Nothing If Not Critical: 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. |
From inside the book
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Page 1705
... Paris . America has never produced an artist to rival Picasso or Matisse , or an art movement with the immense resonance of Cubism . But marvelous work was done there nevertheless . And it can certainly be said of the New York School ...
... Paris . America has never produced an artist to rival Picasso or Matisse , or an art movement with the immense resonance of Cubism . But marvelous work was done there nevertheless . And it can certainly be said of the New York School ...
Page 1709
... Paris in the 1950s and Rome in the 1670s - over the hill , into decline . The point is not that New York has been replaced by some other city as center . It has not been , and will not be . Rather , the idea of the single art center is ...
... Paris in the 1950s and Rome in the 1670s - over the hill , into decline . The point is not that New York has been replaced by some other city as center . It has not been , and will not be . Rather , the idea of the single art center is ...
Page 1712
... and Francis Bacon , through the middle generation ( Ilya Kabakov in Moscow ; Avigdor Arikha in Paris ; sculptors Magdalena Abakanowicz , Nancy Graves , William Tucker and Joel Shapiro; in England, Frank Auerbach, Howard Hodgkin.
... and Francis Bacon , through the middle generation ( Ilya Kabakov in Moscow ; Avigdor Arikha in Paris ; sculptors Magdalena Abakanowicz , Nancy Graves , William Tucker and Joel Shapiro; in England, Frank Auerbach, Howard Hodgkin.
Page 1716
... Paris in 1890 he would have seen immediately what was going on ; if the same time machine were to deposit him in Walt Disney's Academy for the Briefly New , the California Institute of the Arts , in 1990 , he might not recognize it as ...
... Paris in 1890 he would have seen immediately what was going on ; if the same time machine were to deposit him in Walt Disney's Academy for the Briefly New , the California Institute of the Arts , in 1990 , he might not recognize it as ...
Page 1723
... New York today . There is a haunting parallel with Paris at the end of the fifties , when the French were busy persuading themselves that Soulages , Poliakoff , Hartung , Mathieu and other artists formed a generation that could eventually.
... New York today . There is a haunting parallel with Paris at the end of the fifties , when the French were busy persuading themselves that Soulages , Poliakoff , Hartung , Mathieu and other artists formed a generation that could eventually.
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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 Bauhaus become Berenson blue canvas Caravaggio career catalogue century 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 Italian Jackson Pollock Jean-Michel Basquiat Kiefer kind Kooning landscape late light living look Manet mass media Matisse matter modern art modernist Motherwell motif Museum Neo-Expressionism never nude obsessed painter painting Paris parody Picasso pictorial picture Pollock portraits Poussin R. B. Kitaj Renaissance retrospective Rome Rothko scene Schnabel sculpture seems seen sense sixties social Steinberg studio style surface Susan Rothenberg things Titian turned visual wanted Warhol watercolors Whistler York Zurbarán