Robert Hughes, the art critic and historian who died in 2012, used words such as “carious” (to describe Salvador Dali’s breath), “unparsable” (Julian Schnabel’s writing) and “borborygmi” (the “intestinal gurglings” of his fellow art critics).
He also used words such as “airy-fairy” ( art critics, again), “sleazy” ( New York curator Henry Geldzahler) and “bull—-,” the last one too often to bother itemizing.
Like H.L. Mencken, remembered as a chin-forward master of high/low invective. But he was more than that. He was a sedulous scholar, and his work on Goya and histories of Australia, Barcelona and Rome are full of original research and display a mastery of multiple languages.
Unlike most of his colleagues in the field of art criticism, Hughes, who was Time magazine’s leading art critic for over 30 years, wrote taut, clear prose full of metaphors that were both precise and outrageous. Like Oscar Wilde, he believed that the best response to a work of art is to produce something that is a work of art in itself.
Educated by Jesuits, he knew how to put together a seductive argument. Hughes grew up during the golden age of mass literacy, in an era filled with great explainers. “The Shock of the New,” Hughes’ uncompromising TV series on 20th century art, is probably the last great work of educational television.
“The Spectacle of Skill,” an anthology of Hughes’ writings, includes a number of his Time columns, excerpts from his historical works, a selection from the first volume of his autobiography and a few chapters from the unfinished and previously unpublished second volume.
Hughes’ prime as a critic, during the 1970s and ’80s, coincided with a sea change in the art world: celebrity, public relations, fashion, demotic arts such as graffiti, financial speculation, curating and criticism all became intermixed in a kind of toxic soup.
The price of a painting — previously known chiefly to the buyer, the seller and the dealer — was now a bigger story than the work of art itself. Art collecting, once the province of a few, became a field as wide open as real estate speculation.
At the same time, the quantity of available historical masterpieces declined, as did the quality of contemporary art, propelled by a movement in art schools away from rigorous training in drawing.
Trained as an artist himself, Hughes could articulate the difference between real skill and what he called, in his extended evisceration of Julian Schnabel, “the fumbling inability to relate a form to the space around it by the energy of its contour.”
Andy Warhol, “the white mole of Union Square,” was a product of our affectless TV culture:
“It was no longer necessary for an artist to act crazy like Salvador Dali. The old style of hot dandyism was on its way out. Other people could act crazy for you: That was what Warhol’s Factory was all about.”
Out of a desire to clear the field of the corrupt and incompetent — or perhaps out of the natural territoriality of the alpha male — Hughes relished attacking his fellow critics.
“You could hear him blocks away like a truck with a shot muffler warming up in an alley,” Hughes wrote about Hilton Kramer — and Kramer was one of the few critics he respected.
Many pages of Hughes’ unfinished memoir are taken up with an account of the ethical transgressions of his fellow critics: for accepting freebies from artists, or shaking them down in exchange for ink, for writing about artists they collected with an eye to increasing their market value.
“The Spectacle of Skill” illustrates the truism that our faults are a mirror image of our virtues: Hughes’ fearlessness was balanced by an abrasive combativeness; his lapidary wit and ease on a large stage by the orotundity of a speaker who is sure that someone is always overhearing him; and his larger-than-life quality by a tendency to bully or ignore those of normal scale.
Hughes seems to have understood this last quality about himself, if a little too late. The final chapter of his memoir is a bewildered account of the stunted life of his only child, Danton, who committed suicide after Hughes — by his own admission — ignored him, then intimidated him and drove him away.
Of Goya, Hughes wrote: “He could see and experience nothing without forming some opinion about it, and this opinion showed in his work, often in terms of the utmost passion.”
Such words by Hughes could serve as an epitaph for himself.
