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. |
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Page 1711
... be transferred anywhere else , regardless of local traditions , imagery , preoccupations . This reflected the larger political assumptions Americans made at the time : their belief in their country's moral leadership.
... be transferred anywhere else , regardless of local traditions , imagery , preoccupations . This reflected the larger political assumptions Americans made at the time : their belief in their country's moral leadership.
Page 1730
... imagery of money has been so crudely riveted onto the face of museum- quality art by events outside the museum that its unhappy confusion between price and value may never be resolved . It is like the bind in the fairy tale : At the ...
... imagery of money has been so crudely riveted onto the face of museum- quality art by events outside the museum that its unhappy confusion between price and value may never be resolved . It is like the bind in the fairy tale : At the ...
Page 1737
... imagery and style of French neoclassicism. And it would continue to be ratified right through the nineteenth century, up to World War I. The drift of economic history, and of population, fed it too. France was changing from a nation of ...
... imagery and style of French neoclassicism. And it would continue to be ratified right through the nineteenth century, up to World War I. The drift of economic history, and of population, fed it too. France was changing from a nation of ...
Page 1739
... imagery of an industrial world . There was no such thing as rural Constructivism or pastoral Futurism . And Paris was the dream city of Surrealism too . This fixation on the idea of the capital was carried over to New York City forty ...
... imagery of an industrial world . There was no such thing as rural Constructivism or pastoral Futurism . And Paris was the dream city of Surrealism too . This fixation on the idea of the capital was carried over to New York City forty ...
Page 1763
... imagery in Western art : horse painting , like " sporting " art generally , tends to be seen as a minor style of aesthetic tailoring , shaped to reflect the blunt amusements of a class not much liked by connoisseurs . Painters such as ...
... imagery in Western art : horse painting , like " sporting " art generally , tends to be seen as a minor style of aesthetic tailoring , shaped to reflect the blunt amusements of a class not much liked by connoisseurs . Painters such as ...
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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