About This Issue's Cover

Kim Croswell's, Portrait of Herbert Read ('To Hell With Freee'), marks first issue of Anarchist Studies devoted to a pivotal figure in history of modern art (and much more), with a special focus on Read's polemical pamphlet, To Hell with Culture (1941). To fully grasp that statement, we need to recall salient points of Read's biography. Read was son of a tenant farmer whose mother was forced to commit him to an orphanage in Halifax, England when he was ten (Read's father died suddenly in 1903, leaving his wife destitute with children).1 Conditions at orphanage, where Read lived for next five years, were brutal: children washed in cold water and got meal of meat and vegetables per day; otherwise there was only milk and bread. They had no privacy whatsoever and were educated by rote. Days began at six-thirty in morning sharp and closed in regimental fashion: 'When one was shouted, we all knelt at our bedsides, and in this devout attitude remained until rang out, when we immediately rose and placed our little wire baskets on our beds. At three we folded our coats neatly into baskets and as number followed number slowly disrobed ... twelve' [would] permit us to clamber hastily into bed and warm our chilled bodies'.2Upon graduating from orphanage at age fifteen, Read rejoined his mother, who now lived in slum-ridden industrial town of Leeds, where she managed a laundry. Read found work as a bank clerk before enrolling in Leeds University (financing his education with borrowed funds) in 1912. During this period he was introduced to modern art and ideas of Edward Carpenter (Carpenter's Non-Governmental Society turned him to anarchism), Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Max Stirner and Frederick Nietzsche.3 When war began, Read enlisted and, after training at rank of Second Lieutenant, was sent to front at Ypres in November 1915. 'I have now seen the real thing' he wrote: 'A trench in winter, wet and cold, stench of decay, and even ghastly death'.4 Read and soldiers under his command quickly bonded and he later immortalized their shared struggle for survival in a slim book of poetry, Naked Warriors.5 By 1916 Read was advocating for working-class revolution, a revolution that would restructure post-war society by dissolving top-down government as workers took control of production and socialized economy.6 These politics are premise for Read's searing critique of culture's subjugation under capitalism.To Hell With Culture dates art's degeneration into commodity status back two thousand years to Roman Empire and characterizes Romans as 'the first large scale capitalists in Europe'.7 Greece provided Romans with their culture of choice for commodification.8 The Greeks had no conception of culture as something apart from organic life of community. Their architecture, poetry, sculptures and crafts were as integral as their language, as natural, Read emphasises, 'as complexion of their skins'.9 Creativity infused all aspects of environment, because objects were made for their use value, not as commodities. On this basis, Read drew parallels between peoples of ancient Greece and so-called 'primitive civilizations'.10 Like Greeks, people of these societies cultivated a refined aesthetic sensibility and took pleasure in 'definite proportions, relationships, rhythms [and] harmonies' attuned to natural growth forms and 'the structure of universe'.11 Of course Read was not first to analyse ancient Greek culture in these terms. Karl Marx similarly looked to pre-capitalist Greeks for his model of a non-alienated society.12How, then, did Roman Empire pervert these values? Importing Greek culture, Romans commodified it and churned out rank imitations of its greatest achievements while imposing their rule on colonised peoples.13 With end of Roman Empire and advent of Middle Ages, culture recovered its natural functions. …

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