Herbert Read and Landscape Surrealism – seminar

Join us for this research seminar with speaker Dr Anna Reid, Lecturer in the History of Art in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds.

Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes opens at The Hepworth Wakefield on 23 November 2024. It is among a raft of exhibitions, publications and events that mark 100 years since the publication of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto. By examining a range of surrealist terrains, foregrounding works from The Hepworth Wakefield’s Jeffrey Sherwin collection and with a focus on artists working in Britain, the exhibition calls for fresh perspectives on the relationship between a movement that has often been associated with the urban environment, and the landscape.

This presentation, based on new research as part of the Forbidden Territories programme, considers a set of the exhibited works via the lens of the writing of Herbert Read. Read played a central role in the advent of Surrealism in Britain, having organised the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition at the Burlington Galleries. Read’s writings are laden with themes that support an ecological and ecocritical consideration of surrealist mode.

The seminar is hosted by the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies.

About the presenter

Anna Reid is a Lecturer in the History of Art in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. She is an environmental humanities scholar and art historian with a focus on 19th and 20th century local and global British contexts.

Her research, currently focused on landscape and surrealism, is engaged with ecocriticism; the relationship between the ecological and the colonial; plant humanities; animal studies; extinction studies; the interplay between art and science and the politics of aesthetics.

Image

Grace Pailthorpe (1883–1971)
November 16, 1937, At 2.30, 1937 (detail)
Oil on canvas
68.6 x 50.8cm
The Jeffrey Sherwin & Family Collection, permanently housed at The Hepworth Wakefield
Photo: Anya Fiáine-Fox