From Barcelona to Australian art, critic and writer Robert Hughes covered a wide range of subjects in more than 10 dazzling books.
“Australia is not, to me, a picturesque little country full of cute marsupials at the end of the world.”
“I think the biggest single difference between Australians and Americans is that you were founded as a religious experiment, and we were founded as a jail.”
—Robert Hughes
“At 81, Freud is so much younger than any of the Britart dreck installed on the other side of the Thames: younger than Damien Hirst’s slowly rotting shark in its tank of murky formalin; weirder than David Falconer’s Vermin Death Star, which is composed of thousands of cast-metal rats; and about a 100 times sexier than Tracey Emin’s stale icon of sluttish housekeeping.”
—Robert Hughes
Hughes saw no reason not to be drawn to the wrestlers with the inchoate: the old Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Goya, and in his own time Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, and Leon Kossoff. Many of them were kneaders of impasto—artists who slathered and stomped, and who got down and dirty. Writing with delectably Dickensian excess, writing as it were with his palette knife, Hughes conferred on Auerbach’s studio grunge such sacred mystery that it became a tabernacle of living, glowing crud. “You enter the alley through a wicket gate, set between a liver-brick Victorian semi-detached villa on the left and on the right a decayed block of 60s maisonettes. A roughly lettered sign says TO THE STUDIOS. Auerbach’s door opens on a scene of dinginess and clutter. The studio is actually a generous-sized room but it seems constricted at first, all peeling surfaces, blistered paint, spalling plaster, mounds and craters of paint, piles of newspapers and books crammed into rickety shelves, a mirror so frosted with dust that movements detected inside it are barely decipherable. It is a midden heap.”
—Simon Schama
Bob Hughes not only made no bones about his own prose performance; he reveled (despite that commitment to Orwellian simplicity) in his muscular, swashbuckling sentence-fashioning: shamelessly exhilarated by its energy surge, high on its wit. “If you once thought that Vincent the Dutchman had been a trifle oversold, from Kirk Douglas gritting his mandibles in the loony bin at St-Remy to Greek zillionaires screwing his cypresses to the stateroom bulkheads of their yachts you would be wrong …”
—Simon Schama
Or on Watteau, “In his hands the human back, preferably of a young woman, became as expressive as a face—a pyramid or wedge of subdued, lustrous substance, played on by light, divided into delicately articulated folds and crannies that betoken silence and concentration.”
—Robert Hughes
“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 pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements.”
―Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New
“I became a Barcelona enthusiast, as near as I can recall, in the spring of 1966. I hardly knew a word of Spanish, let alone Catalan, but I went there for the oblique reason that I was fanatically keen on George Orwell and wanted to see the place to which he had his homage—the city in Europe about which that insular Englishman felt moved to write with wholehearted affection.”
—Robert Hughes, Barcelona
“The vulgarity of confessional culture is stupefying, but “vulgarity” has ceased to matter in America: it is no longer a term of rebuke, since it is now completely identified with democracy. The classic definition of vulgarity was inappropriate self-exposure. It contracts the “mob”—the vulgus, all emotion and no reason, easily manipulated and cheaply satisfied to the reserved patrician who maintained power through distance and an unshakeable code.
—Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint
“Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.”
—Robert Hughes
“Artists are rarely moral heroes and should not be expected to be, any more than plumbers or dog breeders are. Goya, being neither madman nor masochist, had no taste for martyrdom. But he sometimes was heroic, particularly in his conflicted relations with the last Bourbon monarch he served, the odious and arbitrarily cruel Fernando VII. His work asserted that men and women should be free from tyranny and superstition; that torture, rape, despoliation, and massacre, those perennial props of power in both the civil and religious arena, were intolerable; and that those who condoned or employed them were not to be trusted, no matter how seductive the bugle calls and the swearing of allegiance might seem.
—Robert Hughes, Goya
“I am completely an elitist in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work or a good carpenter chopping dovetails. I don’t think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unless the latter is a friend or a relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn’t matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental, and boring stuff that saturates culture today, more (perhaps) than it ever has. I hate populist [shit], no matter how much the demos love it.”
—Robert Hughes, Things I Didn’t Know
