The Last Modern: A Life of Herbert Read - Hardcover

King, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312048106 ISBN 13: 9780312048105

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1990

About this title

From Library Journal:

Ironically, Read may have become what would have least appealed to him--an icon. Most people remember him only as a relentless promoter of modernism; some may recall that he was an anarchist as well. King tries, with some success, to put some color into a figure whom history seems to have drained of life, and his access to Read's family and many of his papers helps in this aim. Still, despite Read's various loves, successes, disappointments (e.g., evolving into more a cultural than a literary figure), dealings with the intellectually rich and famous (T.S. Eliot, Henry Moore, Kenneth Clark, Carl Jung, W.H. Auden--the list is a long one), he fails here to generate much excitement. For readers inherently interested in the Modernist world or Read per se, this biography will hold much interest; for others, it will read as flat as Read's own autobiographical fiction.
- Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse,
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

It is ironic that Read (1893-1968), the influential English art critic, champion of surrealism and abstraction, greatly resented the role of critic. He was full of contradictions: a pacifist, he fought heroically in WW I; a defender of modernism, he felt betrayed by "tedious" post-modernist fads like Pop and minimalism; an anarchist with paternalistic tendencies, he abandoned the view of the artist as outsider for a faith in art's power to transform society. In a rich, full-scale portrait of one of the foremost English intellectuals of this century, King, biographer of William Cowper and Paul Nash, delves into Read's troubled first marriage, his resentment of "gloomy priest" T. S. Eliot, his relationships with Henry Moore, Jung, Orwell, Dali, Graham Greene, Edward Dahlberg and many others. Photos.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0312048106
• ISBN 13: 9780312048105
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 364