THE NOSTALGIA OF THE

CRITIC: POSTMODERNISM
AND THE UNBALANCING OF
ROBERT HUGHES

Ian Britain

Just after Christmas, 1970, the unsigned &dquo;Art&dquo; column in Time magazine
could be found contemplating the fate of the angel. &dquo;Whether God is dead or
not&dquo;, began,
it &dquo;his
angels seem tobe&dquo;. Yet it ended on an appropriate note
of seasonal uplift, reflecting that: &dquo;As the rigid boxes of nineteenth-century
positivism disappear from our culture and new epiphanies of consciousness
unfold themselves, it is possible that we may return to that receptiveness in
which earlier civilizations saw their angels. Except that we will inevitably call
them something else&dquo;.1
Following stints as an art columnist for various Australian and English
newspapers, and the publication of two books, The Art of Australia (19C6)
and Heaven and Hell in Western Art (1968), Robert Hughes was invited to
New York to write for Time in 1970. His first signed column-a review of a
retrospective of modern American sculpture, held at the Whitney Museum in
Manhattan-appeared in the first number of 1971, one week after the piece on
angels.
It does not seem too fanciful to speculate that both articles were by the
same hand. Their particular subject-matter may be widely divergent, though
that in itself is not uncharacteristic of Hughes. The obsessive urge of this
antipodean prodigy to gobble up a world of knowledge and sensation from
which he had felt so removed when growing up is a familiar trait of intellectual
and cultural expatriates of his generation. A more distinctive signature can be
discerned in the peculiar, almost compulsive, poise of the two articles. This is
reflected not just in their stylistic mannerisms (usages at once bold and exact;

67
68

the combination of punchy rhetoric with fluent cadences) but more generally
in the sense of balance about the judgments each delivers.
&dquo;And yet, and yet ... The thought that angels are dead is a nagging one.
It is unsatisfactory.&dquo; This note of uneasy reservation following confident asser-
tion has an echo in the discriminations voiced in Hughes’s first signed piece for
Time. He does not hesitate to apply the word &dquo;dazzling&dquo; in describing the ef-
fects of two of the sculptors under review-Nancy Graves and Duane Hanson.
But in the second instance, he worries over the implications of that routine
journalistic superlative, suspecting that &dquo;there may seem to be something too
easy, almost flip&dquo; about Hanson’s work. Trying to resist the same hazards in his
own dazzling prose, he puts occasional brakes on its headlong pace and flow,
reins it in to reconsider its general direction and effect. In its syntax as much
as its import, the opening paragraph of his first signed review is characterised

by just such a balancing act: &dquo;In general U.S. museums do not just reflect art
history. They program and write it through their selections, their theme shows,
and their imprimatur. But Manhattan’s Whitney Museum, with dedication, if
2
not full impartiality, has clung to the principle of the survey&dquo;.
A series of dauntingly, and delicately, negotiated balances may be said to
have characterized Hughes’s career and aesthetic to date. They have been the
secret perhaps of his widespread appeal to various fellow critics, to practising
artists, and to those less specialist readers who buy Time regularly to keep
themselves generally abreast or who pick it up for diversion on business flights
or in doctors’ waiting-rooms. The balances respond to various tensions in
Hughes’s own life and sensibility, and they have provided ways of containing
those tensions-till recently, at any rate.
What tensions? What balances? It is an opportune and important moment
to survey these now, as there are signs in Hughes’s just-published selection
of his reviews from Time (and of various longer pieces from other journals)
that his balancing act has begun to fail, and that the tensions are no longer so
containable. Significantly, perhaps, the selection does not reprint any of his
earliest offerings in the magazine, such as that tactful and even-handed piece
on the American sculpture show; in fact, there is hardly anything at all here

from his first decade with Tine. A more disturbing symptom, however playful,
is his chosen title for the selection, Nothing If h7ot Critical, taken, of all things,
from the mouth of Iago, one of literature’s most subtle villains, and the most
obscurely-motivated. Many of the individual items are not anywhere near as
negative or as dark as this may suggest; but that is their overall impression as
he charts the decade of the 1980s, through its art, contrasting it implicitly (at
times explicitly) with previous generations and centuries. Cumulatively, these
pieces fall little short of an all-encompassing jeremiad against the &dquo;postmod-
ern&dquo; world, which (for all that he denounces the very epithet for its vacuity3)
he has to concede is ineluctably ours as we approach the new millennium.44
Their disturbing (not to say disturbed) quality can only be fully appreciated,
 69

perhaps-or begin to be explained-by placing his more recent work in some

larger biographical and intellectual perspectives.
Although he has not yet ventured on any full-scale autobiography, Hughes
has always seemed willing to flaunt the tensions in his life, his personality,
his beliefs, and in the series of influences (geographical, familial, religious,
educational, political, moral and aesthetic) that have helped shape his brilliant
career. As a worldly and sophisticated critic of European and American art, he

has made no secret of-will often invoke-his upbringing as an Australian of

Irish-Catholic origins. His public persona on the international scene has tended
if anything to play up to the boozy, brawling, larrikin stereotype. Notoriously
resounding throughout New York bars for the past two decades (until he made
a recent decision, on medical advice, to give up drinking) the gruff booming

thrust of his voice was made familiar to much wider audiences round the world
with his BBC television series of the late 1970s, The Shock of the New. His accent
is what used to be called &dquo;educated Australian&dquo;, though such nuances would
probably escape the non-Australian audiences for arts programs, brought up
on the mandarin pipings of Kenneth Clark or the fruity warble of Lawrence

Gowing. Hughes’s physical presence in that show was a yet more conspicuous
contrast: no sleek-suited lounge lizard or tweedy, pipe-puffing uncle, but a

burly, restless, outdoor type, far from redneck but defiantly open-neck: not so
removed, except by a decade’s mellowing, from the bohemian, bikie image he
favoured when he first hit the northern hemisphere.5
&dquo;I led this funny kind of split-level life&dquo;, he recalls of his first foray outside
Australia: &dquo;On the one hand it was extremely bohemian, and on the other I
had a nostalgia for the idea of scholarly respectability. I was on the fringes
of the O.z set ... but I also used to hang out a bit at the Courtauld, where I
struck up a friendship with Anthony ~lunt&dquo;.~ This split level was always there,
perhaps. As suggested by the subtler tones of his accent, his Australian-Irish-
Catholic upbringing was not of the rural or working-class varieties but urban-
professional. Born into a Sydney legal family in 1938, he went on to attend
the city’s elite Jesuit school, St Ignatius College. This institution has always had
a reputation for a higher intellectual tone than many other Australian schools,
state or private; and though the precocious young schoolboy had to conceal
one of his current passions, the poems of Apollinaire, within the covers of
a Latin textbook, and endure (Stephen Dedalus-like) the awful platitudes of

a hellfire sermon from one of the fathers, he was also exposed by another

priest on the staff to &dquo;pinned up reproductions of de Chirico, Tanguy, and

Miro ... instead of the usual devotional postcards of Renaissance madonnas&dquo;.7
Slightly to adapt Glen Baxter, it was Bob’s first brush with Modernism;
and (however contrary to the good Father’s intentions) perhaps the first step
to his break with the faith of his upbringing. Art as &dquo;a substitute for religious
experience&dquo;8 was one of the themes of his explorations of Modernism in the
Shock of the New. What kind of substitute it has been for himself, and how ad-
70

equate a one it has proved, remains to be seen. Hughes was also to break with
his family’s tradition of pursuing a legal career, unlike his elder brother, Tom,
who went on to become Attorney-General under a conservative government
in Australia. It was that artistic bent in him, rather than any very specific or
serious political differences, which led to this schism. &dquo;He wasn’t conservative,
and they all were&dquo;, notes the South Australian critic, and an early mentor of
Hughes’s, Geoffrey Dutton. Yet at this stage at least, he was not particularly
radical either, except again in an artistic sense perhaps. &dquo;We were a politically
unconcerned bunch of aesthetes and artists&dquo;, he recalls of his early circle of
friends at Sydney University, where he had elected to take up architecture.9
Hughes’s formal studies even in this field, though more palatable than
the prospect of a law course, did not prove to be a sufficiently sustaining
enthusiasm for him, and his real energies he threw into poetry-writing, painting
and drawing-rather too slavish versions of some of his Modernist heroes,
according to contemporaries and to his own rueful self-assessments in later
life.l° Among these contemporaries were other aspiring painters, such as Colin
Lanceley, who have since gone on to prominent artistic careers, and who
at the time (late 1950s, early 1960s) were crystallizing into a self-consciously
iconoclastic group that became known as the Annandale Imitation Realists.&dquo;
They appealed to-and probably further encouraged-the cheeky renegade
inside the former Catholic schoolboy.
That irreverent side of Hughes was soon to surface more publicly, when
he was employed as a cartoonist on a Sydney newspaper and then picked
out by the editor, Donald Horne-almost at random, so the legend goes-to
write the art column as well. This was the opportunity for him to cultivate
that knockabout style of criticism which earned him the reputation of an en-
fant terrible when he produced his first book-a synthesis of his observations
on Australian painting-in his middle twenties. The artist as critic, bringing

his own practical experience and technical knowledge of painting to bear on

matters of general aesthetic judgment: here was a fruitful combination, surely;

though also another source of tension, involving a tug of roles or another

splitting of levels within his sensibility.
By his account the greater difficulty for him at this stage, whether as an
aspiring painter or critic, was Australia’s distance from the great centres of
Western art. But the tyranny of distance in his case has proved to be more
a psychological than a geographical one, as his self-consciousness about it
seems only to have grown as he has been absorbed into the Euro-American

&dquo;mainstream&dquo;. In the second edition of his book, published six years after he
had left for the northern hemisphere, he voiced his embarrassment about its
youthful gaucheries, claiming to have been &dquo;largely ignorant&dquo; of the European
prototypes of (white) Australian art, and enjoining some future historian to fill
in this important cultural background.&dquo; Yet the revised text at least is heavily
 71

peppered with references to Italian, Flemish, Dutch, English, French and Span-
ish painters, from the Renaissance on, and many of them fairly obscure. It is
true that when he first wrote the book he had not set foot outside Australia,
and had therefore been deprived of the opportunity to see many of their works
face to face and in the original; but he has always harped a bit too much on
the limiting effects of such deprivations.13 The fact that two of his favourite
artists of the 20th century (the emigré German Londoner, Frank Auerbach, and
the New Yorker, Joseph Cornell) have, on his own showing, resolutely shied
away from any extensive touring of the great collections, even though these
have been far more accessible to them than to Australian-based artists, might
have given him more pause for reflection on the mainsprings of the creative
spirit.&dquo; Perhaps deprivation, whether wilful or unavoidable, can be a spur to
the imagination in itself, or a form of discipline. Such functions it may even
have served for the young Robert Hughes.
Conversely, his own case provides evidence for the surprising richness of
Australia’s crosscultural resources, waiting only to be uncovered, developed,
and capitalized on by enterprising explorers such as himself. There was not
only Father O’Connell’s unusual brand of corrupting pictures at school-in an
impoverished enough version to rouse the young Hughes’s desire to experience
the real thing for himself one day. The seemingly philistine depths of the boy’s
own home could yet yield a treasure that was more immediately rewarding,
that required no waiting to appreciate its riches in full, no seeking out of its
original and distant fount. &dquo;My family had no interest whatever in the visual
arts&dquo;, Hughes recalls in a profile recently published in Vanity Fair. &dquo;... But
there was a lot of Ruskin in my father’s library, and he was the first art critic
that I read as a child. The power of the prose in the great descriptive passages
and the minute character of the observation certainly teach you something
about writing when you’re young.&dquo;155
In combination with certain other literary sources, easily accessible through
Australian libraries or bookshops, Ruskin may also have taught Hughes, or re-
inforced in him, some of his most fundamental values about art. There was the
more recent, still live, model of Cyril Connolly, whose potpourri of aphorisms
on love and art, The Unquiet Grave, Hughes recalls exulting in at the age of
sixteen. In a more precious, dilettantish fashion than Ruskin, and a less dis-
simulating one than Blunt’s, Connolly conformed to that very English-seeming
blend of hedonism and restraint, enthusiasm and propriety, that was bound to
impress a wild colonial boy with aesthetic yearnings.
’I’he influence of such writers on Hughes has been particularly compli-
cated, however. Their own attempts to balance contrary impulses in their
nature or thoughts have provided fruitful models for in this same endeavour;
but if they have helped, thereby, in containing certain tensions within him,
or turning them to creative account, they have served to exacerbate related
72

tensions, and in less positive ways. The unbalancing of Hughes that we may
be witnessing in his most recent collection of art criticism is also traceable to
some of these early influences.
Influences of any kind are notoriously difficult to trace in a precise way;
and it is not clear that Hughes’s own account of them is the best or fullest
guide. &dquo;If it hadn’t been for reading the Unquiet Grave&dquo;, he reportedly told its
author, &dquo;I never would have come up with the courage to leave Australia&dquo;. 16
That there was a ten-year lag before he did so leads you to wonder about this;
though turning to the book concerned does suggest the less dramatic kinds of
influence it might have exercised on him while he remained in his native land.
&dquo;The more books we read&dquo;, Connolly counsels at the very start,

the clearer it becomes that the function of a writer is to produce a master-

piece, and that no other task is of consequence ... Every excursion into
journalism, broadcasting, propaganda and writing for the films, however
grandiose, will be doomed to disappointment. To put our best into these
is another folly, since we thereby condemn good ideas as well as bad to
oblivion. It is in the nature of such work not to last, and it should never
be undertaken ... How many books did Renoir write on how to paint? 17

For all his youthful excursions into art journalism, Hughes did endeavour
at this time to reserve his greatest energies for brushes and palette and canvas.
It was only after leaving Australia that he discarded these, and surrendered fully
to such temptations as journalism and (television) broadcasting. As we shall
see, this move might have itself been prompted partly by a reaction against
Cyril Connolly; though it was far from being a complete betrayal of Hughes’s
earlier commitments and enthusiasms, for all that the balance of artists and
critic within him now started to tip another way.
Furthermore, there are several things that Hughes has never discarded
from his youthful samplings of the literature on art available to him in Australia
-that he has, fairly productively till now carried over into his journalistic and
other &dquo;extra-artistic&dquo; activities. And one of these is a steadfast belief in &dquo;the
masterpiece&dquo; as a critical ideal or standard.&dquo; His sense of a definitive tradition
of great works of art is detectable from his earliest writings to his latest. This
has not necessarily prevented him from giving appreciative attention to what he
regards as lesser or vulgar art. &dquo;Australia has never produced a great painter&dquo;,
he notoriously concluded in his first book;19 yet he could devote the whole of
that work to elaborating his reasons for this judgment, and he was never so
harsh as to deny the existence of plenty of good art, serious and pleasurable,
in his native land.
If Hughes’s belief in the special place of the masterpiece is an inheritance
from Connolly, the combination of criteria he has brought to bear on his judg-
ment of artistic worth goes back to Ruskin. On particular matters of judgment,
other influences are also detectable (not least some lingering traces of Hughes’s
 73

early religious upbringing); it is in the range of his critical precepts, and the
sorts of relationship between them, that his correspondences with the Victorian
critic are especially evident.
In his most recent, as in his earliest, criticism, Hughes. is clear that the judg-
ment of true masterpieces has nothing fundamentally to do with the money
value by which a dealer or gallery owner may try to define them in order to
impress prospective clientele. Nor, on the other hand, should this judgment
depend entirely on the ideological commitments (whether religious or political)
evident in their subject-matter, or on the pleasure-giving capacity (whether to
cognoscenti or much wider audiences) of their style and form: these are con-
tending, but also closely interlocking, considerations; and there is a continual
search in Hughes for some kind of balance between them.
Over the years he has looked for each of the following attributes in paint-
ing, singly or in varying combinations: the freshness of the stylistic conventions,
at successive historical stages, by which an artist’s experience of space and form
is expressed; the degree to which the work opens up a passage from its cre-
ator’s personal experience or feeling to more general social or moral meaning;
the potency with which symbols, philosophic implications, myths, are mani-
fested and transmitted. &dquo;Significant content&dquo;, deep emotion, spiritual values,
stylistic and technical virtuosity: all need to be assessed and weighed, though
there is no precise formula laid down for judging the appropriate proportions
of each.’°
Ruskin redivivus? There are certainly some striking parallels, even if they
do not prove a direct or exclusive influence at work. Here is the Victorian sage
on the relation of money to artistic judgment: &dquo;the greater number of persons

or societies throughout Europe, whom wealth, or chance, or inheritance has

put in possession of valuable pictures, do not know a good picture from a bad
one&dquo;.21 Add Australia or America to Europe here, and you have Hughes’s view
in a nutshell. One maxim of Ruskin’s serves to encapsulate all of Hughes’s
varying criteria for artistic judgment: &dquo;when art is set in its true and serviceable
course, it moves under the luminous attraction of pleasure on the one side, and
with a stout moral purpose ... on the other&dquo;.22 This is a firm doctrine, though
flexible within its own terms. There is a related maxim of Ruskin’s which
enshrines within it the very principle of balance by which both the older and
the younger critic have attempted to make their discriminations:

I never metwith a question yet, of any importance, which did not need,
for the right solution of it, at least one positive and one negative answer
... No chance of our getting good art unless we delight in it: ...no chance
’3
of our getting good art unless we resist our delight in it
...

On broader questions, not related specifically to art, Hughes has

some

diverged from Ruskin, though precisely at those points where Ruskin’s own
balancing act has appeared to fail, toppling him over into dogmatism or extrem-
74

ism. In politics, for example, Ruskin notes the &dquo;opposition between liberals
and illiberals ... between those who desire liberty, and who dislike it&dquo;; and he
firmly declares himself &dquo;a violent Illiberal&dquo;. He is equally attracted to, cannot
resist or mediate between, the extremes both of Toryism and Communism.24
Hughes, by contrast, has always sought a path between the excesses of the
right and left, and has found it generally in the liberal ideal, aware though he
is of its fragility in practice, and wary of its own tendencies to excess.
As with many middle-class Australians of his generation, he was shaken
out of his youthful political apathy by the Vietnam War. This half-century,
there has been no more dramatic violation of the very old liberal principle
of national self-determination than the massive commitments of troops to that
conflict made by the Australian as well as American governments of the 1960s.
Hughes was living in Europe by the middle of that decade, writing his book on
images of heaven and hell in Western art; but he was sufficiently outraged by
the hellishness of contemporary events in South-East Asia to smuggle into the
contents of this book his own graphic image of an &dquo;oafish, grenade-festooned
corporal, kicking in the teeth of a Vietnamese adolescent&dquo;.25
In recent years, while living in America, the butt of his attacks has shifted to
the domestic policies of those &dquo;neo-conservative&dquo; administrations which have
dominated the political scene. Yet he has proved to be no militant leftist
either, and can be relied on to rail against the political atrocities and corporate
bureaucratic structures of Communist countries in Europe or South America as
much as he does against those of the US.26
On various social and moral issues, Hughes has contrived to tread a line
which eschews the excesses of libertarianism as much as of authoritarianism.
Signalling deep reservations about the efficacy of capital punishment, he can
still acknowledge the plausibility of one, if only one, argument in its favour (its
definitive despatch of a tiny minority of &dquo;mad-dog sociopaths&dquo;). 21 While clearly
disdaining &dquo;racist persecution&dquo; or bigotry against homosexuals in societies of
the past, he will not engage in special pleading for black or gay artists of the
present day simply because they happen to fit those categories.28 If their artistic
talent is inferior in his eyes, he will make no bones about it. Conversely,
although as unsparing as the most radical feminist may be in exposing the
depths of male chauvinism in an artist like Picasso, and acknowledging that
the &dquo;climate of sexual politics&dquo; since Picasso’s day has changed &dquo;irreversibly
for the better&dquo;, he will not forbear from hymning the creative genius of the
Spaniard, nor even from suggesting that sexual and emotional exploitativeness
was somehow integral to the genius. 29
These are &dquo;balances&dquo; in Hughes’s very liberalism that might have served
to appease even his determinedly illiberal mentor, Ruskin. It is clear, how-
ever, that in his formative years at least, Hughes had need for a more liberally
disposed, not to mention up-to-date, mentor; and Cyril Connolly, in his 1950s
incarnation, fitted this bill pretty well for a time. Having long outgrown the &dquo;en-
 75

gagingly simple left-wing militancy&dquo;, avowedly enshrined in his 1930s memoir,

Eneracies of Prom ise, Connolly was most recently to be identified with the hu-
mane cosmopolitanism of his wartime literary magazine, Horizon.30 By the time
7be Unquiet Grave came to be published, in 1946, a certain world-weariness
seems to have overtaken him, and he could be found predicting there the even-
tual extinction of &dquo;The Liberal die-hard&dquo;. The ideal was not exhausted for him,
however, as a source of poignant consolation if nothing else; and he indicated
how the very spectacle of &dquo;absolute States and ideological wars&dquo; could cause
&dquo;the old platitudes of Liberalism to loom up in all their glory&dquo;.31
There were other consolations to balance the sense of general gloom or at
least keep at bay total despair. &dquo;In our lifetime&dquo;, Connolly wrote at one point,
&dquo;we have seen the arts advance further and further into an obscure and sterile
cul-de-sac&dquo;; this was a symptom of a &dquo;triple decadence&dquo;-in language, religious
belief, and society-and yet &dquo;the goal of every culture is to decay through
over-civilization&dquo;, and &dquo;the civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of
the next&dquo;. The book’s opening had proclaimed an underlying &dquo;faith in the
unity and continuity of Western culture in its moment of crisis&dquo;. Balances are
struck, or a via media is sought, between various related phenomena in politics,
religion and the arts: between belief in the supernatural and the &dquo;brimstone
aridities of the Left Book Club&dquo;; between the &dquo;magical&dquo; and the &dquo;scientific&dquo;;
between &dquo;spiritual and material conception&dquo;; between &dquo;literary charm, arising
out of the desire to please&dquo; and &dquo;those flights of intellectual power which are
more rewarding than pleasure&dquo;.32 It is easy enough to see how these positions
could be accommodated within the older Ruskinian mould, while extending,
modifying and updating it, and what in the resulting blend could appeal to an
art-obsessed young man losing his religious faith.
There were to be divergences from Connolly as from Ruskin-more dra-
matic and personal ones on the surface, but only confirming an underlying
dependence, perhaps. Hughes bumped into his living idol soon after arriv-
ing in London, though Connolly did nothing to encourage the reverence of
this disciple. On the contrary, when Hughes tried to express what The Unquiet
Grave had meant to him, Connolly stingingly retorted that he could not be held
responsible for the &dquo;accidental effects of my juvenilia in distant countries&dquo;, and
turned on his toes. We find Hughes still recounting the incident over quarter of
a century later.33 Certainly, nothing could have been more calculated to sustain
or heighten his sense of marginality as a colonial at the time; and it is possible

to argue that he has been trying to get over Connolly’s put-down ever since.
His very decision, after being in Europe a few months, to leave off painting
and become a full-time critic may have been clinched, if not initiated, by this
exchange, and by the desire now to defy his idol who had so passionately
preached against such a course in the once-sacred book. But this would be
to ascribe an even more &dquo;accidental&dquo; effect to Connolly; and the matter of his
influence on Hughes is nowhere near as simple.
76

To begin with, there was another traumatic incident during Hughes’s first
months in Europe which probably had a much more decisive influence on his
commitment to full-time criticism. With some vestigial ambitions, at least, to
succeed as a painter, he had landed up in Italy at the same time and the same
place as his old friend from Sydney, Colin Lanceley. But Lanceley, already on
the way to realizing his own ambitions as a painter, felt that Hughes was not
really of the same mettle, and brutally apprised him of this by chucking his
palette into the sea.3’
It is of no great matter what or who finally drove Hughes to take up
criticism full-time; more important is his continuing attitude to the task and its
subject, and it is here that Connolly’s influence has proved, perhaps, to be at
least as haunting as Ruskin’s, in negative as well as positive ways. In 1984,
we find Hughes still idolizing Ruskin as &dquo;the greatest art critic ever to use the

English language&dquo;;35 though in his day, and despite his own strictures to the
contrary, Connolly too had shown the possibilities for making a &dquo;masterpiece&dquo;
out of criticism itself. (His own idiosyncratic exercises in it, Enemies of Prorazise
and the Unquiet Grave, and even some of his reviewing for the posh Sunday
weeklies, not to mention his work as editor of Horizon, will probably go on
being remembered long after his rather pallid attempt at a novel, T’he Rock
Pool.) Here, then, was clearly another positive model for Hughes in the career
path he finally chose. Yet the more negative aspects of Connolly’s criticism, not
least those self-denigratory strictures against any diversions from pure creativity,
would seem to have seeped back into Hughes’s own feelings over the years.
In a recent interview, recalling his years as &dquo;a very bad painter&dquo;, he went
on to reject as &dquo;absolute hokum&dquo; the idea that &dquo;failed painters become critics

and then unleash their bitterness upon the world&dquo;.36 There are perfectly solid
grounds-historical and biographical as well as logical-which he could have
adduced for challenging any such generalizations about critics’ careers. It is
the vehemence of his denial which suggests some lingering self-doubts; like
Shakespeare’s Gertrude, he may be protesting too much. Should it matter to
him so greatly even if it proved to be the case that his own failure at painting
was the main motivating force in him for turning to critical journalism? Only

if, after all, he somehow felt this alternative to be second-best, or more inferior
still; and there are hints that his image of himself has been tending in that direc-
tion. One of these may be found in that very motto he has appropriated from
another of Shakespeare’s characters and applied to his collection of journalistic
pieces: lago’s &dquo;nothing if not critical&dquo;.
The identification with lago is casual, and hardly exact; but it cannot be
ignored. There is no knowing whether lago feels inferior in any way, leave
alone whether any such feelings are behind his &dquo;critical&dquo;, or yet more deeply
destructive, disposition; the terror of him is that there may indeed be &dquo;nothing&dquo;
behind this. But in his public employment as an &dquo;ancient&dquo; or &dquo;ensign&dquo; in the
Venetian army-the lowest rank of commissioned officer-he is plainly inferior,
 77

or subordinate, to most of those he mixes with, and is eclipsed by their outward

glamour. Hughes’s account, at least, of how the present New York art world
regards its professional critics places them in a comparable position. &dquo;It’s not
within the power of the critic anymore to create reputations overnight, or still
less, to destroy them&dquo;, he told one interviewer37 without disavowing any urge
to such power, it might be noted. Criticism, he told another interviewer, is
no longer &dquo;needed by the art world. Its only use will be as a literary form&dquo;.3s
These sentiments are not quite as clear-cut as Connolly’s conviction of the
wastefulness and pointlessness of such apparently ancillary activities, but they
tend to echo it across the distance of more than a generation.
The contents of the Unquiet Grave would seem to have gone on disturbing
Hughes down the years; however sporadically or dimly, memories of Connolly
have continued to impress on him the marginality in being not only a colonial
but also a critic. More generally, the kinds of disappointment in art and politics
to which Connolly’s generation were prey by the end of the Second World War
have gradually caught up with Hughes as he has become part of an older
generation himself; its particular objects may be different, but its broad foci
are similar. The main difference is in the tone of response. Confronting the

prospects of doom and destruction, forty years on, Hughes’s tone is far less
measured, far less muted, than Connolly’s. Rather than weariness, it exhibits a
manic energy, an obsessiveness, a mordant relish. These things, too, comport
disturbingly well with the figure of Iago.
Probably because he was so much younger at the time, Hughes had been
more hopeful than Connolly about the significance of the arts in the wake of
the Second World War, less puzzled by their obscurity, still excited by their
novelty. Modernism in the 1950s may already have passed its heyday, but it
remained a vibrant, viable movement, especially in America; and, as Hughes
later indicated, its most commonly recognized associations were with &dquo;virtu-
ously liberal&dquo; traditions of political thought and social action. For all its ob-
scurities and novelties, it could also be related to various artistic traditions that
signalled reassuring connections with the past.39
When Hughes produced his television series and book on Modernism,
The Shock of tie Neu>, in the late 1970s, it was a quarter of a century after
his initial brushes with it at school, and there was a more mature awareness
of its darker sides: its adaptability not just to liberalism but also to fascism,
as reflected in the Italian Futurist movement; or its enshrinement, in urban

architecture round the world, of the bleakest authoritarian and bureaucratic

tendencies in social planning, whether on the right or the left. 4’ But as a radical
breakthrough in the history of painting and sculpture, it was still something
worth celebrating overall; and Hughes’s explication of it set out to recapture
both its novel excitements and its venerable provenance for a much wide
audience than it had ever enjoyed before.
This celebratory hymn took on a note of threnody in its closing stages, as
78

Hughes contemplated the &dquo;end of modernism&dquo;: a prospect &dquo;no longer possible

to avoid&dquo;, he sadly reported, &dquo;for the idea that we are in a ’post-modernist’
culture has been a commonplace since the 1970s&dquo;.41 His lament for Modernism
is never sentimental or dewy-eyed, but it cannot escape that higher nostalgia,
characteristic of pastoral literature, for a vanished golden age in the world’s
history or in the writer’s own youth.

&dquo;The Nostalgia of the Poet&dquo; is the title of a painting by de Chirico, one

of the Modernist masters to whom Hughes was first exposed at school. In
Nothing If Not Critical he reprints a particularly acute and discriminating essay
on the development of the Greco-Italian’s work over eight decades or so.
This documents a &dquo;long slide into mediocrity&dquo;, as the painter’s early &dquo;state of
mind&dquo; signifying &dquo;alienation, dreaming and loss&dquo;, and reflecting on nostalgia,
becomes in itself &dquo;nostalgic, and flatly SO&dquo;,42 regressing to an ersatz classicism.
The trajectory of Hughes’s own career as a critic could not fairly be described
in these exact terms; the de Chirico essay-though a relatively early one, dating
from 1982-is testimony alone to how far from &dquo;mediocrity&dquo; he has remained
in the postmodern decades. Yet his very arguments about de Chirico’s decline,
and more generally his arguments against subsequent developments in the
world of painting, make of Modernism itself a focus of retrospective (if not
regressive) yearning. His is a case, clearly and increasingly, of the &dquo;nostalgia
of the critic&dquo;. 43
In the recently updated edition of 7be Shock of the New, published in
the wake of Nothing If Not G’riticctl, Hughes can be found retreating from this
position slightly. He acknowledges that Modernism may not be entirely dead as
yet, and he challenges the pretensions of self-styled postmodernists to being
its successors by attacking the vagueness of their theoretical and historical
perspectives.44 As in the postmortem on angels in 1970, Hughes is still clearly
capable of reserving final judgment, of saying or thinking &dquo;And yet&dquo;. And
yet, the note of reservation here sounds more confused than judicious, more
equivocal than balanced. For much of the burden of this revised section of the
book is to arraign the same vague movement for facilitating the end of much
more than Modernism-something close to the end of art as the Western world
has known it.
Some such indictment runs right through Nothing If Not Critical. It pro-
vides the sub-text of all the reviews collected there, whether favourable or
unfavourable, and of whatever period in art history (pre-Modernist, Modernist,
or post). Hughes will not deny that &dquo;There are a few living American artists
whose latest shows one would always feel eager to see&dquo;, but that phrase &dquo;a
few&dquo; damns all the rest: those participants in &dquo;the cultural gorge and puke of
the early eighties&dquo;, or their promoters. The recently-dead American artist, Mark
Rothko, becomes a symbol for the death, or rapid erosion, of those &dquo;old pur-
poses of art, the manifestation of myth and the articulation of social meaning&dquo;. 45
By the Ruskinian credo, what pleasures can remain without some such pur-
 79

poses ? For all its flexibility, here is the problem with a rooted faith in any such
credo. To appreciate anything which appears to challenge its scale of values
becomes impossible for Hughes, and his own sense of balance, as a critic, is
inevitably threatened.
He has continued elsewhere to champion surviving Modernist artists, like
Auerbach, Lucian Freud, or Colin Lanceley, though in the monographs that
he has devoted to each of these, he cannot resist taking pot shots at their
successors. 46 He is aware of the &dquo;conservatism&dquo;, by postmodernist canons, of
his remaining favourites; it is a quality he can even prize in them now.47 Yet
there is a crucial loss entailed in this too, for which those same canons are
held to blame. By all his recent accounts, postmodernism has not provided
a new avant-garde to replace the old Modernist one: it has effectively killed

off the very notion of such a thing, embracing a mindless and pseudo-populist
eclecticism. It has grown into a kind of guard or army itself; but its chiefs
(such as Andy Warhol or Julian Schnabel) have proved to be a vacuous as well
as a vicious lot, whose corruption and decadence are reflected in the activ-

ities of their lieutenants (critics turned hype-merchants; connoisseurs turned

dealers) as well as of the institutions which accommodate them or recruit their
successors (museums, such as the once-responsible Whitney, now suffering a
discernible &dquo;loss of intellectual fibre&dquo;; and schools that have given up any dis-
cipline but deconstruction, out of a &dquo;woozy sense of aesthetic democracy&dquo;).48
There is no genuine discipline, or genuine democracy, here. Nothing
exposes more clearly for Hughes the hollowness and pretensions of postmod-
ernism than the jargon favoured by its theorists, most notably Jean Baudrillard.
The French critic’s recent attempt to deconstruct the cultural codes of contem-
porary American capitalism is at one impenetrably arcane and transcendently
vague, according to Hughes’s review of Baudrillard’s America. 49 Originating,
avowedly, from a position on the left, this book’s oracular pronouncements
can make an equal appeal to those from the opposite extreme of the political

spectrum. It is a species of cult literature that wilfully excludes the bulk of

readers by a form of verbal intimidation. The very style of the book is an
offence to Hughes’s liberal conscience.
&dquo;Life goes on despite theory, and so does art&dquo;, he declares at one point,
in exasperation at Baudrillard’s apocalyptic rhetoric,50 and yet, at various other
points, Hughes’s own plain speaking can evoke as portentous a vision of the
current risks to humanity and all its endeavours, artistic or otherwise. If the
end of the world is not yet nigh, it may be nearer than ever before, and artists,
leave alone critics, have no capacity to stop the process (if they ever did). A
review from 7 9~6, reprinted in Nothing If Not Criticctl, exclaims at one point:
&dquo;How touching our grandfathers’ faith in the future seems, in our day of acid
rain, exploding shuttles, decaying inner cities and general creeping dystopia&dquo;.51
Even those last vestiges of faith, such as Cyril Connolly was able to cling to,
in the &dquo;unity and continuity of Western culture&dquo;, seem to have exhausted their
80

viability now, and the consolations of the liberal ideal to have grown still more
tenuous. In a review of a Goya exhibition, held in New York in 1989, Hughes
has occasion to wonder how the speechwriters and television preachers of the
Reagan era &dquo;could so easily turn America’s noblest tradition of political thought
into the ’L word’.&dquo; He pronounces the process &dquo;obscene&dquo;.52
It is still possible, as in these specimens, to use art criticism as a vehicle
for political and social critique; but with little hope of effecting any change.
It would be even more vain, by Hughes’s account, to expect any assistance
in these tasks from artists themselves. In the 1991 edition of The Shock of the
New, he denies any positive role to art in helping &dquo;stave off the horrors of the
eighties from AIDS to crack to the impending greenhouse effect&dquo;.53 Elsewhere,
he goes further than this, implicating art’s most recent forms and manifestations
in what has helped bring the horror about. They are still too lacking in potency
to be directly responsible, but they are part of the same irresponsible milieu.
&dquo;Cultural Reaganism&dquo; is how he dubs the exhibiting strategy of New York’s
Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in 1984: a mini-version of the &dquo;private
opulence, public squalor&dquo; in the world outside. 54 Warhol, in 1982, is already
shaping up to be court artist and chief flatterer at the White House, according
to Hughes’s report in that year.55 And in his 1987 attack on Schnabel, he re-
invokes the image of the exploding shuttle from his 1986 essay, applying it
now to the art careers of that decade, which, he says, have risen &dquo;amid roars

of acclamation and pillars of smoke-and then, like Challenger, det®riated&dquo;.56

The spectacle here is not far removed from those kitschier representations
of hell which he discussed in the opening pages of his second book (written
before he ever set eyes on New York); and associations with the underworld
are clinched in the sentences immediately following: &dquo;Who now remembers

graffiti, the hot ticket of ’83? Or the East Village scene in general? Out to limbo
... permanently remaindered&dquo;. According to the interview with him in Sanity
Fair, his early study in the iconography of hell and heaven &dquo;had the dual effect
of ’getting the Jesuits out of my system’ and bringing him to the attention of
T’ime&dquo;;5~ but one begins to wonder now how far the Catholic schoolboy within
the irreverent art critic was ever exorcised, and whether vestiges of his old
religious faith have not begun to resurface as the challenges to his faith in art
have grown apace over the last decade.
There are signs that the sermon on hell to which he was treated as a
schoolboy by a Jesuit teacher may have had as lasting an impact on him as
his baptism by postcards in the Modernist faith, administered by another Je-
suit at his school. These signs are at their most conspicuous, perhaps, in his
one major work on a non-artistic subject, the Fatal Shore, first published in

1987. This gigantic saga of Australia’s origins as a penal colony has been criti-
cized by several earlier authorities in the field for over-emphasizing the darker,
more oppressive aspects of the convict system; and it is certainly true that
the predominant impression he conveys of places like Port Arthur or Norfolk
 81

Island-sometimes quite explicitly-is of a peculiarly terrifying hell on earth.

Yet, pace his critics, these are not the only impressions of early Australia that
he registers here, whether from his own imaginings or from his contemporary
witnesses. Dwelling on the hellish, he is no more blind to the heavenly rep-
resentations (Australia as paradise, Eden, Arcadia) than he was in his general
study of those &dquo;two master images&dquo; of the Western mind.SA In his visions of
contemporary New York, however, there are no such counterbalancing im-
ages. The associations with hell may not be as overt; but associations with
heaven are non-existent. There may be some sense of a paradise lost (the
&dquo;Heaven in a box&dquo;, represented by Joseph Cornell’s exquisitely arranged bric-
a-brac of the 1940s and 1950s)5~ but none of a paradise regainable. Certainly,
there are no &dquo;angels&dquo; of the kind that the Time reviewer, twenty years earlier,
could still hope existed; the &dquo;new epiphanies of conscience&dquo;, represented by
postmodernism, are nearer to signalling the work of devils.
For all their grimness, there is nothing glum about Hughes’s jeremiads and
prophecies in 1‘Iothing If Not Critical. At times, the tone can verge on fiendish
glee, as if Hughes has become a bit of a devil himself, determined to take
some kind of revenge on a world that has disappointed his earlier hopes for
art. There is an associated guile as well. Some of his previous books have had
rather more portentous or apocalyptic-sounding titles. By comparison with the
Fatal Shore or The Shock of the New, Nothing (f Not Critical sounds nothing
if not tame-unless you pick up the allusion to Iago. Apart from the author’s
photograph on the back of the jacket (a scowling gargoyle) there is nothing to
prepare you for the ferocity inside the covers. It creeps up on you stealthily,
as in the case of Shakespeare’s villain.
The difference from any regular human devilry is that Hughes means well,
not ill, by his guile. Behind it is a clearly moral imperative: to expose the
devilish ills of others in the world around him. It is hard to resist seeing in
this a throwback to the faith of his upbringing. He himself has compared a
fellow art-critic, &dquo;who spent fifteen years in New York never doing a negative
review of anything&dquo;, to &dquo;a sort of priest going around issuing benedictions
Hughes’s resemblance is more to a sort of inquisitor. The stratagems he devises
for outsmarting his particular bete-noir, Julian Schnabel, have an elaborate
deviousness about them that might even be called jesuitical
Unless you happen to be an object of them yourself, there is as much
relish to be had in observing Hughes’s remorseless attacks on this or that new
cult of the current New York art world as he has taken in making them. There
is probably no other art critic in his generation, of whatever sympathies or an-
tipathies, who combines such resources of erudition, wit, fluency and panache.
And the depth of his present antipathies is easy enough to understand in the
light of what we know of his past sympathies. As he has witnessed it, over
the past decade and a half, postmodernism has come to challenge all of the
fundamentals of his own, or his mentors’, artistic faith: firm critical standards
82

for art, based on the premise of a demonstrable tradition of great works or mas-
terpieces ; the possibilities of moral or spiritual or social or political meaning
in painting; a belief and a pride in the unity and continuity of Western cul-
ture. Modernism’s challenges to the classical and romantic traditions of artistic
representation were never so nihilistic or so empty-seeming. From where he
has witnessed their activities most closely, at his base in New York, the prac-
titioners and promoters of postmodernism have appeared to lack any of the
radical earnestness or engagement of the modernist avant-garde in its heyday;
and so it is scarcely surprising that they should have become assimilable to the
do-nothing populism of Reaganite ideology.
For all the sport provided by Hughes’s assault on these postmodernists,
and for all that we may recognize the offence they represent to his (if not our
own) most cherished aesthetic and political values, it is hard not to wonder at
times whether the energies he has put into combatting them are fully justified.
The various inquisitions of the Catholic Church are probably more famous now
for their excesses than for anything else; and so it may prove with Hughes’s
campaign. His weapons and punishments may be even more disproportionate
to the degree of threat involved. He himself has indicated just how shallow the
current devils are, doomed to successive extinction by their own celebration
of the transient and the fashionable, where not by the decadence of their way
of life. Were the offenders against his old religious faith-whether medieval
heretics or Reformation protestants-ever so obligingly self-destructive?
Hughes’s intimation that postmodernism may be symptomatic of a more
general self-destructiveness, in the world of art, or even the world in general,
betokens another kind of disproportion in his vision. Can any kind of world-
view reliably be based on such a narrow focus as New York? He himself is not
so pessimistic as to discount entirely the prospect of great art’s re-emergence
from some unexpected backwater elsewhere-like his native Australia, for in-
stance. But it is a vague and purely speculative prospect, as he presents it, and
any possible grounds for it are nowhere explored, so that he hardly encourages
his readers to take it very seriously as even a glimmer of hope for the future
An updated version of 7be Art of Australia may be one way in which he could
explore this prospect. Even if it should end up confirming him in his general
pessimism, it would at least mitigate the present risk of his compounding New
York’s imperialist hype with a species of anti-hype that is just as imperialist in
assuming that city’s cosmic centrality-and just as parochial in what it actually
bothers to explore in the contemporary art world.
Concentration on the New York scene is admittedly part of his reporting
brief for Time magazine; and when released from its demands at various pe-
riods, he has shown some willingness to extend his purview. But this has
remained within fairly narrow or familiar limits up to now, focusing on a few
individual artists outside America of whom he has long been fond. His enthu-
siastic studies of Freud or Auerbach or Lanceley have never descended into
 83

mere puffing exercises; his detailed readings of their work continue to show

the firm sense of critical discrimination he brought to bear on his beloved Mod-
ernists of the past in The S’hock of the New. Yet this exposes, by contrast, the
completely undiscriminating nature of his sideswipes at postmodernism in the
same books. The devil assumes an even more monolithic form here than in

the individual reviews reprinted in lUothiazg 7/’/Vo~ Critical.

Might not these blanket denunciations be postmodernism’s just deserts:
the only appropriate or effective answer to its wilful eclecticism? The grounds
for such intransigence are slimmer now as postmodernism, in its more re-
cent representations at least, has shown some capacities for self-discrimination,
even self-criticism, within that eclecticism. Another New York art critic of the

day, Hal Foster, has explicitly identified two varieties, conflicting &dquo;in style and
politics&dquo;: on the one hand, a &dquo;neo-conservative postmodernism&dquo; or &dquo;postmod-
ernism of reaction&dquo; that repudiates Modernism through an attempted return
to &dquo;narrative, ornament and the figure&dquo;; and on the other an &dquo;oppositional
postmodernism&dquo; which seeks &dquo;to deconstruct modernism and resist the status
quo&dquo;, not by any return to representation but through &dquo;a critique in which
representation is shown to be more constitutive of reality than transparent to
it&dquo;. 63
Hughes’s criticism, there is no recognition of the second variety of
In
postmodernism as a viable agenda or form for artists, whether in New York
or elsewhere. It would be easy enough for him to dismiss Foster’s arguments
as mere theoretical chatter-a la Baudrillard-simply on the basis of their lan-

guage, which is far more technical, far less accessible than Hughes’s own. But
that would be too easy, and would fail to acknowledge what they remain to
offer if the effort is made to digest them.
To begin with, they could offer some solace, even positive support, to a
critic of Hughes’s background and disposition. Foster tacitly distances himself
from any &dquo;mourners&dquo; for Modernism or an avant-garde; but he also distances
&dquo;
himself from those whose ’postmodernism’ often covers for an antimod-
ernist agenda&dquo;. These and other ruses of particular artists who appropriate
the postmodern label are as much an object of concern and censure for Fos-
ter as they are for Hughes. So are the commercial manipulations and power
urges of postmodernism’s leading sponsors, for whom, Foster says, art today is
merely a &dquo;plaything&dquo;. The instances he cites of the pseudo-seriousness, pseudo-
egalitarianism, pseudo-radicalism, pseudo-freedom, even pseudo-eclecticism,
of what has gone under the name &dquo;postmodern&dquo; would add rich stores to
Hughes’s own cache of weapons against the phenomenon. The work of Julian
Schnabel is the particular target of both critics
Indeed, reading Hughes and Foster together, it is hard to imagine that
they have not already absorbed a great deal from each other, however un-
consciously. Apart from their literary styles, the main thing that continues to
distinguish them is that Hughes does seem to regard postmodernism as a sin-
84

gle, if incoherent, phenomenon, uniformly damnable, whereas Foster takes, or

encourages, a wider, more tolerant, less negative view. He provides avenues
for exploring contemporary art outside the hothouse of neo-conservatism with
which New York has come to be most readily identified. Where he does not
carry out detailed explorations himself, he calls on more specialist guides to
other faces and places of postmodern development. Particular attention, for
instance, is directed at the cultures of contemporary feminism and of the &dquo;post-
colonial&dquo; third world, all involved in what one of these guides has termed &dquo;the
recovery of a history hitherto either misinterpreted or rendered invisible&dquo;.~s
Much more remains to be explored in detail along such avenues-not
least the activities of individual painters and sculptors working within the al-
ternative cultures, and the question of how far their work can be characterized
as distinctively postmodern at all. Their radical potential needs to be tested,

weighed, rendered more visible to wider audiences: tasks requiring just those
degrees of historical perspective, critical rigour, and easy readability that we
find so resourcefully combined in Hughes’s approach to &dquo;mainstream&dquo; art of
the present or the past.
Conversely, fresh explorations of this kind may be just what is needed
to restore some balance to Hughes’s own vision of the future of art. The

prospect held out by &dquo;oppositional postmodernism&dquo; for a recovery of history

by the previously oppressed or obscured would seem to involve at some level
a reclamation of meaning, of a sense of purpose, in art. There is every pos-

sibility that such meanings or purposes would not accord with Hughes’s own
traditional historical and critical understandings, but by studiously confronting
an agenda of that kind-as he has so many other phases and programs in the

history of art-could he ever remain so blackly confident of the nihilism and

vacuousness of the prevalent trends in contemporary arty

The hope-for art’s sake as much as his own-is that he would not be
able to maintain such a negative posture. But that may be a rather pious hope
on his behalf. There are lingering worries that he does not want to have his

prejudices unsettled; and, more generally, that his &dquo;case&dquo; exposes the ultimate
limits of liberalism in a postmodern world, if not its exhaustion. 67 Certainly,
his own dark allusions to the all-but-complete exhaustion of art, and of much
else besides in the world he was brought up in, threatens to align him with a
motley clutch of pundits that his old liberal self, in other contexts, has always
attempted to resist. These include: various conservatives of the past, ranging
from Bernard Berenson to Sir Robert Menzies, who refused to come to terms
with the prevalent art movements of their day, and to varying extent built their
careers around this kind of deliberate incomprehension; 68 a neoconservative
of the present day like Tom Wolfe, whose assaults on modernist architecture,
according to Hughes, bear out the remark of liberalism’s most distinguished
professor, J.S. Mill, that &dquo;the second-rate superior minds of a cultivated age
... are usually in exaggerated opposition against its spirit&dquo;; 69 end-of-history
 85

fantasists to the right or the left, such as Hitler and Marx; 70 and the doom-
merchants or soothsayers from within the ranks of postmodernism itself, most
notably the would-be socialist, Jean Baudrillard, and his reactionary aficionados
in America. 71
Hughes on occasion, can still prove his mettle
as a watchdog of extremism
in all of these varying guises; but he
is proving less and less able to guard
against such tendencies in himself. He is in danger of conforming with what
Hal Foster has shrewdly identified as an &dquo;apocalyptism of the present which is
finally complicit with a repressive status quo&dquo;. 72
There are black shades the eyes of de Chirico’s nostalgic poet which
over

have been interpreted as an emblem of the blind seer in the tradition of Homer,
Tiresias or Milton. It is an ambiguous image, however.~3 The kind of nostalgia
that Robert Hughes displays as a critic, and its implications for his view of the
future of art beyond the golden age of de Chirico and his fellow Modernists,
cannot help evoking a rather less positive figure or condition: that of the
blinkered visionary. It is a condition to which Hughes now almost wilfully
aspires.
Notes
I wish to thank several colleagues and friends who commented in valuable ways
on the initial draft of this
article, especially Bain Attwood, Paul Baxter, Bill Cobbett,
John Foster, Peter Stewart, Brian McFarlane and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne.
1. "The Glory of the Lord Shone Around Them", Time (28 December 1970), pp. 30-35.
2. "Out of the Junkyard", Time (4 January 1971), p. 37.
3. Robert Hughes, Nothing If Not Critical (London, Collins Harvill, 1990), pp. 295, 367.
4. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, 1st edition (London, BBC, 1980), p. 375. (All
subsequent references to this edition, unless otherwise stated.)
5. "The Shock of the Hughes", Vanity Fair (November 1990), p. 224.
6. ibid., p. 226.
7. ibid., p. 225; cf. Robert Hughes, Heaven and Hell in Western Art (London, Weiden-
feld and Nicolson, 1968), p. 35, and The Shock of the New, p. 7.
8. ibid., p. 366.
9. Dutton and Hughes both quoted in Judith White, "The Painted Word", Sun Herald
(9 December 1990), p. 110.
10. "The Shock of the Hughes", p. 225; Janet Hawley, "Art and Nothing But", Good
Weekend in Sydney Morning Herald (2 March 1991), p. 19.
11. Robert Hughes, Introduction to Colin Lanceley (Seaforth, NSW, Craftsman House,
1987), p. 7, and The Art of Australia, revised edition (Harmondsworth, Penguin,
1970), pp. 307309.
12. ibid., pp. 19-20.
13. "There is no tyranny like the tyranny of the unseen masterpiece", he declares in

Nothing If Not Critical, p. 4. cf. Robert Hughes, Donald Friend (Sydney, Edwards
and Shaw, 1965), p. 25; Colin Lanceley, p. 16. For a corrective, see Bernard Smith
86

on "The Myth of Isolation", in his The Death of the Artists as Hero (Melbourne,
Oxford University Press, 1988).
14. Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach (London, Thames and Hudson, 1991), p 7; The
Shock of the New, p. 257; Nothing If Not Critical, p. 224.
15. "The Shock of the Hughes", p. 225.
16. ibid., p. 225.
17. Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1944; revised edi-
tion, 1945), p. 1. (All references are to the revised edition.)
18. cf. e.g. note 13 above.
19. The Art of Australia, p. 288.
20. The most explicit articulation of such criteria maybe found in ibid., pp. 169-170,
287-288, 291; Donald Friend, pp. 60, 76; The Shock of the New, pp. 66, 276, 292,
320, 409; Nothing If Not Critical, pp. 148, 236, 337; "The Shock of the Hughes",
p. 225.
21. John Ruskin, The Stones of venice, vol. II, chap. viii, sec. 135, in E. T. Cook and
A. Wedderburn (eds.), The Works of John Ruskin (London, George Allen, 1903-
1912), vol. X, p. 434.
22. John Ruskin, "Inaugural Address at the Cambridge School of Art" (1958), Works,
vol. XVI, p. 188; cf. his "The Relation of National Ethics to National Arts" (1867),
Works, vol. XIX, pp. 177-181.
23. John Ruskin, "Inaugural Address ...", p. 187.
24. John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, 1.4, 7.2, 10.2, Works, vol. XXVII, pp. 14, 114, 167.
25. Heaven and Hell in Western Art, p. 105.
26. The Shock of the New, pp. 95, 108; Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (London, Collins
Harvill, 1987), p. xiv.
27. ibid., p. 582.
28. ibid., pp. 272-274, 593; The Art of Australia,
p. 171; Nothing If Not Critical, pp. 180,
308312. cf. note 68 below.
29. The Shock of the New, p. 149; Robert Hughes, Picasso (the Fifth Sir William Dobell
Memorial Lecture; Sydney, Dobell Art Foundation, 1981), pp. 22-26, 30-33.
30. Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (revised edition, 1949; Harmondsworth, Pen-
guin, 1961), p. 10; David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir (Lon-
don, Collins, 1983), pp. 288-289; Michael Shelden, Friends of Promise: Cyril Con-
nolly and the World of Horion (London, Minerva, 1990), esp. pp. 42-47, 157-159;
Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War
(New York, Oxford University Press, 1989) pp. 209-222.
31. The Unquiet Grave, p. 35.
32. ibid., pp. xii, 32, 44-54, 73.
33. In "The Shock of the Hughes", p. 224.
34. "Art and Nothing But", p. 19.
35. Nothing If Not Critical, p. 115.
36. "The Shock of the Hughes", p. 225.
37. ibid., p. 190.
 87

38. Reported in Peter Cochranes, "Brickbats, Broadsides and Buckshot: Robert Hughes
Hits Town", Sydney Morning Herald (10 March 1990), p. 3.
39. The Shock of the New, pp. 97, 134.
40. ibid., pp. 97, 184-185.
41. ibid., p. 375.
42. Nothing If Not Critical, pp. 161-164. De Chirico’s "La Nostalgie du Poète"(c. 1914)
hangs in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and is reproduced in various
editions of his work or anthologies of Modernist painting, sometimes under the
title "The Dream of the Poet". Hughes does not specifically discuss this work in his
essay on de Chirico; though there is an interesting, if indirect, connection, in that
the putative model for the face of the poet in the painting is Hughes’s schoolboy
passion, Apollinaire. See A. Rudenstine, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (New
York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1985), pp. 162-163.
43. cf. Bernard Smith’s early diagnosis of this condition in his 1981 radio review of
The Shock of the New, published in The Critic as Advocate (Melbourne, Oxford
University Press, 1989), p. 307.
44. The Shock of the New, Updated and Enlarged Edition (London, Thames and Hudson,
1991), p. 376.
Nothing If Not Critical,
45. pp. 6, 237, 327.
46. Robert Hughes, Lucian Freud paintings, (London, Thames and Hudson, 1987),
pp. 7-8; Colin Lanceley, pp. 9, 15, 17; Frank Auerbach, pp. 9, 11, 19, 214.
47. Colin Lanceley, p. 17; Frank Auerbach, p. 19
48. Nothing If Not Critical, esp. pp. 6-8, 15-23, 243-256, 299-312; The Shock of the
New (1991 edition), pp. 365, 376, 422-423. On Hughes’s position vis-à-vis other
"obituarists" of the avant-garde in America and Europe, see Paul Mann, The Theory-
Death of the AvantGarde (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press,
1991), pp. 31-41.
49. InNothing If Not Critical, pp. 375-387.
50. ibid., p. 386.
51. ibid., p. 196; cf. p. 18.
52. ibid., p. 54.
53. The Shock of the New (1991 editon), p. 376.
54. Nothing If Not Critical, p. 142; cf. p. 18.
55. ibid., pp. 255-256.
56. ibid., p. 303.
57. "The Shock of the Hughes", p. 226.
58. Heaven and Hell in Western Art, p. 7; cf. The Fatal Shore, pp. 3-4, 76, 92, 299,
317-318, 339, 358, 398-400, 441-442, 457, 477, 534, 558, 576, 583-586.
59. Nothing If Not Critical, p. 227; cf. p. 18, where Hughes declares flatly: "New York
had never been a paradise".
60. "The Shock of the Hughes", p. 224.
61. ibid., and Nothing If Not Critical, pp. 299-300.
62. ibid., p. 28.
88

63. Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, Washington,
Bay Press, 1985), p. 121; Preface to Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on
Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Washington, Bay Press, 1983), p. xi. I am
indebted to Juan Davila for introducing me to this literature.
64. Recodings, pp. 3, 28-32, 131-132, 136.
65. Edward Said, "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community" in The Anti-
Aesthetic, p. 158. cf. Craig Owens, "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Post-
modernism", ibid., pp. 57f.; James Clifford, Virginia Domingue and Trinh T. Minh-
Ha, "Of Other Peoples: Beyond the ’Salvage’ Paradigm" in Hal Foster (ed.), Discus-
sions in Contemporary Culture, 1 (Seattle, Bay Press, 1987), pp. 121-150. Critiques
of, or refinements on, Foster’s distinctions within postmodernism, and some further
reflections on the convergences and divergences of postmodernism with feminism
may be found in Andrew Ross (ed.), Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmod-
ernism (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 83-102, 128-129,
149-165, 172-174.
66. He is certainly not incapable of responding enthusiastically to more "mainstream",

long-established specimens of feminist (or, for that matter, overtly gay) art: see e.g.,
Nothing If Not Critical, pp. 212-214, 285-287, 337; The Shock of the New, p. 335.
67. cf. Stanley Aronowit, "Postmodernism and Politics", in Universal Abandon?, p. 46.
68. Nothing If Not Critical, pp. 364-365; The Art of Australia, p. 131.
69. Nothing If Not Critical, p. 367.
70. The Shock of the New, p. 299.
71. Nothing If Not Critical, pp. 375-387.
72. Recodings, p. 1.
73. For a resumé of various interpretations, see Rudenstine, Peggy Guggenheim Collec-
tion, pp. 163-165.