HERBERT
READ
In contrast to Kenneth
Clark, Herbert Read was a champion and elucidator of 'modern art', writing
about a wide variety of twentieth-century artists ... from Picasso and Kandinsky to Moore and Hepworth,
and writing as one of the moderns, a sort of petty-bourgeois intellectual for
whom abstraction, whether of the Left or the Right but preferably the former,
was the bread of contemporary life - at least in art. A leading art critic, Read was also a poet
and philosopher, and it was to such philosophically-biased works as The Redemption of the
Robot that I instinctively gravitated, as though in search of
a twentieth-century Nietzsche - poet, philosopher, and art critic all rolled
into one!
To be sure, it came as no surprise for me to learn that Read had
been an ardent admirer of the great Polish-German philosophe and ill-fated genius
whose works were to have such a profound influence on the twentieth
century. Like Coleridge before him,
Herbert Read was one of those rare Englishmen who transcend the narrow parochialism
of English letters for the broader, deeper world of European culture, a 'Good
European', as Nietzsche would say, and, not altogether surprisingly, he was
aware of what was happening on the Continent.
As for his philosophy ... well, certainly the machine must be
harnessed to human needs and not be allowed to dominate or blight the spirit, a
sort of mechanical slave or servant which frees man for higher cultural and
religious realization, progressively unburdening him of the past. Herbert Read was no reactionary in this
respect, but welcomed the liberating potential of the machine, much as Oscar
Wilde had done a generation or two earlier.
And the machine, tamed and perfected, must lead, in due course, to the next
civilization, a civilization of truly global proportions ... developed and
furthered by Western man, world civilization a kind of extrapolation from
Western civilization rather than a completely new and independent phenomenon -
such, in brief, was how Read reasoned, and we needn't be surprised that he, a
Westerner and Briton himself, should take such a comforting, not to say
convenient, line!
The truth, I fear, is somewhat different, closer, in fact, to Spengler, with whom Read was conversant, though not,
apparently, in complete accord. For
nothing could be further from the truth than to imply, as Read does, that the
West, contrary to being a decadent civilization limited in time, is capable of
saving both itself and the world in due course, spreading the ultimate
civilization to every corner of the globe in the name of mechanical liberation,
with, no doubt, the probability of the wider dissemination of abstract art
thrown in for good measure ... as a sort of cultural corollary to the above!
No, here Read deceives himself and, unwittingly, his readers ...
if he thinks the West capable of such a Houdini-like escape from the manacles
of manifold decadence. Were he a
Catholic Irishman writing about Ireland and the possibility of that country's
becoming a catalyst for supertheocratic revolution throughout
much of the Third World, then we or, at any rate, I could take his philosophy
of redemption more seriously. But, as
things stand, it is little more than an assertion of Western decadence, and
that is no more likely to prevail in the long term than ... universal
communism. We can admire Herbert Read
his global perspective, but not the terms in which it was couched! Being British carries its own inherent
limitations, both culturally and intellectually, and, no less than the other
great Britons I have mentioned, Read was most assuredly their unwitting victim!
