The late Robert Hughes is best known perhaps for his wonderful television series on modern art The Shock of the New (available to watch in its entirety on UbuWeb). His writing may be slightly less well-known but it is no less brilliant; whether his studies of Goya, Lucien Freud, Frank Auerbach, of Heaven and Hell in Western Art or his introduction to Barcelona, which made me fall in love with that glorious Catalan city before I’d set foot there. His brutal and haunting account of the birth of Australia The Fatal Shore and his highlighting of art, folklore and poetry such as Barcroft Boake’s Where the Dead Men Lie make Nick Cave, for one, seem not quite as atypical an Australian. Contrary to popular opinion, there were other Australias and they were dark.

I’ve recently been reading Hughes’ Things I Didn’t Know which, though I’d avoided it due to an aversion to the prevailing grief tourism of childhood memoirs, is a characteristically lucid, eloquent and open-hearted book. Hughes was an outsider in the sense he was too much of a barrel-chested Antipodean for the mouth full of marbles British arts establishment and too much of a rootless cosmopolitan for the Australian scene. In fact you get the sense he was deliberately mistranslated by both. Alfred de Musset’s “Great artists have no country” may have been partially true, in terms of great art critics it was spot on. Hughes was accused of being abrasive when he was a very generous and open-minded critic. Even when he was damning, and he had a merciless turn of phrase, he was never close-minded. He was accused of being elitist simply because he trusted and respected his audience enough to assume they had more than an amoebic brain capacity (a trust that Waldemar Januszczak and co sorely lack). Hughes’ writing is actually deceptively accessible whilst being heavyweight. He had little time for trash admittedly; if he had one failing, it was in having insufficient interest in why people like trash. But then life is short and there seems barely enough time for the things of worth. When Hughes discussed art, you didn’t get the sense he was ever condescending or hectoring, rather he was enthusing about and sharing something he genuinely loved (or indeed hated). It was as if a fellow discerning guttersnipe had sneaked in the back door and was unloading the contents of High Art to the rest of us. Continue reading →