Robert Hughes, Art Critic Whose Writing Was Elegant and Contentious, Dies at 74
By RANDY KENNEDY
With a Hemingwayesque build and the distinctively rounded vowels of his native Australia, Mr. Hughes became as familiar a presence on television as he was in print.
Robert Hughes, Art Critic Whose Writing Was Elegant and Contentious, Dies at 74
By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: August 6, 2012
Robert Hughes, the eloquent, combative art critic and historian who
lived with operatic flair and wrote with a sense of authority that owed
more to Zola or Ruskin than to his own century, died on Monday at
Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. He was 74 and had lived for many years in
Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.
Tim Robinson/WNET13
Robert Hughes’s “Shock of the New” documentary was originally seen by 25 million viewers.
Related
-
The Quotable Robert Hughes (August 7, 2012)
He died after a long illness, said his wife, Doris Downes.
With a Hemingwayesque build and the distinctively rounded vowels of his
native Australia, Mr. Hughes became as familiar a presence on television
as he was in print, over three decades for Time
magazine, where he was chief art critic and often a traditionalist
scourge during an era when art movements fractured into
unrecognizability.
“The Shock of the New,” his eight-part documentary about the development
of modernism from the Impressionists through Warhol, was seen by more
than 25 million viewers when it ran first on BBC and then on PBS, and
the book that Mr. Hughes spun off from it, described as a “stunning
critical performance” by Louis Menand of The New Yorker, was hugely
popular. In 1997, the writer Robert S. Boynton described him as “the
most famous art critic in the world.”
It was decidedly not Mr. Hughes’s method to take prisoners. He was as
damning about artists who fell short of his expectations as he was
ecstatic about those who met them, and his prose seemed to reach only
loftier heights when he was angry. As early as 1993, he described the
work of Jeff Koons as “so overexposed that it loses nothing in
reproduction and gains nothing in the original.”
“Koons is the baby to Andy Warhol’s Rosemary,” he summarized, adding:
“He has done for narcissism what Michael Milken did for the junk bond.”
Of Warhol himself, the most influential artist of the last 40 years, he
was not wholly dismissive — he once referred to him as “Genet in paint” —
and he softened in his judgment over time. But he argued that Warhol
had only a handful of good years and that his corrosive shadow over
contemporary art ultimately did more harm than good. “The alienation of
the artist, of which one heard so much talk a few years ago,” he wrote
in 1975, “no longer exists for Warhol: his ideal society has
crystallized round him and learned to love his entropy.”
About artists he admired, like Lucian Freud, he cast the stakes in
nothing less than heroic terms. “Every inch of the surface has to be
won,” he wrote of Freud’s canvases in The Guardian in 2004, “must be
argued through, bears the traces of curiosity and inquisition — above
all, takes nothing for granted and demands active engagement from the
viewer as its right.”
“Nothing of this kind happens with Warhol, or Gilbert and George, or any
of the other image-scavengers and recyclers who infest the wretchedly
stylish woods of an already decayed, pulped-out postmodernism.”
“The Fatal Shore,” Mr. Hughes’s epic 1987 history of his homeland,
Australia — which he left in 1964 and where his reputation seemed to
seesaw between hero and traitor — became an international best seller.
And he continued to write prolifically and with ambitious range, on
beloved subjects like Goya, Lucian Freud, fishing, the history of
American art, the city of Barcelona — and himself — even after a
near-fatal car crash in Australia in 1999 left him with numerous health
problems. “Things I Didn’t Know,” a memoir, was published in 2006 and
“Rome,” his highly personal history of the city he called “an enormous
concretion of human glory and human error,” was published last year. In
the memoir, Mr. Hughes was as poetically descriptive about his brush
with death as he was about the art he loved: “At one point I saw Death.
He was 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: the bocca d’inferno of old Christian art.”
Boca do Inferno - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boca_do_Inferno
Boca do Inferno. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Jump to: navigation, search. Hell's Mouth near Cascais. Boca do Inferno (Portuguese for Hell's Mouth) is ...
Mr. Hughes studied art and architecture at the University of Sydney and
was associated with a group of leftist artists and writers that included
Germaine Greer and Clive James, who described Mr. Hughes during those
years as “the golden boy.” He pursued criticism mostly as a sideline
while painting, writing poetry and serving as a cartoonist for the
weekly intellectual journal The Observer.
After leaving Australia, he spent formative time in Italy before
settling mostly in London. There, he quickly became a well-known
critical voice, writing for several newspapers and diving into the
glamorous hedonism of the ’60s London, an experience that confirmed him
in a kind of counter-counterculturalism — not that he didn’t indulge
himself during those years.
As he related in his memoir, he was so under
the influence of drugs when Time magazine called to offer him a job
that he thought that it might be a trick by the C.I.A. (He wrote that he
contracted gonorrhea from his first wife, Danne Patricia Emerson, who,
he believed, had contracted it from Jimi Hendrix.)
gonorrhea
- 音節
- gon • or • rhe • a, ((主に英))-rhoe • a
- 発音
- gɑ`nəríːə | gɔ`nəríə
[名][U]淋疾(りんしつ), 淋病.
-al
[形]淋病の, 淋菌性の.
With Ms. Emerson, who died in 2003, Mr. Hughes had a son, Danton, from
whom he was estranged after he and Ms. Emerson divorced in 1981. Danton,
a sculptor who lived outside of Sydney, killed himself in 2002, at the
age of 34.
Besides his wife, a painter, Mr. Hughes is survived by two stepsons,
Freeborn Garrettson Jewett IV and Fielder Douglas Jewett. He is also
survived by his brothers, Thomas Hughes, a former attorney general of
Australia, and Geoffrey Hughes, and by a sister, Constance Crisp, all of
Sydney. His niece, Lucy Hughes Turnbull, was a former lord mayor of
Sydney, and her husband, Malcolm Turnbull, is a member of the Australian
House of Representatives.
Mr. Hughes lived for many years in New York in a loft in SoHo, whose
blossoming art scene he often lampooned. In 1978 he was recruited to
anchor the new ABC News magazine “20/20,” but the reviews of his first
broadcast were so disastrous that he was quickly replaced by Hugh Downs.
In 1999, while in Australia working on a documentary about the country,
he was driving on the wrong side of the road after a day of fishing and
crashed head-on with another car carrying three men, one of whom was
seriously injured.
Mr. Hughes was critically injured, spending weeks in a coma. He fought a
charge of dangerous driving, and after a bitter and highly public legal
battle, he described the men in the other car as “lowlife scum.” (He
was fined and banned from driving in Australia for three years; his
anger about it led to his saying in the hearing of a reporter that it
would not matter to him if Australia were towed out to sea and sunk.)
The accident slowed him greatly and required him to walk with a cane, a
harsh blow for the kind of writer who almost always seemed happier
aboard a motorcycle or a fishing boat than behind a desk. But he
continued to travel, to study deeply, to appear on television speaking
in impromptu sentences almost as accomplished as those he wrote, and to
write.
“No critic could have asked for a better run,” Christopher Hitchens wrote in a review of Mr. Hughes’s memoir.
Mr. Hughes’s essential motivating drive may have been expressed best in
his own words about Goya, who he said haunted him in the months when he
was recovering from the crash. He was an artist, he wrote, whose genius
lay in his “vast breadth of curiosity about the human animal and the
depth of his appalled sympathy for it.”
***** The Shock of the Newu.有漢譯本
The Shock of the New is a 1980 documentary television series written and presented by Robert Hughes produced by the BBC in association with Time-Life Films and produced by Lorna Pegram. [1] It was broadcast by the BBC in 1980 in the United Kingdom and by PBS in 1981 in the United States.[2][3] It addressed the development of modern art since the Impressionists and was accompanied by a book of the same name; its combination of insight, wit and accessibility are still widely praised.Contents |
Series outline
The series consisted of 8 episodes each one hour long (58 min approx.)[4]- Mechanical Paradise - How the development of technology influenced art between 1880 and end of WWI.
- The Powers That Be - Examining the relationship between art and authority.
- The Landscape of Pleasure - Examining art's relationship with the pleasures of nature.
- Trouble in Utopia - Examining the aspirations and reality of architecture.
- The Threshold of Liberty - Examining the surrealists' attempts to make art without restrictions.
- The View from the Edge - A look at those who made visual art from the crags and vistas of their internal world.
- Culture as Nature - Examining the art that referred to the man-made world which fed off culture itself.
- The Future That Was - Robert Hughes slips down the decline of modernism while watching art without substance.
- The Mechanical Paradise - The influence of technology on art from 1880 to 1918
- The Shapes of Dissent - The relationship and conflicts between modern art and authority
- The Landscape of Pleasure - Artists' visions of paradise 1870's to 1950's
- Trouble in Utopia - Modern architecture
- The Threshold of Liberty - Surrealism
- The Sublime and Anxious Eye - Expressionism
- Culture as Nature - Pop Art
- The End of Modernity - The commercialisation of Modern Art.
Book
The book of the series was published in 1980 by the BBC under the title The Shock of the New: Art and the century of change.[5] It was republished in 1991 by Thames and Hudson.[6]The New Shock of the New
The New Shock of The New (2004) - Art Documentary - Robert Hughes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXSSTkDNwcE
1979 EPISODE IThe mechanical paradise - The influence of technology on art from 1880 to 1918.
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That's showbusiness
His
TV series The Shock of the New changed the way people thought about
modern art. A quarter of a century on, Robert Hughes has returned to the
story - and found a world overtaken by money and celebrity
Robert Hughes: the art world 'is taking on some of the less creditable aspects of showbiz'
Photo: BBC
Photo: BBC
Twenty-five years is a mere eyeblink in the story of Egyptian,
Mayan or even medieval English art, but it is a long time in the modern
or (weasel word) post-modern context, and if one is given a single
programme - a mere 55 minutes - to bring the story up to date from where
The Shock of the New left off when we finished making the series, one
is bound to fail. Too much has happened in art. Not all of that "too
much", admittedly, is compelling or even interesting, but the ground is
choked with events that defy brief, coherent summary.
So we decided to sample rather than summarise. Most of the "1980s artists" over whom such a fuss was made have turned out to be merely rhetorical, or inept, or otherwise fallen by the wayside. Is there anyone who really cares much what Julian Schnabel or David Salle, for instance, are now doing? Do the recent paintings of Sandro Chia or Georg Baselitz excite interest? Maybe in your breast, but not in mine.
The period has been full of conceptual art, but conceptual art makes for utterly droning TV. On the other hand, there are a few - a very few - artists of the "neo-expressionist" generation whose work continues its efforts to take on the burden of history, to struggle to explain our bizarre and terrible times to us in memorable visual terms, and one of the most complex and rewarding of these talents, uneven though he can be, is surely Anselm Kiefer.
No less so is Paula Rego, a painter I'd hardly heard of until a few years ago because she was scarcely known in the US - but how strongly put together, how viscerally and deeply felt, are her renderings of bad parental authority and of the psychic nightmares that lie just be low the supposedly sweet surface of childhood! Rego is a great subversive without a trace of the dull, academic conceptualism that renders the more approved American radical-feminists of the 80s-90s so tedious - and she draws superbly, which her sisters across the Atlantic have either forgotten or never learned to do. Like Kiefer, but unlike most painters at work today, she does art with a strong political content that never turns into a merely ideological utterance.
It used to be that media-based, photo-derived art looked almost automatically "interesting". It cut to the chase instantly, it mimicked the media-glutted state of general consciousness, it was democratic - sort of. The high priest of this situation was of course the hugely influential Andy Warhol, paragon of fast art. I am sure that though his influence probably will last (if only because it renders artmaking easier for the kiddies) his paragonhood won't, and despite the millions now paid for his Lizzes and Elvises, he will shrink to relative insignificance, a historical figure whose resonance is used up. There will be a renewed interest - not for everyone, of course, but for those who actually know and care about the issues - in slow art: art that takes time to develop on the retina and in the mind, that sees instant communication as the empty fraud it is, that relates strongly to its own traditions.
It doesn't matter whether the work is figurative or not. Sean Scully's big abstracts retain much more than a memory of experienced architecture, but they relate to the human body too, and there is something wonderfully invigorating about the measured density with which their paint brings them into the world. Not everything of value is self-evident and there is no reason in the world why art should be. Nor is it true that instantaneous media, such as photography and video, should or can deliver "more" truth than drawing. All you can say is that they offer a different sort of truth. This is an issue with which an artist like David Hockney has been struggling for years, and it's fascinating to see how he has given up on the photographic collages he used to make in favour of pure recording in watercolour, of which he is such a master.
Styles come and go, movements briefly coalesce (or fail to, more likely), but there has been one huge and dominant reality overshadowing Anglo-Euro-American art in the past 25 years, and The Shock of the New came out too early to take account of its full effects. This is the growing and tyrannous power of the market itself, which has its ups and downs but has so hugely distorted nearly everyone's relationship with aesthetics. That's why we decided to put Jeff Koons in the new programme: not because his work is beautiful or means anything much, but because it is such an extreme and self-satisfied manifestation of the sanctimony that attaches to big bucks. Koons really does think he's Michelangelo and is not shy to say so. The significant thing is that there are collectors, especially in America, who believe it. He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the result is that you can't imagine America's singularly depraved culture without him. He fits into Bush's America the way Warhol fitted into Reagan's. There may be worse things waiting in the wings (never forget that morose observation of Milton's on the topo-graphy of Hell: "And in the lowest depth, a lower depth") but for the moment they aren't apparent, which isn't to say that they won't crawl, glistening like Paris Hilton's lip-gloss, out of some gallery next month. Koons is the perfect product of an art system in which the market controls nearly everything, including much of what gets said about art.
An interesting result of the growing power of the market is that artists and their dealers are looking for ways, through copyright law, to control what is written or broadcast about the work, so as to prevent critics who might feel less than prostrate admiration for it from saying anything about it at all. On TV, if you can't show, you can't tell. I have seen quite a lot of this in recent years; it is here to stay, and getting worse. Sometimes the results look merely silly, as when the American conceptual artist Mel Bochner, whose work (consisting of vaguely related words printed in capitals on canvas in various tasteful colours) we filmed in the last Whitney Biennial in New York, waited until a few days before broadcast to announce, through his agent, that he "did not wish to participate" in our film. Never mind.
Damien Hirst was another story. We were in London, hoping to film some of Hirst's work and perhaps a brief interview with him for The New Shock of the New. Oh no, absolutely not, came the word back. "Damien," said his gallery, "is very fragile to criticism." Could this fragile aesthete really be the Hemingwoid sheep-slicer, dot-painter and all-round bad boy? I had not actually written about Hirst's work (though I consider him a much more real artist than some of the lesser geniuses of our time) but it was clear he suspected he might be treated as someone less than Michelangelo or, for that matter, Richard Serra. The last message from him was that never, no-how, under no circumstances, could we film anything of his in the current show at the Tate, In a Gadda da Vida. Why? "Conservation reasons," it said. Better to discourage anything being said about the great work than risk the utterance of dissent or doubt.
I think the drift of such examples (and there are plenty of others) is clear enough. The art world is now so swollen with currency and the vanity of inflated reputation that it is taking on some of the less creditable aspects of showbiz. Hollywood doesn't want critics, it wants PR folk and profile-writers. Showbiz controls journalism by controlling access. The art world hopes to do the same, though on a more piddly level. No other domain of culture would try this one on. No publisher, fearing that an unfavourable review, would attempt to stop a book critic quoting from some novel. No producer would make a guarantee of innocuousness the price of a critic's ticket to the theatre. It just wouldn't happen. But in art, it can. And since it can, as Bill Clinton remarked in another context, it does.
· The New Shock of the New is on BBC2, Saturday, 9.05pm.
So we decided to sample rather than summarise. Most of the "1980s artists" over whom such a fuss was made have turned out to be merely rhetorical, or inept, or otherwise fallen by the wayside. Is there anyone who really cares much what Julian Schnabel or David Salle, for instance, are now doing? Do the recent paintings of Sandro Chia or Georg Baselitz excite interest? Maybe in your breast, but not in mine.
The period has been full of conceptual art, but conceptual art makes for utterly droning TV. On the other hand, there are a few - a very few - artists of the "neo-expressionist" generation whose work continues its efforts to take on the burden of history, to struggle to explain our bizarre and terrible times to us in memorable visual terms, and one of the most complex and rewarding of these talents, uneven though he can be, is surely Anselm Kiefer.
No less so is Paula Rego, a painter I'd hardly heard of until a few years ago because she was scarcely known in the US - but how strongly put together, how viscerally and deeply felt, are her renderings of bad parental authority and of the psychic nightmares that lie just be low the supposedly sweet surface of childhood! Rego is a great subversive without a trace of the dull, academic conceptualism that renders the more approved American radical-feminists of the 80s-90s so tedious - and she draws superbly, which her sisters across the Atlantic have either forgotten or never learned to do. Like Kiefer, but unlike most painters at work today, she does art with a strong political content that never turns into a merely ideological utterance.
It used to be that media-based, photo-derived art looked almost automatically "interesting". It cut to the chase instantly, it mimicked the media-glutted state of general consciousness, it was democratic - sort of. The high priest of this situation was of course the hugely influential Andy Warhol, paragon of fast art. I am sure that though his influence probably will last (if only because it renders artmaking easier for the kiddies) his paragonhood won't, and despite the millions now paid for his Lizzes and Elvises, he will shrink to relative insignificance, a historical figure whose resonance is used up. There will be a renewed interest - not for everyone, of course, but for those who actually know and care about the issues - in slow art: art that takes time to develop on the retina and in the mind, that sees instant communication as the empty fraud it is, that relates strongly to its own traditions.
It doesn't matter whether the work is figurative or not. Sean Scully's big abstracts retain much more than a memory of experienced architecture, but they relate to the human body too, and there is something wonderfully invigorating about the measured density with which their paint brings them into the world. Not everything of value is self-evident and there is no reason in the world why art should be. Nor is it true that instantaneous media, such as photography and video, should or can deliver "more" truth than drawing. All you can say is that they offer a different sort of truth. This is an issue with which an artist like David Hockney has been struggling for years, and it's fascinating to see how he has given up on the photographic collages he used to make in favour of pure recording in watercolour, of which he is such a master.
Styles come and go, movements briefly coalesce (or fail to, more likely), but there has been one huge and dominant reality overshadowing Anglo-Euro-American art in the past 25 years, and The Shock of the New came out too early to take account of its full effects. This is the growing and tyrannous power of the market itself, which has its ups and downs but has so hugely distorted nearly everyone's relationship with aesthetics. That's why we decided to put Jeff Koons in the new programme: not because his work is beautiful or means anything much, but because it is such an extreme and self-satisfied manifestation of the sanctimony that attaches to big bucks. Koons really does think he's Michelangelo and is not shy to say so. The significant thing is that there are collectors, especially in America, who believe it. He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the result is that you can't imagine America's singularly depraved culture without him. He fits into Bush's America the way Warhol fitted into Reagan's. There may be worse things waiting in the wings (never forget that morose observation of Milton's on the topo-graphy of Hell: "And in the lowest depth, a lower depth") but for the moment they aren't apparent, which isn't to say that they won't crawl, glistening like Paris Hilton's lip-gloss, out of some gallery next month. Koons is the perfect product of an art system in which the market controls nearly everything, including much of what gets said about art.
An interesting result of the growing power of the market is that artists and their dealers are looking for ways, through copyright law, to control what is written or broadcast about the work, so as to prevent critics who might feel less than prostrate admiration for it from saying anything about it at all. On TV, if you can't show, you can't tell. I have seen quite a lot of this in recent years; it is here to stay, and getting worse. Sometimes the results look merely silly, as when the American conceptual artist Mel Bochner, whose work (consisting of vaguely related words printed in capitals on canvas in various tasteful colours) we filmed in the last Whitney Biennial in New York, waited until a few days before broadcast to announce, through his agent, that he "did not wish to participate" in our film. Never mind.
Damien Hirst was another story. We were in London, hoping to film some of Hirst's work and perhaps a brief interview with him for The New Shock of the New. Oh no, absolutely not, came the word back. "Damien," said his gallery, "is very fragile to criticism." Could this fragile aesthete really be the Hemingwoid sheep-slicer, dot-painter and all-round bad boy? I had not actually written about Hirst's work (though I consider him a much more real artist than some of the lesser geniuses of our time) but it was clear he suspected he might be treated as someone less than Michelangelo or, for that matter, Richard Serra. The last message from him was that never, no-how, under no circumstances, could we film anything of his in the current show at the Tate, In a Gadda da Vida. Why? "Conservation reasons," it said. Better to discourage anything being said about the great work than risk the utterance of dissent or doubt.
I think the drift of such examples (and there are plenty of others) is clear enough. The art world is now so swollen with currency and the vanity of inflated reputation that it is taking on some of the less creditable aspects of showbiz. Hollywood doesn't want critics, it wants PR folk and profile-writers. Showbiz controls journalism by controlling access. The art world hopes to do the same, though on a more piddly level. No other domain of culture would try this one on. No publisher, fearing that an unfavourable review, would attempt to stop a book critic quoting from some novel. No producer would make a guarantee of innocuousness the price of a critic's ticket to the theatre. It just wouldn't happen. But in art, it can. And since it can, as Bill Clinton remarked in another context, it does.
· The New Shock of the New is on BBC2, Saturday, 9.05pm.
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