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Abstract
In an article in The Burlington Magazine of 1933, British theorist Herbert Read (1893–1968) proposed “a basic linear signature of our race.” His invocation of line as a mark of identity is representative of a wider community of thinkers who linked the British avant-garde with medieval illumination via the watercolors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Theorists and scholars such as Kenneth Clark (1903–1983), William George Constable (1887–1976), and Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983) joined Read in identifying drawing as an essential aspect of medieval illumination that had re-emerged in the compositions of the Romantic period as well as those of the Neo-Romantics, including John Piper (1903–1992) and Paul Nash (1889–1946). Theoretical enthusiasm for this lineage arose not only from aesthetic affinities but also from political utility. Amid concerns over mounting political extremism, notions of medieval art were useful as emblems of British precedent for sustainable and proud work. This paper traces the use of line at the time, most notably by Read, as a symbolic mark that promoted a balance between individualism and collectivism through its connection to the medieval period. Furthermore, I argue that harnessing the moral connotations of line was possible, and particularly effective, because of culturally available understandings of the drawn line's distinctive intimacy.
ORCID
Kate Aspinall http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7136-6454
Notes
1 Herbert Read, “English Art,” Burlington Magazine 63 (December 1933), 269.
2 Ibid., 244, 269, 270.
3 Royal Academy, British Art c.1000–1860 (January–March 1934). Catalogues: William Llewellyn (1858–1941) preface, William George Constable (1887–1976) and James Mann (1897–1962), intro. Exhibition of British Art, c. 1000–1860 (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1934); British Art, An Illustrated Souvenir of the Exhibition of British Art at the Royal Academy of Art (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1934); and William George Constable and Charles W.H. Johnson (1896-1964), eds., Commemorative Catalogue of the Exhibition of British Art, Royal Academy of Art, 1934 (1935).
4 Read, “English Art,” 243–76; and Herbert Read, The Philosophy of Modern Art: Collected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), 249–68. 1936 publication unknown; referenced in Andrew Causey, “English Art and ‘The National Character,’ 1933–34,” in The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past 1880–1940, ed. David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt, and Fiona Russell (London: Yale University Press, 2002), 283.
5 Kevin Davey, “Herbert Read and Englishness,” in Herbert Read Reassessed, ed. David Goodway (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998), 270.
6 Dana Ward, “Art and Anarchy: Herbert Read's Aesthetic Politics” in Re-Reading Read: New Views on Herbert Read, ed. Michael Paraskos (London: Freedom Press, 2007), 20–33.
7 Allan Antliff, “Open Form and the Abstract Imperative: Herbert Read and Contemporary Anarchist Art,” in Paraskos,Re-Reading Read, 34; David Goodway, “The Politics of Herbert Read,” in Read Reassessed, 215–47; Ward, “Art and Anarchy,” 25; Jerry Zaslove, “Herbert Read as Touchstone for Anarcho-Modernism – Aura, Breeding Grounds, Polemic Philosophy,” in Paraskos, Re-Reading Read, 60. See also David Thistlewood, “Herbert Read's Organic Aesthetics I [1918–1950] and II [1950–1968]” in Goodway, Read Reassessed, 215–47.
8 For advocates of an expanded cultural field in the history of art in Britain, see: Timothy Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (London: Yale University Press, 2012); Timothy Barringer and Tom Flynn, eds., Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (London: Routledge, 1998); Corbett et al., Geographies; David Peters Corbett, The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); David Peters Corbett, The Modernity of English Art: 1911–30 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); and Lisa Tickner, “English Modernism in the Cultural Field,” in English Art 1860–1914: Modern Artists and Identity, ed. David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 13–30. For the importance of interwar Britain in particular in relation to nation building, see also: Jane Beckett, “(Is)land Narratives: Englishness, Visuality and Vanguard Culture 1914–18,” in Corbett et al., English Art, 195–212; Michael Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Mark Cheetham, Artwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain: The ‘Englishness’ of English Art Theory since the Eighteenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). In relation to medievalism, see: Richard Marks, “Englishness of English Gothic Art?,” in Studies in the Art and Imagery of the Middle Ages (London, Pindar Press, 2012), 1–32; and P. Crossley, “Between Spectacle and History: Art History and the Medieval Exhibitions,” in Late Gothic England: Art and Display, ed. Richard Marks (London: Shaun Tyas in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 2007), 138–54.
9 Andrew Causey, “Herbert Read and the North European Tradition 1921–33,” in Goodway, Read Reassessed, 123–44; “Herbert Read and Contemporary Art,” in Goodway, Read Reassessed, 123–44; and “English Art,” 275–302. Kevin Davey and Fiona Russell have also written on Read and Englishness. Davey in relation to a greater and gendered program and Russell looks to Read as a key figure in the revival of John Ruskin's thought in the 1930s. While the medieval influence is a component of all these texts, including Causey, it is considered only in relation to the efficacy and ethicality of nationality construction, rather than understanding why it was ripe for this utilization or why line in particular was used toward this end. In “English Art,” Causey is more interested in the combined invocation of Hogarth's “earthy instinct” and the medieval line without weighing how the instinct and the line relate to each other as indexical signs. Fiona Russell, “John Ruskin, Herbert Read and the Englishness of British Modernism,” in Corbett et al., Geographies, 303–21; and Davey, “Read and Englishness.”
10 Read, “English Art,” 243.
11 Read was sensitive to the difficulty of fixing definite origins, as later elaborated in “The Modern Epoch in Art” of 1949, where he opened by acknowledging the futility of “trying to fix a specific ‘beginning’ to anything so underground as the first growth of an artistic style” in deference to Max Dvorˇák's (1874–1921) discussion of the origins of naturalism in the Middle Ages in Idealismus und Naturalismus in der gotischen Skulptur und Malerei (1917; English, 1967). Herbert Read, “The Modern Epoch in Art” [1949], in The Philosophy of Modern Art (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), 20.
12 There are 14 plates with 28 images, one of which, Thomas Gainsborough's (1727–1788) Mr. and Mrs. Brown of Trent Hall (c. 1752) is in colour. Images in this paper are reproduced in “English Art”; however, Read did not engage directly with these images, only the tendencies of their makers, and they were omitted from the reprint of 1952. It is probable that they were treated as explicit in The Meaning of Art of 1931: “The illustrations are not necessarily referred to in the text, but are intended rather as a supplement to it; they carry on the discussion in another medium”; Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art [1931] (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), 11. The earthy instinct is elaborated as an interest in the particular, which can mean comedy, humility, or close observation of nature. It is dwarfed in the discussion, however, by the engagement with line and thus is not treated as a driving component of the article, certainly not in relation to the discussion of the Middle Ages. Read, “English Art,” 244, 269, 270.
13 Read, “English Art,” 269.
14 Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945), Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art [originally Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neuren Kunst (Munich: F. Bruchmann, 1915), first translated into English in 1932], trans. Marie Donald Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950), 18.
15 See also Causey's discussion of “form” versus “style” in Read's “What is Revolutionary Art?” (Five on Revolutionary Art [London: Wishart, 1935], 13): “Read still, in 1935, saw contemporary art basically as a problem of form, with taste and style as supplements, and he now divided the elements of art between the timeless and abstract on the one hand and, on the other, the different styles – each of only momentary validity – which are imposed on history. Taste and style he describes as the “mannerism” through which “the prevailing ideology of a period is expressed.” Andrew Causey, “Herbert Read and Contemporary Art,” in Goodway, Read Reassessed, 131.
16 Herbert Read, “The Appreciation of Pottery” in Catalogue of Pottery, Paintings and Furniture by Staite Murray (London: Lefevre Galleries, 1930); republished in part in Meaning of Art, 41–2; discussed also in Lee Beard, “Pottery as Precedent,” in Paraskos, Rereading Read, 126–7; and in Chris Stephens, “Ben Nicholson: Modernism, Craft and the English Vernacular,” in Corbett et al., Geographies, 232–3.
17 Read, “English Art,” 244.
18 Ibid., 243.
19 Ibid., 243.
20 Ibid., 276. See in particular: Bernard Rackham (1876–1964) [and Herbert Read], English Pottery: Its Development from Early Times to the end of the Eighteenth Century (London: Benn, 1924); Herbert Read, Staffordshire Pottery Figures (London: Duckworth, 1929); and Herbert Read, English Stained Glass (London: Putnam, 1926).
21 Read, “English Art,” 244–54. For more on the Benedictional, see: Walter Oakeshott, The Benedictional of St. Ethelwold (London: Faber & Faber, 1959); Thomas Kendrick, Late Saxon and Viking Art (London: Methuen, 1949) and Anglo-Saxon Art to A.D. 900 (London: Methuen, 1938); and O. Elfrida Saunders, A History of English Art (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1932).
22 Read, “English Art,” 244.
23 Ibid., 253.
24 Ibid., 259.
25 Ibid., 244. Blake was influential on the artists now considered Neo-Romantics.” See: Malcolm Yorke, The Spirit of Place: Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and their Times (London: Constable, 1988), 11–27.
26 Read, “English Art,” 260, 269–70.
27 Ibid., 276.
28 Causey has argued that: “Though Read championed experiment till his death – if with increasing misgiving – it was those artists [the group living in Hampstead around 1933] and others of the early modern period that his deepest loyalty lay,” Causey, “Read and Contemporary Art,” 123.
29 Laurence Binyon (1869–1943), English Water-Colours (London: A. & C. Black, 1933); and Laurence Binyon, English Water-Colours, 2nd ed. (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1944), 164–75.
30 This link is further strengthened by the similarity of imagery and praise in “English Art” and a later eulogy for Paul Nash, both of which were reprinted together in 1952 (Read, Philosophy of Modern Art, 194).
31 As listed in Royal Academy, Illustrated Souvenir, xi.
32 Royal Academy, Illustrated Souvenir, x.
33 See: Read, “English Art,” 242–77; Georges Duthuit (1891–1973), Ernest William Tristram (1882–1952), Albert Frank Kendrick (1872–1954), John George Noppen (1887–1951), Basil S. Long (1881–1937), and William Whitehead Watts (1860–1947), “The Exhibition of British Art,” Burlington Magazine 64 (February 1934), 52–78; Anonymous, “Exhibitions of British Art at the Museums,” Burlington Magazine, 64 (February 1934), 95. See also Roger Fry (1866–1934), Reflections on British Painting (London: Faber & Faber, 1934).
34 Anonymous, “Exhibition of British Art,” 95.
35 Ibid., 95.
36 Read, “English Art,” 244. Kenneth Clark (1903–1983), “English Painting,” The Listener 10 (December 20, 1933): 947.
37 Cheetham, Artwriting, 94.
38 Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983), The Englishness of English Art: An Expanded and Annotated Version of the Reith Lectures Broadcast in October and November 1955 (Auckland: Penguin, 1956), 134, 136. Chapter 5, “Blake and the Flaming Line,” traces the importance of the linearity Pevsner attributes to the Perpendicular and Decorated styles of architecture and ornament, again seeing it re-emerge in importance for Hogarth and Blake.
39 William George Constable, “Foreword,” in The Rudiments of Figure Drawing: A Handbook for Teachers and Students (London: Pitman, 1933), vii.
40 See: William George Constable, “Introduction,” in Constable and Johnson, Catalogue of the Exhibition, xv.
41 Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010), 169.
42 Harris, Romantic Moderns, 184.
43 For more on the Array and the Mistery, see: Peter Barberis, John McHugh, and Mike Tyldesley, Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organizations: Parties, Groups, and Movements of the Twentieth Century (London: Pinter, 2000), 182; Thomas Linehan, British Fascism 1918–39: Parties, Ideology and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 141; and Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), 42–4.
44 For parallels with Germany's invocation of a medieval past, see: Karen Lang, “Monumental Unease: Monuments and the Making of National Identity in Germany,” in Francoise Forster-Hahn, ed., Imagining Modern German Culture: 1889–1910, Special Issue of Studies in the History of Art 53 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1996): 274–99.
45 Even British racist nationalist groups, such as the Britons Society and the Imperial Fascist League, which did engage with ethnic purity, deprioritized the nineteenth-century rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon blood by championing the scholarship of G.P. Mudge, a professor at London University who conjectured that Britain, though relatively homogenous, was not a pure breed but a mixture of Nordic and Mediterranean races. Richard Thurlow, “The Developing British Fascist Interpretation of Race, Culture and Evolution,” in The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far Right in Britain, ed. Julie V. Gottlieb and Thomas P. Linehan (New York: Tauris, 2004), 66–8.
46 As Causey observed, “The England that was imagined was one explored for the needs and purposes of the present, and there was no questioning whether the earlier period of history being appealed to, back to the Anglo-Saxon, had had any, let alone the same, sense of national identity” (“English Art,” 281). Causey also locates Read's contribution as “one of the most forceful in speaking up for the Middle Ages, in the formation of Englishness” but which simply “help[ed] push the boundary of English art back to the pre-Conquest, while maintaining the pivotal position of Hogarth” (“English Art,” 289). I disagree, however, with the narrowness of this view and the de-prioritization of how line operated within this push.
47 Richard Witt, Artist Unknown: An Alternative History of the Arts Council (London: Little Brown Book, 1998), 18–19.
48 Pevsner certainly linked the two in his 1936 book Pioneers of Modern Design: William Morris to Walter Gropius, consolidating Read's advocacy, which included trying to establish a Bauhaus in Edinburgh while he was there – an interest and friendship that resulted in Art and Industry (1934). Walter Gropius (1883–1969) was living near Read in Hampstead from 1934 to 1938. László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) was also living in Hampstead from 1935 to 1937 (he assisted the photograph selection for Art and Industry) and the Bauhaus methods were widely disseminated in Britain through the publications: Paul Klee (1879–1940), Pedagogical Sketchbook [1925] (London: Faber & Faber, 1953) and Johannes Itten (1888–1967), Design and Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus [1964] (London: Thames & Hudson, 1967).
49 Saler, Avant-Garde, 8.
50 Reed challenges reading modernism exclusively in relation to a mainstream, anti-domestic, and militaristic “heroic ideal” and argues for Bloomsbury as a subculture deeply involved in political activism – defending Fry's exhortations of “disinterestedness” as actually referring to “an aesthetic ideal of selfless objectivity, renouncing impulses to possess or control”; Christopher Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity (London: Yale University Press, 2004), 2–17, 9. Brockington also challenges conflations of domesticity and social inaction, in tracing manifestations of “positive peace” and “pacifist modernism,” which were aspects of a constructive, rather than merely reactive, force for internationalism over insularity. Bloomsbury as a nebulous network rather than a coherent group is considered within this framework. See Grace Brockington, Above the Battlefield: Modernism and the Peace Movement in Britain, 1900–1918 (London: Yale University Press, 2010), 1–9, 23–59.
51 This is evident in one of its most famous products: the London Underground headquarters, commissioned in 1929 from architect Charles Holden (1875–1960), which incorporated sculptures by Eric Gill (1882–1940), Henry Moore (1898–1986), and Jacob Epstein (1880-1959). Such social symbolism, when enhanced by grand aesthetic unity, synthesizing several levels of artistry, could truly be a cathedral for the industrial-commercial age, as a reporter noted at the unveiling in: Anonymous, “A Cathedral of Modernity,” Observer (January 12, 1929).
52 Fry, The Omega Workshop Descriptive Catalogue, October 1914; quoted in Judith Collins, “Roger Fry's Social Vision of Art” in Art Made Modern: Roger Fry's Vision of Art, ed. Christopher Green (London: Merrell Hoberton, 1999), 82.
53 Saler, Avant-Garde, 20. For more on “vital beauty,” see John Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin's Genius (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 73.
54 Ward, “Art and Anarchy,” 23.
55 “Progress, we might say, is the gradual establishment of the individuals within society. In the long history of mankind, the group is to be regarded as an expedient – an evolutionary aid. It is a means to security and economic well-being; it is essential to the establishment of a civilisation. But the further step, by the means of which a civilisation is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct from an independent of the parent group. The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group.” Herbert Read, The Philosophy of Anarchism (London: Freedom Press, 1940), 38.
56 Alexander Joseph Finberg (1866–1939), “Early English Water-Colour Drawings by the Great Masters,” in The Studio, Special Issue (1919): 178–9.
57 Finberg, “Early English,” 178–9.
58 Though the Benedictional's inscription named scribe Godeman as its creator, the manuscript is most probably the work of more than one craftsman within a Winchester scriptorium; and yet its size and detail connote patience and skill that is personal – even if numerous hands were involved, it is each hand, and not the group, that is most immediate to the viewer.
59 Jerry Zaslove, “Herbert Read as Touchstone for Anarcho-Modernism – Aura, Breeding Grounds, Polemic Philosophy,” in Paraskos, Re-Reading Read, 59. Read edited Kropotkin's writings: Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (1842–1921), Kropotkin: Selections from his Writings, ed. Herbert Read (London: Freedom Press, 1942). See also Allan Antliff, “Open Form and the Abstract Imperative: Herbert Read and Contemporary Anarchist Art,” in Paraskos, Re-Reading Read, 36.
60 Read, Philosophy of Anarchism, 34.
61 Herbert Read, The Innocent Eye (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1947), 265.
62 By 1963 Read held that the creative energy emerged from Sigmund Freud's (1856–1939) conception of libido; thus, he argued, the need to make art arose from the human body. Herbert Read, To Hell with Culture [1963] (London: Routledge, 2002), 78. See also: Herbert Read, Anarchy and Order: Essays in Politics (London: Faber, 1954); and Carissa Honeywell, A British Anarchist Tradition: Herbert Read, Alex Comfort and Colin Ward (London: Continuum, 2011). For discipline, see Malcolm Ross, “Herbert Read: Art, Education, and the Means of Redemption,” in Goodway, Read Reassessed, 209; and David Thislewood, Herbert Read: Formlessness and Form: An Introduction to his Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 1984), 10–11.
63 William Blake (1757–1827), Descriptive Catalogue (1809); quoted in Osbert Burdett, William Blake (New York: Parkston Press, 2009), 129, 132.
64 John Ruskin (1819–1900), Elements of Drawing [1857] (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), 91. For more on the resurgence of Ruskin's ideas at this time, see Saler, Avant-Garde, 20–23; Russell, “John Ruskin” in Corbett et al., Geographies, 303–22; and Kenneth Clark, Ruskin Today (London: Murray, 1964). For the many permutations of Ruskin, see Lars Spuybroek, The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design (Rotterdam: V2 Publishing, 2011).
65 Laurence Binyon, Painting in the Far East: An Introduction to the History of Art in Asia, Especially China and Japan (London: Edward Arnold, 1908), 8–9. See also Laurence Binyon, The Flight of the Dragon: An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Art in China and Japan (London: John Murray, 1911); David Peters Corbett, “Laurence Binyon and the Aesthetic of Modern Art Visual Culture in Britain 6 (2005), 101–19; and chapter 1, “Radical Modernism, 1914–18,” in Modernity. Read, “English Art,” 270.
66 For more on this, including the effect on Wyndham Lewis, see Paul Edwards, “Wyndham Lewis and the Rappel à l'ordre: Classicism and Significant Form, 1919–21,” in Corbett et al., Geographies, 145. Roger Fry, “Drawings at the Burlington Fine Arts Club,” Burlington Magazine 32 (February 1918), 51–63, 61.
67 Possibly referring to the crucifixion in The Arundel Psalter, 1075, ink and pigments on vellum, now in the British Library, Arundel MS 60, f.52v. Francis Wormald (1904–1972), The Survival of Anglo-Saxon Illumination after the Norman Conquest [June 14 1944], From the Proceedings of the British Academy 30 (London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1944), 4–5.
68 John Berger (b. 1926), “The Basis of all Painting and Sculpture is Drawing” [c. 1954–1959], in Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1979), 24–5.
69 “He had no consciousness that the world is looking over his shoulder”; Read distinguishes between “complicated” drawings that are like paintings and drawings that are the “fragment of life – a fold of drapery, the profile of a face, the contour of a muscle, the structure of a flower” (Read, Meaning, 132–3). Drawing qua drawing does not fit naturally within his broader oeuvre at the time; he even warned viewers away from drawing: “so enticing is this art of drawing, that the danger is we may never turn to what is the primary work of the artist” (Read, Meaning, 133). Though Entry into Jerusalem would be considered one of the “complicated drawings which require as much analysis as a painting,” perceiving its drawn lines, albeit drawn with a brush, taints one's reading by subconscious association.
70 Beard, “Pottery as Precedent,” 129. H. Read, Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design [1934] (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 80.
71 Paul Nash (1889–1946), Room and Book (London: Soncino Press, 1932), 7. Herbert Read, ed. and intro., Surrealism (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), 12–13; regarding Paul Cézanne (1839–1906): Read, “English Art,” 275. In locating Cézanne in tradition, he is joined by Laurence Binyon: “there was no need to invoke Cézanne for [John Sell] Cotman [1782–1842] was there to show the way by his mastery of structural design” (Binyon, English Water-Colours, 191); and in relation to the Bauhaus, see: Read, Art and Industry, 60, 84; David Thistlewood, “Herbert Read: A New Vision of Art and Industry,” in Herbert Read: A British Vision of World Art, ed. Benedict Read and David Thistlewood (Leeds: Leeds City Art Galleries, 1993–1994), pages missing; and Davey, “Read and Englishness,” 276–77. Read's retrospective adoption of the new as old extends to countering the consensus view at the time that the Winchester School was the result of the influx of Carolingian style from the Court School of Charlemagne, often known as the Ada Group. Citing “certain German scholars” (i.e., Wilhelm Worringer, Paul Clemen, and Georg Vitzthum), Read suggests that it could have been the Anglo-Saxon styles that influenced the Carolingian. Read, “English Art,” 243; Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965), Schriften der Königsberger Gelehrten Gesellschaft [1931] (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1932); Georg Vitzthum, Die Pariser Miniatur Malerei (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1907); and Paul Clemen, Die Gotischen Monumentalmalerei der Rheinlande (Dusseldorf, 1930).
72 Read, “Modern Epoch,” 20.
73 Read, “English Art,” 243.
74 Reginald Howard Wilenski (1887–1975), The Modern Movement in Art [1927] (Faber & Faber, 1945), 8.
75 Read, Philosophy of Anarchism, 34.
76 See endnote 61.
77 Winfried Georg Sebald (1944–2001), Austerlitz (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), 155; J.R. Doheny, “Herbert Read's Use of Sigmund Freud,” in Goodway, Read Reassessed, 70–84.
78 John Piper (1903–1992), “Abstraction on the Beach,” XXe Siècle 1 (1938): 41.
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Kate Aspinall
KATE ASPINALL is an independent historian, writer, and artist. Based in London, she recently completed her doctoral studies at the University of East Anglia, sponsored by the School of Art History Studentship, and currently consults for the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. Her research looks to the role of drawing in early twentieth-century British visual culture with a particular emphasis on the intersections between institutional and personal discipline. Most recently, she wrote a chapter on Jacob Bronowski, Feliks Topolski, and the subjectivity of scientific judgment for British Art in the Nuclear Age (Ashgate, 2014), and presented the paper “The Pasmore Report?: Reflections on the 1960 Coldstream Report and its Legacy” at Art School Educated Conference, Tate (2014). She is in the process of turning her doctoral research into a monograph, The Paradox of Medium Specificity: Drawing Practice and Twentieth Century Modernism in Britain.