George Read (b. 1950 ) began to paint while he was a History of Art student at Harvard. The program was disciplined and old-school; illustrated lectures in the morning, critical analysis, masses of reading. There was studio work in the afternoons for those who wanted it. This including painting, printmaking, and instruction in techniques, materials, color, and form. The studio work was taught by working masters in those fields, including Eduardo Chillida, Afro Basadella, and Robert Neuman.
George spent one undergrad summer serving as powerful art critic Harold Rosenberg's full-time gardner and part-time assistant in the Hamptons, which he describes as "two months of BUDS training in the fine arts. Mr. Rosenberg’s opinion, which was quite correct, was that I needed artistic toughening up. He took the job very seriously. Relief came on days when he'd lend me out to his friends in The Springs. The artists Adolph Gottleib and Willem de Kooning among them. I’d go to their places and do chores. They were very kind. It was magical."
Later, in France, in the fall of 1977, he had his first show with a young Japanese sculptor, Tetsuo Harada. There, Read's paintings and assemblages attracted the attention of well-known French critic Michel Tapie, who invited him to join a group of young artists working at the new Centre Pompidou. The plan was interrupted. Before he could move into the new space, he was offered a position at Sotheby's, New York. He took the job and moved to New York.
What followed was a complete immersion into the deep end of the international art world. This evolution included the titles of specialist, auctioneer, lecturer, writer, and consultant, and this engaged him, in some function or other, with "nearly every category of art and antiquity known, the collectors of those objects, and the markets where they trade, both real and fraudulent."
What was that world like? Long hours of appraisal work, meetings with collectors, and occasional black-tie auctions in the evenings. There were celebrities in need of advice; Joanne Woodward, on a French armoire, and Barbra Streisand, on a secretary bookcase. There were months of inventory and cataloguing in preparation for the sale of the contents of the Newport mansion of notorious socialite Claus von Bulow, and a trip to Los Angeles with Oprah to find furnishings for her place in Chicago. He appeared on her show twice. On the second, he auctioned off a Michael Jordan game jersey to an audience of millions.
He has now found his way back into the studio. He describes the break as immensely valuable; an opportunity to sharpen and refine. Even if the break was a bit longer than anticipated, he adds. He works quickly and on as many as a dozen things at once, a practice he picked up from his former mentor, Eduardo Chillida. Chillida suggested one day that he begin several pieces at once, putting each one aside when it had just begun to find form and definition. Then, with a roomful of works in varying stages of progress, Chillida encouraged him to move freely among them, from image to image, without a set pattern or plan. The practice suited him; he found it helped keep his eyes fresh and, most important, it forestalled over-analysis.
Read suggests that modern painting and sculpture are born from attitude and method far more than style or technical mastery. “What we are all trying to do successfully is to put color, line, and form onto a flat surface in such a way that they look like they belong there. That’s where we all begin.”