Robert Hughes (critic) Totally Explained

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Robert Studley Forrest Hughes AO, (born July 28, 1938), usually known as Robert Hughes, is an art critic, writer and television documentary maker. Hughes has lived in New York for over 30 years.

Early life

Hughes was born in Sydney in 1938. His father and paternal grandfather were prominent lawyers. Hughes' father, Geoffrey Forrest Hughes, was an aviator in World War I, with later careers as a solicitor and company director. Robert Hughes' 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 made a name for himself within the Sydney "Push" — a group of artists, writers, intellectuals and drinkers. Among the group were at least two other cultural observers: Germaine Greer and Clive James. Hughes failed university and, after subsequently enrolling in architecture school, abandoned his studies to become first a cartoonist and then an art critic for the Sydney periodical The Observer, edited by Donald Horne.^{(External Link) (External Link)} 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.

Career Highlights

Hughes left Australia for London, England in 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.
   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.
   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' 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 published the first volume of his memoirs, Things I Didn’t Know, in 2006. (External Link

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Road accident

On May 28, 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 didn't give evidence and his defence was technical, in that the prosecution couldn't 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'd 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 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 also spiralled into 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 don't 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 committed suicide by gassing himself with his car in the garage. As explained by Robert Hughes, "He was very sad, he was very alienated, a condition for which I partly blame myself, as parents always do and must, I suppose, but bad things happened to him that he genuinely wasn't able to handle and that's all I can say about it." More recently Hughes has written: "I miss Danton and always will, although we'd been miserably estranged for years and the pain of his loss has been somewhat blunted by the passage of time."
   From 1981 until 1996 he was married to Victoria Hughes, formerly, Victoria Whistler.
   In 2001 Robert married American Artist and former Art Director, Doris Downes, with whom he'd been together for 10 years. She is 21 years his junior. He has two stepchildren from Downes' 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 (Tom's daughter), a former Lord Mayor of Sydney, is married to Australian businessman and politician Malcolm Turnbull. 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.

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

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

On Julian Schnabel's memoirs:
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The unexamined life, said Socrates, isn't worth living. The memoirs of Julian Schnabel, such as they are, remind one that the converse is also true. The unlived life isn't worth examining.

:- from Nothing if Not Critical:Selected Essays on Art and Artists

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.

1987 - named New York Public Library Literary Lion

1988 - named recipient of the American Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award.

1988 - W.H. Smith Literary Award for The Fatal Shore

1991 - Order of Australia

1995 - granted an Honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of Melbourne

1996 - elected to membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

1997 - elected one of 40 "Living National Treasures" after a general vote conducted by the Australian media on behalf of the National Trust of Australia

2000 - London Sunday Times Writer of the Year (previous recipients of the award including Anthony Burgess, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, and Salman Rushdie)

2007 - New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for non-fiction for Things I Didn't Know: a Memoir

Publications (alphabetical order)

A Jerk on One End: Reflections of a Mediocre Fisherman (1998. ISBN 0-345-42283-X)

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)

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)Further Information

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