Herbert Read
Herbert Read
Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MCwas an English art historian, poet, literary critic and philospher, best known for numerous books on art, which included influential volumes on the role of art in education. Read was co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
art personality host
Art in its widest sense is the extension of the personality: a host of artificial limbs.
art consciousness exposure
Art is an indecent exposure of the consciousness.
space vision spontaneity
Spontaneity is not enough - or, to be more exact, spontaneity is not possible until there is an unconscious coordination of form, space and vision.
art exercise skills
The classicist, and the naturalist who has much in common with him, refuse to see in the highest works of art anything but the exercise of judgement, sensibility, and skill. The romanticist cannot be satisfied with such a normal standard; for him art is essentially irrational - an experience beyond normality, sometimes destructive of normality, and at the very least evocative of that state of wonder which is the state of mind induced by the immediately inexplicable.
ethos literature deny
What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.
equality literature world
To realize that new world we must prefer the values of freedom and equality above all other values - above personal wealth, technical power and nationalism.
progress literature groups
The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group.
doubt evolution stage
I have not the slightest doubt that this form of individuation represents a higher stage in the evolution of mankind.
life literature dull
If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, but dull and mechanical.
law growth balance
The most general law in nature is equity-the principle of balance and symmetry which guides the growth of forms along the lines of the greatest structural efficiency.
animal literature morality
Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals.
art men giving
Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs, the elements of a new iconography.
art modern said
The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.
art modern symbols
If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar, that was only to be expected.