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
... cultural irrelevance . We were already used to that , since for most of the two - hundred - year history of white Australia the colonial experience had bitten deeply into us and caused a reflex known as the Cultural Cringe . The Cultural ...
... cultural irrelevance . We were already used to that , since for most of the two - hundred - year history of white Australia the colonial experience had bitten deeply into us and caused a reflex known as the Cultural Cringe . The Cultural ...
Page 1706
Essays on Art and Artists Robert Hughes. essence of cultural colonialism is that you demand of yourself that your work measure up to standards that cannot be shared or debated where you live . By the manipulation of such standards almost ...
Essays on Art and Artists Robert Hughes. essence of cultural colonialism is that you demand of yourself that your work measure up to standards that cannot be shared or debated where you live . By the manipulation of such standards almost ...
Page 1709
... cultural traits have changed or seem ready to . The decade may be officially dead , but it won't lie down just yet . In the eighties the scale of cultural feeding became gross , and its aliment coarse ; bulimia , that neurotic cycle of ...
... cultural traits have changed or seem ready to . The decade may be officially dead , but it won't lie down just yet . In the eighties the scale of cultural feeding became gross , and its aliment coarse ; bulimia , that neurotic cycle of ...
Page 1710
... culturally exhausted was an important ingredient of American self - esteem . Its ancient craftiness , its subtlety , its strata of memory , its persistent embrace of elitist against " democratic " cultural values : these , in American ...
... culturally exhausted was an important ingredient of American self - esteem . Its ancient craftiness , its subtlety , its strata of memory , its persistent embrace of elitist against " democratic " cultural values : these , in American ...
Page 1711
... cultural standards for Europe and the Western cultures of the Pacific , including Australia - sprang from the narcissistic assumption that people everywhere aspired to the condition of Americans , so that aesthetic issues that filled ...
... cultural standards for Europe and the Western cultures of the Pacific , including Australia - sprang from the narcissistic assumption that people everywhere aspired to the condition of Americans , so that aesthetic issues that filled ...
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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