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Robert Hughes (critic)

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Robert Studley Forrest Hughes AO (born 28 July 1938) is an Australian-born art critic, writer and television documentary maker who has resided in New York since 1970.

Early life

Hughes was born in Sydney in 1938. His father and paternal grandfather were prominent lawyers. Hughes's father, Geoffrey Forrest Hughes, was an aviator in World War I, with later careers as a solicitor and company director. Robert Hughes's mother was Margaret Eyre Sealy, née Vidal. His older brother, Tom Hughes, is an Australian lawyer and former Attorney-General of Australia. Geoffrey Hughes died from lung cancer when Robert was aged 12.

He was educated at St Ignatius' College, Riverview before going on to study arts and then architecture at the University of Sydney. At university, Hughes associated with the Sydney "Push" — a group of artists, writers, intellectuals and drinkers. Among the group were Germaine Greer and Clive James. Hughes, an aspiring artist and poet, abandoned his university endeavours to become first a cartoonist and then an art critic for the Sydney periodical The Observer, edited by Donald Horne.[1] [2] Around this time he wrote a history of Australian painting, titled The Art of Australia, which is still considered to be an important work. It was published in 1966. Hughes was also briefly involved in the original Sydney version of Oz magazine, and wrote art criticism for The Nation and The Sunday Mirror.

Hughes's early ambitions to be an artist and poet led him, possibly unwittingly, to rely unduly on imitation, which resulted in an episode of harsh criticism in student and public newspapers. In 1961, an article by a law student, Geoffrey Lehmann, in the Sydney University weekly newspaper Honi Soit noted similarities between specific Hughes poems (including two that had won the Henry Lawson Prize[1] in 1957) and work by Terence Tiller, George Seferis, Alun Lewis and Dylan Thomas. Similarly, a published Hughes drawing was described as resembling one which had appeared in a 1955 international art magazine.[2] The criticism was given wider prominence by the award-winning poet and journalist Elizabeth Riddell in a Daily Mirror article.[3]

Career highlights

Hughes left Australia for Europe in 1964, living for a time in Italy before settling in London, England (1965) where he wrote for The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Observer, among others, and contributed to the London version of Oz. In 1970 he obtained the position of art critic for TIME magazine and he moved to New York. He quickly established himself in the United States as an influential art critic.

In 1975 he along with Don Brady provided the narration for the film Protected, a documentary showing what life was like for Indigenous Australians on Palm Island.

Hughes and Harold Hayes were recruited in 1978 to anchor the new ABC News (US) newsmagazine 20/20. His only broadcast, on June 6, 1978, proved so disastrous that, less than a week later, ABC News president Roone Arledge dumped Hughes and Hayes, replacing them with veteran TV host Hugh Downs.

In 1980, the BBC broadcast The Shock Of The New, Hughes's television series on the development of modern art since the Impressionists. It was accompanied by a book of the same name; its combination of insight, wit and accessibility are still widely praised.

In 1987, The Fatal Shore, Hughes's study of the British penal colonies and early European settlement of Australia, became an international best-seller.

During the 1990s, Hughes was a prominent supporter of the Australian Republican Movement.

Hughes provided commentary and highlights on the work of artist Robert Crumb throughout the 1994 film "Crumb", calling Crumb "the American Breughel".

His 1997 television series American Visions reviewed the history of American art since the Revolution. He was again dismissive of recent art; this time, sculptor Jeff Koons was subjected to scathing criticism. Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore (2000) was a series musing on modern Australia and Hughes's relationship with it. During production, Hughes was involved in the near-fatal road accident detailed in the next section.

Hughes's 2002 documentary on the painter Francisco Goya - Goya: Crazy Like a Genius—was broadcast on the first night of the BBC's domestic digital service.

Hughes created a one hour update to The Shock of the New. Titled The New Shock of the New, the program aired first in 2004. [3]

Hughes published the first volume of his memoirs, Things I Didn’t Know, in 2006. [4]

Broome road accident

On 28 May 1999, during a brief return to Australia, Hughes was seriously injured in a vehicle accident near Broome, Western Australia (WA). After a day out fishing, Hughes had been driving alone when his hired Nissan Pulsar collided head-on with a Holden Commodore. Hughes's right leg was broken in five places and his right elbow was shattered. He was airlifted to Royal Perth Hospital, was in a coma for several weeks and later claimed no memory of the crash. Three men were travelling in the other car, one of whom was injured; they stated that Hughes was driving on the wrong side of the road.

During 2000, Hughes was acquitted of two counts of dangerous driving by Broome magistrate Antoine Bloemen. Hughes did not give evidence and his defence was technical, in that the prosecution could not rule out the possibility of a mechanical failure causing the car to veer over the centre line. However, the charges were reinstated and upgraded by the WA Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Robert Cock QC. Two men from the other vehicle were not called to give evidence, following allegations that they had attempted to blackmail Hughes. He was subsequently acquitted.

Hughes was later sued for defamation by Cock and his assistant, Lloyd Rayney. Further controversy arose when it was alleged that Hughes had made a racist remark about Rayney, an Asian Australian. This was denied by Hughes.

The matter came to a close in 2003, when the WA Crown Solicitor's appeal against Hughes's acquittal reached court. This time Hughes pleaded guilty to the charge of dangerous driving causing grievous bodily harm. He was convicted and fined A$2,500.

Personal life

Hughes married his first wife, Danne Patricia Emerson, in 1967 and was divorced in 1981. During this marriage, Danne experienced cocaine and heroin addiction. Danne died of a brain tumour in 2003 at the age of sixty. "She was enormously fat from the aftermath of a prolonged cocaine addiction from which her lesbian girlfriend had struggled, on the whole successfully, to free her," Hughes wrote in The Sunday Times (London) on August 20, 2006. "I do not miss Danne at all."

Hughes and Emerson had one child, Danton (30 September 1967 - 2002), named after the French revolutionary, Georges Danton. Danton became a sculptor and lived in Sydney's Blue Mountains. In 2002, at age 34, Danton Hughes took his own life by gassing himself with his car in the garage. Hughes later wrote: "I miss Danton and always will, although we had been miserably estranged for years and the pain of his loss has been somewhat blunted by the passage of time."[4]

From 1981 until 1996 he was married to Victoria Hughes, née Whistler.

In 2001 Robert married American artist and former art director, Doris Downes, with whom he had been together for 10 years. She is 21 years his junior. He has two stepchildren from Downes's previous marriage, Freeborn Jewett IV and Fielder Jewett. They divide their time between a loft in New York City and a home in Briarcliff Manor, New York.

His niece Lucy Turnbull (his brother Tom's daughter), a former Lord Mayor of Sydney, is married to Australian businessman and politician Malcolm Turnbull, who in September 2008 became Leader of the Opposition in the Federal Parliament. Robert stayed with them for an extended period during his recovery from injuries in the 1999 car accident.

Quotations

  • Assessing Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross on the documentary, American Visions:

Barnett Newman once said, 'I thought our quarrel was with Michelangelo.' Well, bad luck, Barney. You lost.

  • On Canadian Art

People don't show it in America, for Christ's sake. How am I supposed to know about Canadian art living in America?

  • On Australia

They could tow Australia out to sea and sink it for all I care.[5]

  • On Australia and America:

[The] difference between the Australian and the American experience was that in America space liberates, while in Australia space was the ultimate prison.[6]

[E]very time I go back to Australia I feel more at home, because Australia is, generally speaking, a saner society than America. That would not be hard. [7]

The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. The memoirs of Julian Schnabel, such as they are, remind one that the converse is also true. The unlived life is not worth examining.
- from Nothing if Not Critical:Selected Essays on Art and Artists
  • On the contemporary art world:

Some think that so much of today's art mirrors and thus criticises decadence. Not so. It's just decadent. Full stop. It has no critical function, it is part of the problem.[8]

Honours

As a reviewer, Hughes is the only art critic to twice win America's most coveted award for art criticism (in 1982 and 1985), the Frank Jewett Mather Award, given by the College Art Association of America.

Publications (alphabetical order)

  • American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (The Harvill Press, 1998. ISBN 1-86046-533-1)
  • The Art of Australia (1966. ISBN 0-14-020935-2)
  • Barcelona (Vintage, 1992. ISBN 0-394-58027-3)
  • Barcelona: the Great Enchantress (2001. ISBN 0-7922-6794-X. Condensed version of Barcelona.)
  • Culture of Complaint (Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-19-507676-1)
  • Donald Friend (Edwards and Shaw, Sydney, 1965)
  • The Fatal Shore (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1987. ISBN 0-394-50668-5)
  • Goya (Vintage, 2004. ISBN 0-09-945368-1)
  • Heaven and Hell in Western Art {Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1968)
  • A Jerk on One End: Reflections of a Mediocre Fisherman (1998. ISBN 0-345-42283-X)
  • Lucian Freud Paintings (Thames & Hudson, 1989. ISBN 0-500-27535-1)
  • Nothing if Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists (Including 'SoHoiad') (The Harvill Press, 1991. ISBN 1-86046-859-4)
  • The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change (updated and enlarged edition, Thames & Hudson, 1991. ISBN 0-500-27582-3)
  • Things I Didn’t Know: A Memoir (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 2006. ISBN 1-4000-4444-8)

Notes

  1. ^ Henry Lawson Prize for Poetry (at Sydney University)
  2. ^ The Mad Emperor by Hughes in The Sydney University annual Hermes, 1958, was described as rather like Head of a Poet by Leonard Baskin, which had appeared in the international art magazine Perspectives in 1955.
  3. ^ Coombs A Sex and Anarchy: The life and death of the Sydney Push Viking Penguin Books (Australia, 1996) pp 158-9
  4. ^ Hughes R The curse of free love TimesOnline (UK) 2006 (Being an extract from his book Things I Didn't Know, Vintage (2006)
  5. ^ Time Magazine, 13 May 2002
  6. ^ The Lives of Robert Hughes by Robert Boynton, The New Yorker 12 May 1997
  7. ^ Hughes Views, Salon
  8. ^ The Mona Lisa Curse Channel 4, 21st September 2008
  9. ^ It's an Honour - Officer of the Order of Australia

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