Thunderbolt critic

“Robert Hughes, who has died aged 74, was simply the greatest art critic of our time and it will be a long while before we see his like again,” eulogised Jonathan Jones, art writer of The Guardian. “He made criticism look like literature. He also made it look morally worthwhile. He lent nobility to what can often seem a petty way to spend your life.

Hughes could be savage, but he was never petty. There was purpose to his lightning bolts of condemnation.”

Born on July 28, 1938 in Sydney, Australia, Hughes studied arts and architecture at the University of Sydney but graduated in neither. He moved to Great Britain in the 1960s and wrote for The Spectator, The Telegraph, The Times and The Observer.

In 1970, almost by accident, he became an art critic when Time magazine was head-hunting for someone who could write about art in a way non-experts could understand, and without being condescending.

In 1980, his ‘The Shock of the New’ came out as a television series by BBC on the development of modern art since the Impressionists. It was accompanied by a book of the same name which became a Bible of sorts for a whole generation of artists, writers and art aficionados.

A long time contributor of Time magazine, he authored several other books including The Fatal Shore (1987), Culture of Complaint (1993) and American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (1997).

An expert carpenter and avid hunter, Hughes who passed away last month (August 6) at the age of 74, exuded a unique persona, not without its share of failed marriages, car accidents, drinking and drug taking binges.

Sharp but balanced

Hughes wrote prolifically about artists, art movements and the art market in articles and essays which showed rare insight and great analytical prowess. Sharp in observation, comments and criticism, his writing, particularly in the Time magazine, catapulted him into the status of a celebrity. 

Hughes clearly had his favourites in the art world but that did not blind him from seeing through the defects and limitations of their life and/or work.  

He observed that Pablo Picasso (1881- 1973) was ‘a superstitious, sarcastic man, sometimes rotten to his children, often beastly to his women’, but also pointed out that there was scarcely a 20th century movement that the Spaniard didn’t inspire, contribute to or beget. “No painter or sculptor, not even Michelangelo, had been as famous as this in his own lifetime... Picasso was not a philosopher or a mathematician, but the work he and Braque did between 1911 and 1918 was intuitively bound to the perceptions of thinkers like Einstein and Alfred North Whitehead: that reality is not figure and void, it is all relationships, a twinkling field of interdependent events. Cubism was hard to read, willfully ambiguous, and yet demotic too. It remains the most influential art dialect of the early 20th century.”

On the other hand, Salvador Dalí was ‘the apotheosis of the dandy who grew famous through shock-effects and scandal’. About his own brief acquaintance with the artist, he recalled: “I knew Dalí only slightly — he held court at the St Regis in New York, where he favoured new acquaintances with foul gusts of the worst human breath I have ever smelt.”

At the same time, Hughes saw Dali as the greatest modern painter (other than Joan Miró) born in Catalonia; one who was regularly brilliant on a small scale; and closer to cinema than any other painter of his day. “Both Dalís — the disruptive youthful genius and the pretentious, whorish old fanatic — are the same person; but one is a corrupted, ‘grand’ version of the other.”

Hughes considered Dalí’s ‘Soft Construction with Boiled Beans — Premonition of Civil War’ (1936) to be among his greatest and most frightening works. “With this single painting, Dalí moved into the territory of Goya. This, not Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, is modern art’s strongest testimony on the civil war, and on war in general. Not even the failures of Dalí’s later work can blur that fact.”

Praise and scorn

Hughes’ views and observations were well-researched, historically accurate and unaffected by the artist’s reputation. For him, Vincent van Gogh was ‘an absolutely central figure in the story of modern art, and the debt its protagonists owe him — chiefly Matisse, the Fauves and the German expressionists — is enormous and fundamental.’

If Vermeer was an incredible artist ‘who did such silently amazing things in the way of raising a mere blob or speck of paint to a charismatic height’; Lucien Freud was ‘a genuine national treasure (of Great Britain)’; Robert Rauschenberg made us “experience things more clearly”; and Marcel Duchamp, ‘that cunning old fox of conceptual irony’, had more influence on nominally vanguard art than Picasso.

Hughes clearly preferred traditional painting of the kind Freud did, for it showed its perceptual superiority; he had nothing but scorn for “image-scavengers and recyclers who infest the wretchedly stylish woods of an already decayed, pulped-out postmodernism.”

When the whole art world seemed to be drooling over Damien Hirst and his brand of art, Hughes called him a pirate, and his work simple-minded and sensationalist, “just the ticket for newbie collectors who are, to put it mildly, connoisseurship-challenged and resonance-free... Actually, the presence of a Hirst in a collection is a sure sign of dullness of taste.” He had earlier called Andy Warhol ‘diligent and frigid’, and his art ‘bland translucency, as of frosted glass’.

Hughes often despaired at the ‘frenzied racketeering of the art market’, and its unscrupulous art dealers and brokers. He saw the art world as the biggest unregulated market outside of illicit drugs. “Thanks to folks like Charles Saatchi, the art world has practically no content but money; it’s an unpleasant souk full of hustlers and promoters...”

He bemoaned the role of art critics in a vitiated cultural milieu. “It’s like being the piano player in a whorehouse. You don’t have any control over the action going on upstairs.’
Hughes had many admirers, and his share of detractors. While conceding that he had been invaluable in his role as an axe swinger in the modern forest of deadwood, artist-writer Miles Mathis felt that Hughes was not judging art but only exposing its pretense.

Mathis also saw Hughes’ outlook on the future of art was so bleak and his arguments against Classicism so weak, one almost imagined he was asking for another Renaissance.

“Hughes judges new art and old art by completely different standards. For him, new art must look new. But, in his heart of hearts, he hates modernity, and he hates newness for newness sake, as he has admitted. So, that leaves him in a no man’s land, a Sinai desert with only himself and Lucian Freud huddling under a blasted bush...”