'A stimulation to greater effort of living’: The Importance of Henry Moore’s ‘credible compromise’ to Herbert Read’s Aesthetics and Politics
- Submitting institution
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Royal College of Art(The)
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- Cranfield2
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity
- Publisher
- Tate Research Publication
- ISBN
- 9781849763912
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
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- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
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http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/henry-moore/ben-cranfield-a-stimulation-to-greater-effort-of-living-the-importance-of-henry-moores-r1151301
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Despite the pre-eminence of Herbert Read’s work as an ambassador of the avant-garde in his own lifetime, he fell into obscurity after his death, with just a few attempts to re-evaluate his legacy in recent years. Similarly, Henry Moore’s success has also been his downfall, with subsequent generations of artists rejecting his particular brand of modernism. In this single-authored research article I counteract this historic dismissal by considering the role Moore played in Read’s aesthetic theory and in his political commitment to anarchism.
This work is of significance for art historians concerned with the development of modernism in mid-century Britain, and contemporary artists, curators and scholars interested in recovering the lost radical potential of modernism’s key practitioners from the wreckage of their essentializing and universalizing positions.
The research for this article builds upon my long-term work on the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where Herbert Read was founding Chairman and subsequently President until his death. I offer a rigorous analysis of Read’s philosophical and political thinking through a comprehensive reading of Read’s extensive published work. The piece was edited and reviewed by the research team at Tate as part of a major research project between Tate and the Henry Moore Foundation.
This article builds on research in Cranfield, B. (2013) ‘‘Not Another Museum’: The Search for Contemporary Connection’, Journal of Visual Culture 12, 2, 313–331; Cranfield, B. (2012) ‘Between Consensus and Anxiety: Curating Transparency at the ICA of the 1950s’, The Journal of Curatorial Studies, 1, 1, 83–100; Cranfield, B. (2011) ‘Students, Artists and the ICA: the revolution within?’ in Resurgence of the Sixties: The Continuing Relevance of the Cultural and Political Watershed, London and New York: Anthem Press, 82–100, submitted for the REF 2014.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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