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 1707
... sixties . Thirty years ago , Abstract Expressionism was pretty well a mandatory world style . We in Australia looked at it with awe . The bottle in which its messages washed up on our shores ( since the paintings themselves did not ...
... sixties . Thirty years ago , Abstract Expressionism was pretty well a mandatory world style . We in Australia looked at it with awe . The bottle in which its messages washed up on our shores ( since the paintings themselves did not ...
Page 1710
... sixties eagerly claimed that their art had superseded that of Europe , their eagerness was itself a period phenomenon . The American Revolution had held , deep in its heart , the vision of a corrupt Europe , a Europe whose hold was long ...
... sixties eagerly claimed that their art had superseded that of Europe , their eagerness was itself a period phenomenon . The American Revolution had held , deep in its heart , the vision of a corrupt Europe , a Europe whose hold was long ...
Page 1711
... sixties the belief that it was the mission of New York to set cultural standards for Europe and the Western cultures of the Pacific , including Australia - sprang from the narcissistic assumption that people everywhere aspired to the ...
... sixties the belief that it was the mission of New York to set cultural standards for Europe and the Western cultures of the Pacific , including Australia - sprang from the narcissistic assumption that people everywhere aspired to the ...
Page 1717
... sixties and seventies . One was the increased attachment of art teaching to universities , which meant that theory tended to be raised above practice and making . Thinking deep thoughts about histories and strategies was more noble than ...
... sixties and seventies . One was the increased attachment of art teaching to universities , which meant that theory tended to be raised above practice and making . Thinking deep thoughts about histories and strategies was more noble than ...
Page 1740
... sixties , when there were fewer artists , collectors and museums , the differences between New York's new - art environment and the " classical " European avant - garde , circa 1900-30 , were perhaps not so obvious , although they ...
... sixties , when there were fewer artists , collectors and museums , the differences between New York's new - art environment and the " classical " European avant - garde , circa 1900-30 , were perhaps not so obvious , although they ...
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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