Edgar Marcel Wind
Unknown photographer
© Warburg Institute, London

Reith Lectures, 1960

The Reith Lectures were/are usually delivered live. Their tight format (28 minutes precisely) impeded Wind’s habitual free-flowing lecture-style, delivered with few notes. Instead, he was required to speak from a pre-written text. Lasting precisely 28 minutes each, Wind used these lectures as the basis of his highly influential book, Art and Anarchy, subsequently published in 1963. Each lecture evolved into one chapter of the published work:

    Art and anarchy (book, not lecture)
    Aesthetic participation (transcript)
    Critique of connoisseurship (transcript)
    The fear of knowledge
    The mechanization of art
    Art and the will (audio disc record)

Recordings of some of these lectures have survived, held by the BBC’s Archive.

Of the three surviving lectures (lectures 4, 5 and 6), the Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library holds a digital copy of Art and the Will.