Robert Hughes

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes (28 July 1938 – 6 August 2012) was born in Sydney, Australia, into a prosperous Catholic family. He studied architecture and art at the University of Sydney, became a prominent critic in Sydney’s art scene, and emigrated to the United States in 1970 to take up the position of art critic at Time magazine, where he remained for over thirty years.

Life and Career

The Shock of the New (1980) — accompanying his eight-part BBC/Time-Life television series — remains the most widely read popular history of modern art in English. It covers Impressionism through Minimalism with a combination of visual intelligence, historical sweep, and polemical energy that no subsequent art survey has matched. Hughes was not a theorist; he was an aesthete with strong opinions, and his judgments — passionate defences of artists he admired (Goya, Lucian Freud, Robert Rauschenberg), savage demolitions of those he didn’t (Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst) — gave the book its vitality.

The Fatal Shore (1987) — a sweeping narrative history of Australia’s founding as a British penal colony, from the First Fleet’s arrival in 1788 through the end of convict transportation in 1868 — was both a massive bestseller and a work of serious historiography. Hughes used convict records, letters, and court transcripts to reconstruct the experience of transportation with Dickensian vividness.

Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993) attacked both the political correctness of the academic left and the philistinism of the populist right, positioning Hughes as a cultural conservative in the old sense — someone who believed in standards, craft, and the Western tradition without subscribing to the political agenda of those who weaponised those values.

Goya (2003) — his most sustained work of art criticism — was a comprehensive study of Francisco Goya’s life and work. Hughes saw Goya as the first modern artist: the painter who showed that art could be simultaneously beautiful and horrifying, that it could testify to human cruelty without flinching.

A near-fatal car accident in Western Australia in 1999 damaged his health permanently but did not diminish his output. His memoir, Things I Didn’t Know (2006), was characteristically pugnacious.

Themes and Style

Hughes wrote about art as inseparable from the society that produces it. He despised the contemporary art market’s inflation of mediocrity, the culture of celebrity artists, and what he saw as the collapse of critical standards. His prose style — rhetorical, muscular, filled with vivid metaphor and sudden shifts between erudition and colloquial directness — made him the most readable art critic of his generation. He could be brutal: his description of Julian Schnabel as “the Liberace of the art world” is characteristic.

Critical Standing

Hughes was the last of a generation of public intellectuals — figures like Kenneth Clark, John Berger, and Sister Wendy Beckett — who made art criticism accessible to a mass audience without dumbing it down. His combination of visual sophistication, historical knowledge, and rhetorical power has no contemporary equivalent.

Key Works

• The Shock of the New (1980)
• The Fatal Shore (1987)
• Culture of Complaint (1993)
• Goya (2003)
• Things I Didn’t Know (2006)

Collecting Hughes

The Fatal Shore (1987, Alfred A. Knopf, New York) first editions bring $30–$80 in fine condition. The Shock of the New (1980, BBC/Knopf) brings $40–$100. Goya (2003, Knopf) brings $20–$50. Signed copies of most titles are available, as Hughes was an active public figure.