

Mina Loy, ‘Gertrude Stein’ (2005: 437)

In 1956, Herbert Read wrote an Introduction to the ‘Critic's Choice’ exhibition he had curated for the gallery of Arthur Tooth and Sons in London. In expansive as well as explanatory mode, Read found himself, as he had done for some three decades, justifying and defending ‘that extreme in contemporary art’ that was ‘misrepresented’ by the word ‘“abstraction”’ (Read and Thistlewood 1993: 167). To counter likely accusations of intellectualism, Read posed ‘directly sensuous and profound enjoyment’ – ‘I like this kind of art’. Dissociating his choices from ‘pejorative’ associations of abstraction with the ‘formalist’, the ‘pure’ and the ‘academic’, Read argued instead that to be abstract was to be more realist than to represent ‘the superficial appearance of objects’. He cited in support the aesthetician Ernst Cassirer, though he might equally have cited any of those modernist painters for whom abstraction was emphatically not ‘abstraction’: ‘To live in the realm of forms (Cassirer has said) does not signify an evasion of the issues of life; it represents, on the contrary, the realisation of one of the highest energies of life itself.’ Anticipating protests that this was indistinguishable from the aim ‘of every realist since Cézanne (if not since Masaccio)’, Read insisted that to follow Cézanne was to lead, ‘step by step with inexorable logic’, to the abstract paintings he had chosen for the exhibition.

Herbert Read haunts Lee Hall's characterisation of Lyons in The Pitmen Painters, and he has quietly accompanied much of the narrative of this book. Like Raymond Williams, Read knew something of the journey that the long revolution into education and democracy promised, in his case from a farming upbringing in North Yorkshire to becoming one of the leading art critics and public intellectuals in Britain. Unlike Williams, Read was a fervent champion of abstraction.