The shock of the opinionated: Robert Hughes remembered

The title of Robert Hughes’s most famous book, The Shock of the New, has been played on ad infintum in popular culture, from Oasis dirges to Niall Ferguson books. Yet the fact that its simple compilation of five words continues to compel and confront, and stands as testament to the art critic’s meaty, robust, accessible writing style.

The Australian-born Hughes, who died today in New York, was described as “the most famous art critic in the world” by the writer Robert S Boynton in 1997, and while the 1982 television series that took the same evocative title did much to expand his reputation (with a combined viewership of 25 million across the BBC and America’s PBS), it was his writing that placed him as one of the greats of his discipline.

Hughes took up criticism in the early 1960s as a sideline to his art practice – pushed into it by the editor of Australian journal The Observer, desperate to replace an art scribe who had just been sacked. Hughes noted some years later: “If there’d been anybody in the readership of The Observer in those days who knew anything about art, I wouldn’t have lasted two seconds.”

From these career beginnings he moved to Italy in 1964, before joining the band of Australian baby boomers – which also included Germaine Greer and Clive James – who landed in London in the midst of 1960s hedonism. There Hughes dropped any pretence at being a practising artist and began to pick up work with the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph and Oz magazine, opining on the exhibitions staged in the city’s then tiny and under evaluated art scene.

Heaven and Hell

During this period he also wrote Heaven and Hell in Western Art (1969), a little read précis on the role theological fear had in shaping pre-twentieth century art, but a book important to Hughes’ biography in that it got him the gig as Time magazine’s regular art critic. It precipitated a move to New York, whose art scene he would preside over for the following 30 years.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his travels, Hughes embodied the cliché of the plain-speaking Australian – stating the case for or against an artist with language that never belittled or simplified its subject but advanced an argument without pretension. His evaluation that “a Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion” was typical.

Such sly humour was ever present. He was sardonic when called for – “the new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive” – and never afraid to employ tangential analogies from popular cultures or contemporary news to hammer home a point. He wrote that Jeff Koons “is the baby to Andy Warhol’s Rosemary. He has done for narcissism what Michael Milken did for the junk bond” (Milken was the financier who developed high-yield bonds in the 1970s).

Sacred cows were slayed left, right and centre. On Lucien Freud, of whom he was an admirer, he wrote: “Every inch of the surface has to be won, 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.”

If Hughes’s death – which came after a long period of illness and a decline in health since a car accident during a visit to Australia in 1999 – is to serve anything, then it should be hoped that it inspires popular coverage of the arts to be of his ilk: full of opinion, full of insight, and full on entertaining.

Oliver Basciano is a critic and writer based in London. Follow him on Twitter @olibasciano