Herbert Read, the École de Paris and Art Criticism, c. 1946

Published in the first issue of a new magazine, "The Arts", in late 1946, Herbert Read's commentary on the work of French painter Edouard Pignon testifies to a confused crossroads for the Ecole de Paris. In the exhausted and uncertain situation following the dark years of war and occupation, artists and critics alike were tasked with a humanist mission: to discern the key directions for modern art philosophy and to conceptualize the present as historical. This essay examines the articulation of this historiographical and aesthetic crisis in Pignon's paintings of the mid-1940s and Read's essays on European art. Both blatantly exhibit signs of the painful struggle to reconcile tradition and modernity, to produce a convincing manifestation of unity. Their linked figures are a reminder that there is nothing inevitable about the formation of such a phenomenon as 'modern art', nor about the historical intelligibility of the post-war moment for art history.