Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs, the elements of a new iconography.

This work both changed fundamentally his own life’s work throughout his remaining twenty-five years and provided art education with a rationale of unprecedented lucidity and persuasiveness. Read perhaps was the closest England came to an existentialist theorist of the European tradition. ) Herbert Read Reassessed (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 1998)
King James The Last Modern: A Life of Herbert Read (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1990)
Paraskos Michael (ed.

Sir Herbert Edward Read DSO MC (1893–1968) was an English anarchist poet and critic of literature and art.