Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists
Robert Hughes
Language: English
Pages: 448
ISBN: 014016524X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From 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.
Relationships with other artists; but when it comes to interpretation, out come the violins, the woodwinds, the kettledrums, everything. Rothko’s Houston murals “create a total environment, a unified atmosphere of all-encompassing, awe-inspiring spirituality.” By the end of his life, the tragic hero of her text “had attained a harmony, an equilibrium, a wholeness in the Jungian sense, that enabled him to express universal truths in his breakthrough works, fusing the conscious with the.
Seat, And a Thing that is hardly a thing. This is the caricature of Surrealist kitsch Lichtenstein invokes in paintings such as Reclining Nude, 1977: one figure sporting Swiss-cheese holes in the manner of Arp, another in a stiff suit like a Magritte businessman, a Kandinsky-style wiggle here, a Tanguy pebble there. In parodying these caricatures of Surrealism, Lichtenstein is certainly showing a postmodernist turn of mind—recycling the already recycled; but what else is going on? Not much,.
About him proliferate and are often true: a jail sentence in Wormwood Scrubs as a young man, the rages in his broken-up studio, the destruction of work. One German collector gave Morley $40,000 for a painting and was nonplused to see the artist slash his canvas to ribbons before handing the check back. Such gestures establish a profile. But it is the work that matters. One can plunge into Morley’s peculiar oeuvre with a painting that presents his dislocations at full stretch: Age of Catastrophe,.
Of mixed metaphors and rhetorical hiccups, thickened with unparsable gibberish that would break the point of any editorial pencil—“The disparity between the reflectiveness of the plates and the paint were in disagreement with each other.” CVJ (the initials are supposed to stand for a private term of endearment between Schnabel and his wife, a rich Belgian girl) has no beginning and no end, only a disjointed middle, a string of maundering art-world anecdotes, stilted attempts at aphorism and.
The righte Place.” The current exhibition of Van Dyck’s English portraits, organized by Oliver Millar at the National Portrait Gallery in London, shows how well Van Dyck’s fluency has lasted. It is a delectable exhibition, though cramped and clumsily installed, and it makes one realize how far the tradition of formal portraiture has declined since the days when Van Dyck epitomized it. Certainly, Van Dyck knew how to make his sitters look handsomer than they were. Any cosmetician can do that; it.