Ben Read (1945–2016)

Abstract

Benedict (Ben) Read, who died on 20 October 2016, was chairman of this journal's editorial board between 1997 and 2013. The magazine has always been a flagship of the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, of which Ben, in 1991, had been one of the founder members. In his foreword to the first issue of the journal he dated preliminary discussions about the need for such a publication back to the time when the Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture had been set up in Leeds in 1982. Participants in that discussion included the then director of the centre, Terry Friedman; Charles Avery, ex-Deputy Keeper of Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum; Peyton Skipwith of the Fine Art Society; and the businessman and sponsor, John Lewis. All of them would have been in agreement about the need for this to be a scholarly publication, although the question would later be asked whether a less academic approach might not better accord with the wishes of the PMSA membership. The year in which Ben placed those discussions was the year in which his Victorian Sculpture was published by Yale University Press. It was his magnum opus and a scholarly endeavour that made clear on which side of that debate he would be.Ben was born in 1945, the youngest son of Sir Herbert Read, the writer and critic who, from the 1930s onwards, became the nation's chief spokesman and interpreter for modern art, including not only abstraction and surrealism, but also the work of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Far from taking a stand against his father and his artistic preoccupations, Ben always had very fond memories of him, and, particularly in the 1990s, welcomed a revived interest in his life and work. Ben's first degree in English literature at Oxford University might account for his way with words, but a second BA course in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute more conclusively hit the spot and determined his future path. What did his father, author of To Hell with Culture, think about this choice of subject? Herbert Read was a man of many aspects. He had worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum and been chief editor of the Burlington Magazine. Clearly he was amused, and during a walk with his son, listed all the foibles of the leading art historians of the day. Of Ben's period options, Gothic and Victorian, the latter was definitely indicative of Ben's need to find an area and period of scholarly expertise that he could call his own, outside the shadow of his father's work. Herbert Read, however, died in 1968, a year into Ben's course, and did not live to see the full extent of his son's aesthetic apostasy, his being drawn away from art's 'grass roots' by the siren song of high Victorian art - the sirens in this case being Albert Moore, Frederic Lord Leighton and their continental equivalents. In this, as in the Catholic upbringing and the attendance at Ampleforth School of Ben and his siblings, may be detected the influence of Lady Read, Margaret (nee Ludwig), known in the family as 'Ludo'. She was a viola player of mixed Scottish and German extraction, and was probably responsible for steering Ben's musical taste in the direction of the Romantic repertoire, in particular Berlioz and Mendelssohn. These beliefs and tastes combined with a lifelong love of football (especially his beloved Arsenal), Belgian beer, German sausages and cheese to form a curious cocktail, the gastronomic ingredients of which were indulged with moderation because of a diabetic condition diagnosed in childhood.It was Sir Alan Bowness, then in charge of nineteenth-century and modern studies at the Courtauld, who persuaded Ben to attempt a history of Victorian sculpture. To this were devoted the twelve years following his graduation in 1970. During the whole of this period, he was employed in the Courtauld Institute's photographic libraries, though dedicating increasing amounts of time to teaching and supervising postgraduate work. In an interview published in Sculpture Journal in 2014 in a special issue on Victorian sculpture, he recalled many of the contributory circumstances, whether people or events, which had helped him finally to put paid to Julius Meier Graefe's assertion that in nineteenth-century Britain there had been no plastic art to speak of. …