Life & Wisdom Quote by Herbert Read

“Art is pattern informed by sensibility” is a clean little provocation: it refuses the romantic myth that art is pure outpouring, and it also refuses the cold modernist myth that art is only form. Herbert Read, writing out of early-to-mid 20th-century Europe, had seen both temptations harden into dogma. On one side, the sentimental cult of “expression” that treats craft as an optional accessory; on the other, the fetish of structure that turns artworks into clever machines. His line tries to weld the two back together.

The intent is almost diagnostic. “Pattern” is Read’s anti-mysticism word: composition, rhythm, proportion, repetition, the built thing. It nods to his sympathy for modernism’s emphasis on form and to the era’s fascination with design, psychology, and even the sciences of perception. But “informed by sensibility” is the corrective, insisting that pattern alone is sterile unless it’s shaped by a lived, responsive inner life: taste, feeling, moral attention, the grain of a person’s consciousness.

The subtext is a defense of discrimination in a culture starting to mass-produce images and experiences. Sensibility isn’t mere emotion; it’s trained receptivity, a way of noticing. Read implies that what separates art from decoration, propaganda, or technical display is not the presence of pattern (they all have it) but the quality of human attentiveness embedded in that pattern. Art, here, is where structure becomes a kind of conscience.