Robert Hughes: A Richly Gifted Art Critic
ROBERT HUGHES was a pungent, richly talented Australian-born art critic who moved to New York City in 1970 and began writing essays for Time magazine. He also created several series on art for public television, wrote some best-selling books and made himself one of the major art critics in the world.
He enjoyed all this immensely, savored life, craved not only art itself, but the chance to react to new works, and to provoke reaction in others.
Hughes was in some ways a very traditional man. He was a staunch supporter of the Royal Academy, an institution routinely derided by working artists. Hughes was Jesuit-educated, extremely well-read, and knew reams of poetry by heart. He was as proud of his patrician ideas, as he was of his provocative ones. He would often tell his friends: “Bless you!”
But Hughes was also a gifted and devoted popularizer of modern art. Hughes could seem pompous when he went on and on about one of his pet peeves — but then he’d tell a joke on himself, and roar with laughter. He was a man of many pieces.
Robert Hughes was born and raised in Australia and his Jesuit traditional side was mixed with a working-class Aussie style. No one could ridicule something like Robert Hughes. He thought contempt not just a worthy emotion but the only worthy response to certain provocations. He felt contempt for academic jargon (“artspeak”); he felt contempt for the deference to identity politics of race, nation or sexual orientation; and he hated the sky-high price of art.
“Putting great works of art in front of billionaire art investors,” said Robert Hughes, is “like putting a bucket of blood in front of a pack of dingoes.” He thought the desire of the super-rich to possess art was pathological, and said so with relish. (“What strip mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture.”)
He roasted Andy Warhol as ‘a scavenger of images’ in a little world of his own that was ‘wretchedly stylish.’ Rather unfairly, Hughes blamed Andy Warhol for artists like Jeff Koons, whom Hughes called “the baby to Andy Warhol’s Rosemary.”
The third shaping aspect of Robert Hughes’ life were the years he’d spent in late-’60’s London, drinking in the counterculture.
At his peak, Robert Hughes could criticize broad, corrupted trends, raise his voice to a bellow without losing pitch, and in the same essay turn around and make fine observations, and delicate distinctions.
Hughes wrote and hosted a wonderful eight-part BBC series called “The Shock of the New.” He covered an enormous distance of ground, from the Impressionists to Andy Warhol. In exploring the ways that a series of novelties had shocked the settled world, Hughes also explored the ways in which technology had shaped art.
He dug into the uneasy relationships between modern art and cultural authority. He talked about the many wonderfully different ways that artists imagine paradise. He showed us modern architecture and Expressionism and Pop Art without dumbing down any of those things, nor giving any of them a free pass. Whenever and wherever Robert Hughes sensed that the commercial process had corrupted art, he scowled and came down heavily on those responsible.
He was good at demystifying things, at tackling big subjects and wrestling them down, and he was never better at that than in his “Shock of the New” project.
At the end of that series, he stood at the foot of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and said: “The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness — not through argument but through feeling — and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way to pass from feeling to meaning.”
Hughes looked like a traditionalist: white male, broad, beefy face, and a take-no-crap attitude. But unlike traditionalists, Hughes never saw artistic skill as the essential thing in an artist. More important was the determination to honestly convey the artist’s own vision, and the power to do so. Intensity and coherence is what he was looking for, for images so striking that “You can’t say no, and you give in to it.”
Hughes admired artisans of all kinds, and he liked tormented artists of the second rank, men and women who’d never been told they were great. He liked these artists far more than the fading prodigies and the startlingly gifted, who’d never needed to develop much inner life.
Hughes loved the work of Lucian Freud, and once wrote approvingly of a Freud canvas: “Every inch of the surface has to be won, must be argued through, bears the traces of curiosity and inquisition.” If Lucian Freud wanted to paint a horse, with the horse’s head awkwardly cropped out of the picture, that was fine with Robert Hughes. Hughes knew that Freud cared deeply about his work, had suffered, paid his dues, and found a way to be interesting. Who cared about the damn horse’s head? If you want to see a horse complete, 10,000 portrait photographers can do that sort of thing very well. To people who complained that Lucian Freud’s paintings were “weird,” Hughes would say: ‘Good!’
On the other hand, Hughes was scathing about artists who were weird for its own sake, as a tactic. “The Shock of the New” that Hughes considered sacred was sacred only when its novelty described something hard-won in the artist.
Robert Hughes believed that you must take risks in life. He admired artists who risked it, and he wanted the public to take risks, too — to follow their senses toward things not familiar, not easily palatable. He reminded his readers again and again not to be unduly suspicious of what was new to them.
Hughes had a complex relationship with Australia. Australians keep a sharp eye out for local boys who make good in England and the United States. Many Australians told Hughes by letter or to his face that they were proud of his success, that it reflected well on Australia, and his upbringing and schooling there. Hughes basked in this uncomplicated sort of cheering.
But there was also the guilty knowledge, on both sides, that Hughes had felt compelled to leave Australia in order to rise, that he would almost certainly NOT have become the world’s best-known art critic if he’d stayed in Australia. More than a few Aussies called him “a traitor” for leaving.
In 1987, Hughes published “The Fatal Shore,” a book about the convict origins of Australia. Most Australian reviews were positive; the book was unquestionably an achievement — a serious book of history that read like a novel. But the book also struck a raw nerve in Australia. It discussed the growth of sturdy social institutions in early Australia, but also made clear that Australia was partly settled by convicts, the “dregs” of England. The Fatal Shore discussed the brutality and hardship of those early years, and the way that some escaped convicts resorted to murder or cannibalism to survive. The book described the settlers’ brutal mistreatment of the Aborigines.
So “The Fatal Shore” was an important book, but not one for the faint of heart. Australians had generally liked to see Robert Hughes point his accusing finger, because the things he railed against — the follies of the commercial art world — were pretty foreign to Australians. But this time Hughes had pointed his finger at his boyhood home.
In 1992, he published an excellent book on Barcelona. Authoritative but witty, sweeping yet with a taste for the ripe anecdote, the book teaches you more than you might need to know about the history, religion, music and architecture of Barcelona, but with such spirit that you get caught up in it. You want to learn what he’s telling you about Catalan poetry.
In 1993, he published “The Culture of Complaint” about “the fraying of America.” In that book, he took on both the left-wing and the right-wingers. In 1997, Hughes did a series on American art for PBS called “American Visions.”
And then he went through a series of sad times and horrendous tragedies. Two marriages broke up. His only son, from whom he’d been estranged for years, killed himself. In 1999, Robert Hughes got into a very bad car accident in Western Australia. It was his own fault; he was driving on the wrong side of the road. But he had great trouble admitting that. When the law came after him, he called the prosecutors “turkeys” and those in the other car “dumb scum,” and popular feeling in Australia turned heavily against him.
Hughes went through a long, painful period of physical rehabilitation. At one point, he recollected later, he saw death “sitting at a desk, like a banker. He made no gesture but he opened his mouth and I looked right down his throat, which distended to become a tunnel.”
Even those who loved Hughes and his writing concede that his late magazine writing fell off somewhat in quality. It’s not that Andy Warhol and Julian Schnabel didn’t deserve the roasting he gave them. But Hughes became slightly predictable, something he’d never been in his prime. Now when he bellowed, he’d go a little off-key, and many of the essays no longer seemed capable of making those sudden, startlingly fine distinctions. He called his 2006 memoir “Things I Didn’t Know,” and the modesty of the title was not like the Robert Hughes of old.
Robert Hughes died in the Bronx, at 74, at Calvary Hospital. Late in life, he wrote a powerful biography of the Spanish artist Goya. Hughes paid tribute to the “appalled sympathy” he saw in Goya’s work. Hughes saw Goya so clearly, in part because they shared so much — both of them lovers of art, marginal figures in high society, outsiders, with a rich, Catholic sense of sin, a sense, as Hughes put it, “that it’s not going to be alright in the end.”
Robert Hughes insisted that even if a man doesn’t weep at the funeral of a family member, he should always be able to weep at a good art museum. Hughes could laugh, gasp in admiration, sneer and weep, all in the same museum.