[6] Read's studies at the University of Leeds were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, during which he served with the Green Howards in France.

He was commissioned in January 1915,[7] and received both the Military Cross (MC) and the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) "for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty" in 1918.

[10] During the war, Read founded the journal Arts & Letters with Frank Rutter, one of the first literary periodicals to publish work by T. S.

Read was a champion of modern British artists such as Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

He was one of the organisers of the London International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 and editor of the book Surrealism, published in 1936, which included contributions from André Breton, Hugh Sykes Davies, Paul Éluard, and Georges Hugnet.

He also served as a trustee of the Tate Gallery and as a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum (1922–31), as well as co-founding the Institute of Contemporary Arts with Roland Penrose in 1947.

[21] Politically, Read considered himself an anarchist, albeit in the English quietist tradition of Edward Carpenter and William Morris.

Nevertheless, in the 1953 New Year Honours he accepted a knighthood for "services to literature";[22][23] this caused Read to be ostracized by most of the anarchist movement.

In his philosophical outlook, Read was close to the European idealist traditions represented by Friedrich Schelling, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, believing that reality as it is experienced by the human mind was as much a product of the human mind as any external or objective actuality.

This meant that art was not, as many Marxists believed, simply a product of a bourgeois society, but a psychological process that had evolved simultaneously with the evolution of consciousness.

Art was, therefore, a biological phenomenon, a view that frequently pitted Read against Marxist critics such as Anthony Blunt in the 1930s.

Read "became deeply interested in children's drawings and paintings after having been invited to collect works for an exhibition of British art that would tour allied and neutral countries during the Second World War.

As it was considered too risky to transport across the Atlantic works of established importance to the national heritage, it was proposed that children’s drawings and paintings should be sent instead.

Read, in making his collection, was unexpectedly moved by the expressive power and emotional content of some of the younger artists' works.

The experience prompted his special attention to their cultural value, and his engagement of the theory of children's creativity with seriousness matching his devotion to the avant-garde.

"[30] Following his death in 1968, Read was probably neglected due to the increasing predominance in academia of theories of art, including Marxism, which discounted his ideas.

Until the 1990s the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London staged an annual Herbert Read Lecture, which included well-known speakers such as Salman Rushdie.