Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists

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Collins Harvill, 1990 - Art - 429 pages
A generous selection of forthright essays on art and artists. Hughes tackles the lives and works of over 80 artists, from the old masters to our contemporaries, exploring their achievement (or lack of it) and how they altered the history of art for better or worse. This much-feted book from Robert Hughes, one of our greatest living art historians, makes a welcome appearance in paperback. A selection of his most important articles, it includes his accounts of the particular skills and vision of some 80 artists - from old masters such as Holbein, Caravaggio, van Dyck and Reynolds to contemporary painters such as Lichtenstein, Bacon, Kitaj and Hockney. Hughes looks too at some of the vexed questions confronting art today. Lawrence Gowing has said that Robert Hughes is 'illuminating and compelling on whatever subject he touches'; this book offers much evidence to support that plaudit. (Kirkus UK).

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Contents

of the City of Mahagonny
3
Ancestors
31
Nineteenth Century
89
Copyright

15 other sections not shown

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About the author (1990)

Robert Hughes was born in Sydney, Australia on July 28, 1938. He studied art and architecture at the University of Sydney. He pursued art criticism mostly as a sideline while painting, writing poetry and serving as a cartoonist for the weekly intellectual journal The Observer. He left Australia and spent time in Italy before settling in London, where he became a well-known critical voice and wrote for several newspapers. He was chief art critic for Time magazine for over 30 years. He wrote several books including The Fatal Shore, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America, Things I Didn't Know, and Rome. He also hosted an eight-part documentary about the development of modernism from the Impressionists through Warhol entitled The Shock of the New. It was seen by more than 25 million viewers when it ran first on BBC and then on PBS. He also wrote a book by the same name about the series. He died after a long illness on August 6, 2012 at the age of 74.

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