Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and ArtistsFrom Holbein to Hockney, from Norman Rockwell to Pablo Picasso, from sixteenth-century Rome to 1980s SoHo, Robert Hughes looks with love, loathing, warmth, wit and authority at a wide range of art and artists, good, bad, past and present. As art critic for Time magazine, internationally acclaimed for his study of modern art, The Shock of the New, he is perhaps America’s most widely read and admired writer on art. In this book: nearly a hundred of his finest essays on the subject. For the realism of Thomas Eakins to the Soviet satirists Komar and Melamid, from Watteau to Willem de Kooning to Susan Rothenberg, here is Hughes—astute, vivid and uninhibited—on dozens of famous and not-so-famous artists. He observes that Caravaggio was “one of the hinges of art history; there was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same”; he remarks that Julian Schnabel’s “work is to painting what Stallone’s is to acting”; he calls John Constable’s Wivenhoe Park “almost the last word on Eden-as-Property”; he notes how “distorted traces of [Jackson] Pollock lie like genes in art-world careers that, one might have thought, had nothing to do with his.” He knows how Norman Rockwell made a chicken stand still long enough to be painted, and what Degas said about success (some kinds are indistinguishable from panic). Phrasemaker par excellence, Hughes is at the same time an incisive and profound critic, not only of particular artists, but also of the social context in which art exists and is traded. His fresh perceptions of such figures as Andy Warhol and the French writer Jean Baudrillard are matched in brilliance by his pungent discussions of the art market—its inflated prices and reputations, its damage to the public domain of culture. There is a superb essay on Bernard Berenson, and another on the strange, tangled case of the Mark Rothko estate. And as a finale, Hughes gives us “The SoHoiad,” the mock-epic satire that so amused and annoyed the art world in the mid-1980s. A meteor of a book that enlightens, startles, stimulates and entertains. |
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Page 18
... kind of income level enjoyed by only one American in forty , had never been easy . ( Those who complain about the street squalor of Manhattan as though it were something new should consult the chronicles of New York in the 1840s , when ...
... kind of income level enjoyed by only one American in forty , had never been easy . ( Those who complain about the street squalor of Manhattan as though it were something new should consult the chronicles of New York in the 1840s , when ...
Page 291
... kind of existential romantic , flinging pots of paint in the eyes of fate . What we see is not what legend tells us to see . For Motherwell is a painter of superb though admittedly fitful balance who has managed to raise a magisterial ...
... kind of existential romantic , flinging pots of paint in the eyes of fate . What we see is not what legend tells us to see . For Motherwell is a painter of superb though admittedly fitful balance who has managed to raise a magisterial ...
Page 317
... kind of all - purpose orifice with deadly molars , all of which aspire , in the common view , to the condition of documents . Here , one has been told over and over again , is the outer limit of expressionism : these are the signs of ...
... kind of all - purpose orifice with deadly molars , all of which aspire , in the common view , to the condition of documents . Here , one has been told over and over again , is the outer limit of expressionism : these are the signs of ...
Contents
of the City of Mahagonny | 3 |
Ancestors | 31 |
Nineteenth Century | 89 |
Copyright | |
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abstract Abstract Expressionism aesthetic American art American artist Andy Warhol architecture art history art market art world avant-garde Basquiat Baudrillard become Berenson blue canvas Caravaggio career catalogue Cézanne Chirico collectors color Courbet critics Cubist cultural dealers death Degas drawing early Édouard Manet eighties English exhibition expressionist face fantasy feeling figure flat Frank Auerbach French Gallery Gauguin Gogh Goya Goya's hero Hockney idea imagery imagine Jackson Pollock Jean-Michel Basquiat Kiefer kind Kooning landscape late light living look Manet mass media Matisse matter Michelangelo modern art modernist Motherwell motif Museum Neo-Expressionism never nineteenth century nude obsessed painter painting Paris parody Picasso pictorial picture Pollock portrait Poussin Pre-Raphaelite R. B. Kitaj retrospective Rome Rothko scene Schnabel sculpture seems seen sense sixties social Steinberg studio style surface Susan Rothenberg things tion turned visual wanted Warhol watercolors York Zurbarán