The Critics part 5 - Robert Hughes
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Summary:
In the fifth in our series looking at influential critics in the arts, today's program is dedicated to the man the New York Times recently called 'the world's most famous art critic' – Robert Hughes.
Time magazine’s art critic for over 30 years, Hughes has always prided himself on his ability to communicate with the widest possible audience. In his time he has published a great range of books: a history of Australian art, tributes to artists Lucien Freud and Goya, a book on the city of Barcelona, and art histories which developed into his TV programs on Modern art and American art – The Shock of the New and American Visions. And it was undeniably The Shock of the New, his 1979 8-part TV series on the rise and fall of modern art, which made Hughes not just a leading visual arts critic, but also a household name.
There was also The Fatal Shore, Hughes’s epic chronicle of the colonisation of Australia, and a couple of terrifically entertaining, polemical books of essays: Nothing if not Critical, and the brilliant insight into the 'decay' of American culture, Culture of Complaint.
Like Australia’s other favourite public intellectuals, Robert Hughes is an ex-pat. His near-fatal car crash here a few years ago exacerbated his sometimes difficult relationship with this country. So perhaps, when he settled in NY back in the early 1970s, he found just the right place to be at just the right time: NY at the height of the arts scene. It is there where he developed the opinionated, pugnacious wit which characterises the Hughes style.
Julie Copeland speaks to British TV arts personality and commentator Matthew Collings about Robert Hughes's arts criticism and the valuable role he plays as a rather gruff but intelligent and convincing voice in an art world dominated by impenetrable theory and questionable values.
Details or Transcript:
Julie Copeland: Hello and welcome to Exhibit A on ABC Radio National. I’m Julie Copeland, and in the fifth in our critics series, it’s Australia’s and – according to The New York Times – the world’s most famous art critic, Robert Hughes.
Although he left Australia 40 years ago, Hughes is so well known here he hardly needs introduction. Time magazine’s art critic for over 30 years, he’s also written a range of books, beginning with a history of Australian art, tributes to artists Lucien Freud and Goya, and to the city of Barcelona, plus books from his TV histories of modern art and of American art, Shock of the New and American Visions.
In between, there was The Fatal Shore, Hughes’s epic chronicle of the colonisation of Australia, plus his terrifically entertaining, polemical books of essays, Nothing if Not Critical, and a scathing attack on the decay of US culture titled The Culture of Complaint.
Like Australia’s other favourite public intellectuals, Robert Hughes is an ex-pat, whose near-fatal car crash here a few years ago exacerbated his already uncomfortable relationship with this country. So perhaps when he settled in New York back in the early 70s, he found just the right place at the right time, at the height of the New York art scene, where he developed the opinionated, pugnacious wit which characterises his writing and TV style.
Juliana Engberg: I’ve always thought if Robert Hughes was a painting he would be this massive craggy rock with waves crashing against it and there would be a blustery sky and bats would be coming off it, and it would all be dark and brooding and moody. Then down right at the very bottom of the painting there would be a big rock that had crushed an artist who had been painting a landscape, because he’s like that. There’s a certain kind of boisterous temper within what he talks about, what he thinks, what he writes. It’s kind of eloquent, it’s very romantic, but it’s often very devastating.
Peter Timms: I think the really important thing about Robert Hughes…I mean, he can be awfully overbearing and pompous and all those things and he’s very good at putting people offside, but basically his real importance is as a populariser in the best sense of the world, a populariser in the way that, say, Kenneth Clark was or Leonard Bernstein. That is, someone who can talk about art without dumbing down, without patronising, and that’s a rare skill. Robert Hughes: This series, The Shock of the New, is about an old subject, almost 100 years old, the art of our own century; modernism. Now, in cultures, centuries don’t start neatly on cue. Ours didn’t. It began around about 1880 and it’s finishing up its run now, leaving behind it (in my view) some of the most challenging, beautiful and intelligent works of art that have ever been made, along with a great mass of superfluity and rubbish. Now, I don’t want to do a history of modern art, instead I want to evoke its spirit by showing how it has acted upon society and vice versa, how it has dealt, for instance, with the idea of pleasure, how it has tried to confirm or reject the political status quo, how it has tried to construct utopias and so on. Julie Copeland: The opening episode of Robert Hughes’s series The Shock of the New on American public TV in 1979. Before that, two Australian contemporary art voices; curator Juliana Engberg, and arts writer and historian Peter Timms. And although every Hughes reader has a favourite book (along with Peter Timms mine is Barcelona), undeniably it’s The Shock of the New, his eight-part account of the rise and fall of modern art, which made Hughes not just the leading visual arts critic but a household name.
Hughes has famously declared that no artwork can compete with the impact of newspapers and TV culture. But he’s always prided himself on his ability to communicate with the widest possible audience, and he knew that TV was the place to find it. Perhaps the nearest present-day equivalent is the British TV arts personality and commentator Matthew Collings, he of the BBC’s This is Modern Art series, which you may have seen here on ABC TV a few years ago.
And when Matthew Collings was in Brisbane recently, he joined me from the Brissie ABC studio to assess Robert Hughes.
Matthew Collings: Well, I think it’s fair enough to call him the world’s most famous because he’s got his platform in Time magazine, or at least he did have. But I think what else makes him distinguished amongst art critics who gear what they have to say to a popular audience is his seriousness and his originality. So he's not a populist in the sense of dumbing things down, he wants to 'intelligent up' the audience.
Julie Copeland: Which makes him a very rare breed indeed, doesn’t it?
Matthew Collings: I would say so, yes, and not only rare but desirable. And it’s unfortunate that recently he’s become, to some extent, an unpopular populist art critic. Certainly Australia has got a bit fed up with him. But I think he’s certainly the world’s most famous art critic, I don’t think he’s the world’s greatest art critic, but I do think at the moment I would certainly wish to defend him in his battle against what we might loosely call ‘PC culture’. I think all the things that he hates about that do make him unpopular at the moment, but I must say I kind of agree. He wants art and culture to have the sort of noble aspiration that it used to have, and he doesn’t want there to be a universalising of culture so it is accessible to all if that universalising and accessibility is only achieved by dumbing things down, and he’s absolutely right because when that happens then culture isn’t worth having. He thinks culture should be something improving, something marvellous, and something that sweeps you off your feet and is worth aspiring to, and I agree with him there. The type of culture that we have at the moment…certainly the type of art culture that we have at the moment is a hateful thing that makes you want to commit suicide rather than to embrace life.
Julie Copeland: Well, he was particularly vitriolic in his attacks during the 1980s when he looked at the likes of Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons, who, as he said, saw art as being about money and hype. He was particular nasty about Julian Schnabel. I seem to remember he said something like, ‘Our time of insecure self-congratulation and bulimic vulgarity got the genius it deserved.’
Matthew Collings: Yes. You know, now you’ve hit the point where actually I start to disagree with him. I think that Schnabel isn’t nearly as bad as Hughes thinks, and I think a lot of the artists that Hughes has kind of forced himself to support in order to make his case are not as good as Hughes thinks. I think that Sean Scully and Paula Rego and Lucien Freud are all slightly tedious, actually. Although Schnabel may be a bit up and down, he’s a much more adventurous figure than any of those three. But nevertheless, I think what Hughes is pointing at generally, and using Koons as an example of…and even Schnabel…both of whom, by the way, have done some pretty extraordinary things…what he’s pointing at generally is a correct target. Hughes is right to say that something has gone wrong. As art has become more and more popular, it’s stopped really being art, and there’s a bit of a line between unpopular art which has a richness to it and popular art which no longer has any richness. If it’s popular, what’s the point of it being popular if there’s nothing really there?
Julie Copeland: If I could ask you to just sum up, more or less, what was the impact and what was the effect of The Shock of the New, both the television series and the book, in terms of it’s scope? You know, it was covering the whole rise and fall of modernism in the 20th century, the whole century, it’s huge. But what kind of line did Robert Hughes take, in your view, when you first saw it? What kind of impression did it have on you in terms of what it was saying?
Matthew Collings: You know, they are two different things, the TV series and the book. The book, you can read it and read it, there is a lot of good stuff in there. I would say that’s what’s happening with the TV series, the achievement here is that he’s making a very complicated story into something that will work in a medium that favours simplicity. So to be able to do that is a marvellous thing. And when you ask what impact did it have on me…well, it was just like watching TV; you don’t really think of TV as having an impact, you just watch it, you find it enjoyable or not. But when I now put the things together, when I think about that book and the TV program, I think what is great about what Hughes did was that he took an already established story, which is the story of the isms of modern art, and he made it into a gripping narrative. But that narrative wasn’t just gripping because of some abstract ability he had to make a story, but because he had high aspirations. He gave you the feeling that he was genuinely depressed about the noble aspirations of art no longer being there, that they had somehow been lost, that the moment of modernism had past. He made you feel that that thing that was lost was a tragic loss, and he found a voice to express that so you could take it seriously. He wasn’t a fuddy-duddy, he wasn’t an academic…as I say, he made that idea of modern art as something important that was essential and that we needed. He made the passing of it seem like a loss. Robert Hughes: By the end of the war, the entire world knew what had been done in the death camps of Nazi Germany and there was no testimony that art could give that could rival the evidence of the photograph. Today places like Dachau are their own monuments, but any distortion of the human body that an artist might make after 1945 was going to have to bear comparison with what the Nazis had done to real bodies, and very few expressionist paintings could stand this strain. What we understand about the Holocaust we get from writing and photography, but art had very little to contribute, almost nothing of importance. The effects of this failure are still with us because after the war there were very few people who believed that art could carry the burden of major social meanings any more. There would be no more Goyas and Courbets. In the death camps the only product, as far as art was concerned, was silence. Julie Copeland: The stentorian tones of Robert Hughes from his now legendary TV series The Shock of the New. And while the Australian-born art critic admired the greatest artist of death and suffering, Goya, and Courbet, he once quipped that a Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Reuben could get in a whole crucifixion.
Before we talk about his persona on television and what kind of a TV arts critic he is…I think it was one of the American critics who said that Robert Hughes is the only art critic who had that precise and vivacious elegance that Kenneth Tynan had, the great theatre critic. And of course he’s been compared to Hughes with the likes of Kenneth Clark and Simon Schama, but in terms of the style he’s also impressive in the way he’s able to write across different audiences. I mean, he said somewhere he likes to write short articles and long books and that’s why he’s not at the New Yorker but at Time magazine for 30 years and prides himself on having the widest possible audience that he has with Time, but then he can write quite serious books about art, his book of Goya, for example.
Matthew Collings: Yes, I would say he’s a brilliant journalist. I wouldn’t say that he was a very original intellectual, and I don’t think he would hate me (I hope) for saying that. I would say that he of the absolute top class of journalism. Some of those other names you mentioned…Kenneth Tynan is very good for coming up with original perceptions. I think Simon Schama is maybe a little bit more verbose than Hughes. I think Simon Schama actually lacks the journalistic gifts that Hughes has. But in a way what Hughes did was invent by himself, through his own originality and his own gifts mixed with circumstances as he found them in the New York art world in 1970 when he moved there, a new tough journalistic populist style of art critic. He made that thing, the popular style of art criticism, which is really rather a ropey thing which on the whole doesn’t have much going for it, he made it into something worth having, he elevated a low style into a high style. But it certainly isn’t academic, what he comes up with, and it may be that some of the recent scholarship on Goya, for example, is more interesting and surprising and insightful and helpful about Goya than Hughes’ recent book on Goya, but none of them are as entertaining as Hughes’s book because Hughes has that journalistic flair and he can make the story of Goya a good read. You want to read that book like you want to read a novel, whereas Janis Tomlinson – who’s the absolutely fantastic academic who’s the Goya specialist who I’m sure Hughes has read everything she’s ever written – will give you much more insightful but maybe more difficult ideas about Goya, which take a little while to digest and work out. She hasn’t quite got that flair for narrative that Hughes has.Robert Hughes: Pollack was the first American artist to influence the course of world art. For the last ten years of his life until he died in a car crash in 1956, he lived and worked on Long Island outside New York.
Jackson Pollack: My painting is direct. I usually paint on the floor. I enjoy working on a large canvas. I feel more at home, more at ease in a big area. I like to use a dripping, fluid paint. I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them.
Robert Hughes: Pollack’s drip technique used to be treated as a joke, as though he was out of control, but he wasn’t. The drips of paint were spontaneous but they fell just where he wanted them, building the surface into a web of skeins and subtle energies working across the whole canvas. Pollack once declared that he wanted to become nature. What did he mean? That he wanted to work parallel with its variety, its unpredictability and above all its vitality. He had a very light hand. Sometimes, as in Blue Poles, you might be looking at a sort of abstract Tiepolo, the same kind of airy light and spritely drawing. This nervous energy of Pollack’s expanding under strict control seems to refute the picture of him as a rip-roaring wildcatter from middle America. Only intelligence, allied to a deep sense of the natural world, can produce work like this. Julie Copeland: Again, and I’m quoting another reviewer of one of Robert Hughes’ work saying, ‘To read a Hughes commentary on a painting is to feel that it’s hanging in your mind’s eye, perfectly lit for inspection.’ What I’m interested to ask you, Matthew Collings, as someone who’s also presented more recent television programs on contemporary art and modern art, how would you describe his style on television compared to some of the other presenters, including yourself? As we said, he’s a very robust and macho kind of opinionated writer. What kind of figure does he cut on television for you?
Matthew Collings: He’s a compelling figure on TV, and I think I make a sort of act out of doubt a bit, and he is a much more Hemingwayesque guy who never has any doubts.
Julie Copeland: No self-doubt there at all. Not a one.
Matthew Collings: I don’t always believe what he’s saying. Recently on TV I feel that he’s not quite all there and that he’s being told what to say by the producers sometimes. One of the problems with doing these authored TV docos is to fight for control of your material, and in some ways he may have slightly given up that fight I feel. I don’t know if that’s actually the case, but the impression I get is that The Shock of the New is much more convincing as somebody’s ideas than his series about Australia a few years ago. The Australians are all fed up with him for being anti-Australian but I was fed up with him for not really being anything. I couldn’t understand what on earth he was saying in that series. He was just sort of rambling from one thing to another really.
Julie Copeland: Well, that was, of course, after his car crash, his terrible accident…
Matthew Collings: Yes, which was indeed absolutely awful, yes.
Julie Copeland: So it’s a combination of things I think that’s led to that falling out with Australia that you mentioned before.
Matthew Collings: Yes, as far as I can see, to sum it up, he seems to have…his feelings were kind of hurt and he lashed out in a…for a public figure, in a way that he couldn’t really afford to do, and he was kind of destroyed for that lashing out. I think that’s a shame, that the state of contemporary art internationally now (and Australia is absolutely no exception to this) is so lamentable. It’s the same everywhere, so Australia is just as advanced as New York or Cologne, it’s not provincial at all. But the whole thing is so ghastly that you really need a Robert Hughes, you need him thundering against it, and so it’s a shame to chuck him out just because he got a bit cross and said some unfortunate things.
Julie Copeland: It’s interesting if you go back to his book The Culture of Complaint, if we go back to the writing rather than the television, he’s talking about how the whole notion of an avant-garde existing in art is a fallacy anyway and that…
Matthew Collings: Well, it doesn’t exist now, he says.
Julie Copeland: He’s talking about the United States mostly, and that the idea that there could be an innovative artist or group struggling against an entrenched establishment, which is the old idea of the avant-garde, is now dead. What do you make of that?
Matthew Collings: Well, I absolutely agree, of course. But it’s not really anything that anyone could really disagree with. What avant-garde means is the opposite to the salons of the official art, it’s slightly ahead of official art and it is against official art. Broadly, you’ve got an idea of culture that’s innovative and is trying to push society along, to advance itself and to progress and to be less conservative. But what you’ve got now is a pseudo avant-garde that’s absolutely one with the shallow aims of society and is absolutely willing to do whatever rubbish society wants, and he’s quite right to deplore that and to feel nostalgic for lost values and angry about those lost values and to maybe sometimes to be even a little bit blustering and histrionic and narrow in his shoutings. I think he has a right to those foibles – or to that slight weakness in his case – against the present because he feels a sort of beleaguered guy; he’s out there on his own, no one else will go along with him. I’d like to sign up to his particular political party.
Julie Copeland: Yes, and even that’s a bit confusing in Culture of Complaint when he’s rallying against the right, he rallying against the…well, the ideologues on the right and the left.
Matthew Collings: It’s not that confusing. I’m not sure if it’s really confusing; he says that the extreme right in America are ghastly, and the PC brigade is ghastly too, and that seems to me fair enough.
Julie Copeland: …and particularly art theoreticians or academics. There’s a lovely story in Culture of Complaint where he’s talking about driving through New York streets with several of America’s most influential art theoreticians in the back, and he says (hopefully tongue in cheek) that he may have been doing the art world a big favour had he ran the car off the road.
Matthew Collings: Yes, well, you know, theory is something that is now done in the art world as part of careerism and power moves, and in some other ways it’s almost sort of ornamental or decorative; you cite a bit of theory-speak which sounds important just so you can attach a theory flourish to whatever ghastly nondescript conceptual art object you want to put over on the public. But that’s the misuse of theory within the art world, and that’s what he’s railing against. He doesn’t pay much attention to real theory. Real theory is done by real theorists who are clever and spend their time doing theory and have made incredibly valuable contributions to civilisation and to society and to changes in the way that we think. What he’s railing against is the misuse of theory by the art world and also by the literary world. What it has gradually degenerated into is the worst aspects of pop culture and the most obscure aspects of theory about pop culture seeming to be pretty much indistinguishable, they both seem as shallow as each other. What you want high culture and art to do is to present a real alternative to mass pap, but whereas in fact what you’re finding is high culture and art culture merging with mass pap.
Julie Copeland: That’s right. I don’t think he feels that strongly about mass pap or even television; it is bad television that he rails against, and also the fact that theorists would take something like mass culture, like Madonna, commercial culture, seriously. You know, that there’s the Lacanian Madonna and the Freudian Madonna and the Marxist Madonna…who cares?
Matthew Collings: Yes, who cares? You know, Lacan and Freud…absolutely, these are brilliant minds. Madonna is brilliant within her area, but what’s it got to do with anything? It’s a pop phenomenon; it’s got really nothing to do with high art.
Julie Copeland: From what you’re saying, Matthew Collings, it sounds like Robert Hughes is now a little bit past it in terms of his references because if you look at his tributes to the single artists that he’s written about—Goya most recently, Frank Auerbach, Lucien Freud—these are his favourite artists, but I’m interested in what you think they reveal about where he’s at at the moment. These are the great male geniuses of the past almost, aren’t they?
Matthew Collings: I don’t know that the fact that they’re male is any real problem with them. I don’t think Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach are geniuses. Goya is obviously an unassailable genius, so in a way Robert Hughes writing a book about him is rather superfluous to requirement. You don’t particularly need a book about Goya, but as I said earlier, his book about Goya is an incredibly gripping read, so it is a very enjoyable book to read. You know, Auerbach is a sympathetic minor English artist from the end of the 20th century, and Lucien Freud is a bit of a wag really. He has a very small talent that he’s made into something preposterously large by having a lot of shocking nudity.
Julie Copeland: He’s terribly successful and his paintings fetch millions.
Matthew Collings: Yes, I know, but success in a world of judgements which are wacky really. I don’t think there’s much difference between Lucien Freud’s attention-grabbing antics and those of the artists that Hughes thinks he’s against. When you asked what it reveals about Hughes, I think it reveals a certain confusion on his part. I don’t really know what he’s going on about with those artists frankly. You know, he likes this artist Paula Rego who’s even worse than Sean Scully and Lucien Freud for not really having anything at all to offer, and who also is very successful. When we say ‘successful’ we mean she’s supposed to be good in the minds of the people who run the art world, but the people who run the art world, as Robert Hughes himself has noticed, are rather shallow hucksters really, who don’t have anything substantial to tell us.
Julie Copeland: Just tell us about her briefly, just for listeners who don’t know who she is, and why you don’t think she’s a very good artist.
Matthew Collings: Well, Paula Rego, she’s a sort of graphic artist who’s now in her early 70s, originally comes from Portugal and has been living in London for about 50 years. She does a sort of soppy, sentimental version of feminism that people pretend to like, and he thinks that she can draw better than her feminist cousins in America. I think with Paula Rego you’re looking at an incredibly minor talent. Possibly Hughes thinks he ought to fill out the roster of heroes a bit and chuck in a heroine or two.
Julie Copeland: He does say somewhere, too, that pleasure is the root of all appreciation of art.
Matthew Collings: That’s a very good thing to say, yes, I certainly agree with that.
Julie Copeland: Yes, Pauline Kael, who’s one of the other critics in our series that we’re looking at, she thinks it’s all about pleasure. Maybe he gets pleasure out of Paula’s work and maybe that’s the criterion.
Matthew Collings: He certainly claims to. I think his claims are empty. I think there’s something funny about…he seems to paint himself into a corner where he’s forced to support certain artists in order to make a case.
Julie Copeland: Well, Matthew, it sounds like you still think art’s worth talking about and responding to because you picked up where Robert Hughes left off, pretty well, with your This is Modern Art series. So what is it about for you?
Matthew Collings: I think it’s not going to change the world politically, but I think this pleasure is a very complex notion, to sound a bit theoretical. Art offers a pleasure that is contemplative and important and serious and long-lasting, and as such it is an alternative to all the other crap that makes up contemporary existence. That alternative is badly needed, and at the moment, I would say, one finds it more in modern art up to the 1950s and in pre-modern art than in contemporary art. So for me as a critic, the job is to try and, I think, make people aware of what art can really do as opposed to the rather low-level, low-hum that it is doing now.
Julie Copeland: Matthew Collings, a London based arts writer, critic, presenter and artist. Thanks very much for speaking to me today about the art critic and writer Robert Hughes. Thank you.
Matthew Collings: Thank you.
Julie Copeland: And Matthew Collings, who some of you may know, also is the front man for the BBC’s TV broadcast for the Turner Prize, and was in Australia recently as guest speaker at the Arc Biennial in Brisbane. I’m Julie Copeland. My thanks to the ‘A team’, producers Rhiannon Drown, Debra McCoy, and technical assistance from Alec McCloskey.
Producer: Rhiannon Brown
Guests on this program:
Matthew Collings
London-based artist, arts commentator, writer and presenter of the BBC's Turner Prize.
Matthew was in Australia as a keynote speaker at the inaugural ARC Biennial in Brisbane last month.
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Publications:
This Is Modern Art
Author: Matthew Collings
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1999
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The Shock of the New
Author: Robert Hughes
Publisher: Knopf; Revised edition (1991)
A beautifully illustrated hundred-year history of modern art, from cubism to pop and avant-garde.
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Culture of Complaint : The Fraying of America
Author: Robert Hughes
Publisher: Warner Books (1994)
The art critic offers a withering jeremiad for an American culture plagued by political correctness.
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Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists
Author: Robert Hughes
Publisher: Penguin Books (1992)
Time's art critic assesses four centuries of Western art.
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Goya
Publisher: Knopf (2003)
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Barcelona
Author: Robert Hughes
Publisher: Vintage (1993)
Hughes's historical-cultural treatise on the Catalonian capital sparkles on the topic of architecture.
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American Visions : The Epic History of Art in America
Author: Robert Hughes
Publisher: Knopf (1999)
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The Fatal Shore : The epic of Australia's founding
Author: Robert Hughes
Publisher: Vintage (1988)
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