ABSTRACT
The passing of Sir Herbert Read, who died on June 12 at the age of seventy-four, brought to a close one of the most remarkable careers in modern times. Herbert Read was probably the most famous art critic of his day, at least in the English-speaking world, and, besides being an active polemicist on a wide range of social and political questions and a poet, he was also prolific as a literary critic. He made sizable contributions to the literature of anarchism, and to educational theory—particularly the theory of art education. Encouragement, the championship of the new and the unfamiliar, the defense of the modernist faith—these were the prevailing motives in Read's art criticism in the thirties, when he took up the cause of modern art and gave it an eloquent and high-minded advocacy. In England, where Read's generosity to several generations of artists and writers was itself a legend, these contradictions were not much explored.
