Robert Hughes (critic)

 

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes, AO (28 July 1938 – 6 August 2012) was an Australian-born art critic, writer and television documentary maker.

Early life

Hughes was born in Sydney, Australia in 1938. His father and paternal grandfather were prominent lawyers. Hughes's father, Geoffrey Forrest Hughes, was an aviator in the First World War, with later careers as a solicitor and company director. Geoffrey Hughes died from lung cancer when Robert was aged 12. His mother was Margaret Eyre Sealy, née Vidal. His older brother, Thomas Eyre Forrest Hughes, is an Australian lawyer and a former Attorney-General of Australia.

Hughes was educated at St Ignatius' College, Riverview before going on to study arts and then architecture at the University of Sydney. At the university, Hughes associated with the Sydney "Push" – a group of artists, writers, intellectuals and drinkers. Among the group were Germaine Greer and Clive James. Hughes, an aspiring artist and poet, abandoned his university endeavours to become first a cartoonist and then an art critic for the Sydney periodical The Observer, edited by Donald Horne.^{[1] [2]} Around this time he wrote a history of Australian painting, titled The Art of Australia, still considered 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

Hughes left Australia for Europe in 1964, living for a time in Italy before settling in London (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, where he quickly established himself as an influential art critic. In 1975, along with Don Brady, he provided the narration for the film Protected, a documentary showing what life was like for Indigenous Australians on Palm Island.

Hughes and Harold Hayes were recruited in 1978 to anchor the new ABC News (US) newsmagazine 20/20. His only broadcast, on 6 June 1978, proved so controversial that, less than a week later, ABC News president Roone Arledge terminated the contracts of Hughes and Hayes, replacing them with veteran TV host Hugh Downs. The BBC broadcast The Shock of the New, broadcast Hughes's 1980 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.

Hughes published The Fatal Shore in 1987. A study of the British penal colonies and early European settlement of Australia, it became an international best-seller. During the late 1990s, he was a prominent supporter of the Australian Republican Movement. Hughes provided criticism on the work of artist Robert Crumb in parts of the 1994 film Crumb, calling Crumb "the American Bruegel". His 1997 television series American Visions reviewed the history of American art since the Revolution. 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's 2002 documentary on Francisco Goya, Goya: Crazy Like a Genius, was broadcast on the first night of the BBC's domestic digital service. He created a one hour update to The Shock of the New. Titled The New Shock of the New, the program aired first in 2004. He published the first volume of his memoirs, Things I Didn’t Know, in 2006.

Hughes was initially chosen to curate the 2003 Venice Biennale but left amidst controversy over remarks which he had made.

Personal life

Hughes met his first wife, Danne Emerson, in London in 1967. They divorced in 1981 in New York. She died of a brain tumour in 2003, outside Sydney living near her son, Danton (30 September 1967 – 2002), named for the French revolutionary Georges Danton, the only child from her marriage to Hughes. Danton Hughes became a sculptor and lived in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. In 2002, at age 34, Danton took his own life by gassing himself with his car in the garage. Hughes later wrote: "I miss Danton and always will, although we had been miserably estranged for years and the pain of his loss has been somewhat blunted by the passage of time." His second marriage, to Victoria Whistler in 1981, was dissolved in 1996.

In 1999, Hughes was involved in a near-fatal car accident south of Broome, Western Australia. He was returning from a fishing trip and driving on the wrong side of the road when he collided head on with another car carrying three occupants. He was trapped in the car for three hours before being airlifted to Perth in a critical condition . Western Australian Police subsequently laid several charges against him relating to the accident. Two of the occupants of the other car were charged with trying to blackmail Hughes over the accident. Hughes recounts the story of his accident and recovery in the first chapter of his 2006 memoir Things I Didn't Know.

In a 2000 court hearing Hughes' defence barrister alleged that the occupants of the other car had been transporting illicit drugs at the time of the accident and were at fault. Hughes eventually pleaded guilty to the charge of dangerous driving causing grievous bodily harm in 2003 and was fined $2,500.

In 2001, Hughes wed, thirdly, the American artist and art director, Doris Downes, well known for her paintings of natural history. He credited her on many occasions, in both his writings and public interviews, for his survival following his near fatal car crash. She flew to Australia to be with him. He said, "Apart from being a talented painter, she saved my life, my emotional stability, such as it is."^{[citation needed]} He had two stepchildren by Downes's previous marriage.

Death

Hughes died at the Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, New York, on 6 August 2012 following a long illness, with his wife at his bedside. The official cause of death was Alzheimer's disease. He was 74 years old. Hughes is survived by two stepsons, Freeborn Garrettson Jewett IV and Fielder Douglas Jewett; his brothers, Thomas and Geoffrey Hughes; a sister, Constance Crisp; and a niece, Lucy Hughes Turnbull, the former Deputy Mayor of Sydney until the departure of Frank Sartor as Mayor, when she succeeded him (Turnbull did not seek election by popular vote), and her husband, Malcolm Turnbull, a member of the Australian House of Representatives.

Honours

Hughes received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism in 1982 and 1985, 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 – Officer of the 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
• 2009 – The Mona Lisa Curse – Winner of the 2009 Grierson Award for Best Documentary on the Arts, Oxford Film and Television for Channel 4, UK
• 2009 – International Emmy Award – Arts Programming, "The Mona Lisa Curse", Oxford Film and Television for Channel 4, UK

Publications (alphabetical order)

• 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)
• Frank Auerbach (Thames and Hudson, 1990)
• Goya (Vintage, 2004. ISBN 0-09-945368-1)
• Heaven and Hell in Western Art (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1968. ISBN 978-0-297-17671-8)
• A Jerk on One End: Reflections of a Mediocre Fisherman (1998. ISBN 0-345-42283-X)
• 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)
• Rome: A Cultural, Visual and Personal History (Knopf, New York, 2011)
• 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)

Biography

• Anderson, Patricia, Robert Hughes: The Australian Years, Pandora Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-9579142-2-3
• Britain, Ian, "Once An Australian: Journeys with Barry Humphries, Clive James, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes", Oxford University Press, 1997 ISBN 0195537424

External links

• Robert Hughes (critic) at the Internet Movie Database
• Robert Hughes at Random House Australia
• Valerie Lawson, Sydney Morning Herald, "After legal jousting and vitriol, Hughes fined in absentia for car crash" (2003)
• Eric Ellis, The Bulletin, July 2002, "Shock of the Broome"
• 1987 audio interview of Robert Hughes by Don Swaim of CBS Radio, RealAudio
• The New York Times Magazine – Food; Tuna Surprise (A fisherman's journey to Costa Rica)
• The Times Online, “The curse of free love”, excerpt from Things I Didn’t Know: A Memoir. (20 August 2006)
• The Nation - Christopher Hitchens column on Things I Didn't Know: A Memoir. (25 September 2006)
• Enough Rope, ABC TV Interview - Andrew Denton and Robert Hughes. (13 November 2006)
• Interview with Hughes on CBC Radio's Writers and Company (January 2008)]
• International Herald Tribune- Joyce Wadler of the New York Times- at Home with Robert Hughes and Doris Downes
• Booknotes interview with Hughes on American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, 20 July 1997.
• Obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald: "Robert Hughes turned criticism into an art"
• Obituary in The Independent by Marcus Williamson

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