Pliant Solids: Herbert Read’s Aesthetic Reversal in The Green Child and Selected Sculptures by Henry Moore

As in Wyndham Lewis’s BLAST sketches, the avant-garde sought to replace expressionist empathy with geometric abstraction, even as resistance to the resulting transparency of form emerged (Weninger). The aesthetics of Herbert Read offer a specific illustration of how such transparency, as modernist trope and aesthetic, evolved for the succeeding generation. Like T. E. Hulme’s and Lewis’s, Read’s interest in transparency had been motivated initially by the revival of medieval classicism in Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1907). Constituting one pole of his overall argument, Worringer’s “life-denying inorganic” antithesis (4) was aggressively anti-humanist, insofar as it sought to liberate form from what Paul Sheehan has called the ‘anthropometric turn’ (6-10), the requirement that art serve as the measure of man (or woman). As depicted in the grotto sequence of Part Three of The Green Child (1935), however, Read attempts to synthesize the ossified (crystalline) forms of organic transparency with the increasing pliancy of the human bodies composing it. This re-incorporation of the pliant within the ossified augurs, I shall argue, the return of an explicitly humanist plasticity within avant-garde aesthetics. Moreover, Read’s turn toward pliant form re-prioritized—as he argued Henry Moore’s sculpture sought to do—beauty over Bergsonian vitality, the empathic over the organic, and both the empathic and organic over the inorganic (Read 11-12). In Moore’s case, Read reversed his prior aesthetic position privileging abstract transparency over empathic solidity; in this, he anticipated the postmodern interest in mass-culture as “woman” (Huyssen) as well as a consumerist basis for post war aesthetics resulting from the increasing commodification of form.