IAS Fellow at Trevelyan College, Durham University (January – March 2015)
Richard Read is Winthrop Professor in Art History at the University of Western Australia. He has published in major journals on the relationship between literature and the visual arts, nineteenth and twentieth-century European and Australian art history, contemporary film, popular culture and complex images in global contexts.
His first degree was in English Literature at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, followed by an MA in Literature and Art History and a PhD on English Art Criticism at the University of Reading under the supervision of the Warburg art historian D. J. Gordon. He taught English literature at the University of Melbourne and art history at the University of Queensland. At the University of Western Australia he has achieved world leadership in scholarship on the twentieth-century art critic Adrian Stokes and on the history of English art theory and criticism in several high impact journals. His Art and Its Discontents: the Early Life of Adrian Stokes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002: PA: Penn. State U. Press, 2003) was widely reviewed and was joint winner of a national book prize. His current research includes book projects on: ‘The Trope of Contrast in the Art and Literature of the British Grand Tour to Italy’, and ‘Disencumbrance and Desuetude: the Forgetting of the Past in Contemporary Art’ funded by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of the Emotions. His research is informed by a broad range of undergraduate art history units on seventeenth-century art and architecture, Cubism and its diasporas, the history of art theory and the art and literature of the British Grand Tour to Italy. In 2013 he received an inter-Faculty prize for excellence in research supervision for which he was nominated again this year.
Professor Read’s work on complex images won an Australian Reseach Council grant in 2004 and was the subject of invited lecture at the universities of Warwick, Plymouth, Melbourne, Aberystwyth and Cambridge; also at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of America at Washington, D.C., the Courtauld Institute of Art and Tate Britain. He was Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professorship at the University of Bristol (2010), Senior Research Fellow at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, UEA (2011 and 2013) and resident scholar at the University of Maryland, Washington D. C. (2013).
At Durham he will be completing a book project on The Reversed Painting in Western Art. The reversed painting is an easel painting that depicts another painting or paintings seen from behind, most famously in Velázquez’s Las Meninas. The topic is concerned with the dynamic emergence of the visible from the unseen and illuminates important shifts in the relationships between viewers and pictorial worlds across different continents and many centuries. He will also be working on the emergence of the visible from the unseen in the influence of theories of visual perception upon nineteenth-century British and American art criticism and travel writing, and in the emergence of sub-textual meaning from these texts and the art criticism of Adrian Stokes.