AN EYE-OPENING SPECTACLE OF OVERKILL
Robert Hughes reveals his fatal flaw in excepts from an unfinished memoir, while samples of his art criticism are a reminder of his formidable talent
When the art critic Robert Hughes died in 2012, at 74, he left behind an unfinished memoir, portions of which are published for the first time in The Spectacle of Skill, a plump new anthology of his writing.
It’s an eye-opener. It contains some of the most nakedly emotional prose this stinging and insolent writer ever committed to paper, in a chapter about the suicide of his estranged son, Danton, a sculptor, at 34.
Hughes wasn’t a proper father to his only child, he writes, because his waking hours were a lunatic blend of “infidelities, booze, my responsibilities as a card-carrying member of the New York literati” and because he was mired in a marriage between “emotional cripples”.
The tone is sombre in this section. You’re reminded that Hughes’ life had its share of black patches, notably a car accident that crushed him “like a sardine in a can squashed by a hammer” and nearly killed him in 1999. The aftermath was recounted in a previous memoir, Things I Didn’t Know (2006).
The unfinished memoir picks up where the earlier one left off, with the Australian writer’s arrival in New York and the start of his tenure, in 1970, as art critic for Time magazine. The chapter that will open eyes in the art world is titled Graft — Things You Didn’t Know.
In it, Hughes alleges that some of the bestknown American critics, editors and curators of the last half of the 20th century were on the take, demanding (or expecting) paintings from the artists they wrote about, recommended or chose to exhibit.
He names names, in a big way. These include the legendary art critic Clement Greenberg (whom Hughes had outed before in this regard) and Thomas B Hess, who edited Art News and later wrote criticism for New York magazine. He also takes aim at Henry Geldzahler, the Metropolitan Museum’s first curator for 20th-century art, and many others.
There’s a scene in which Geldzahler forces his way into Hughes’ SoHo loft and asks to see his “collection”. When Hughes says there isn’t one, Geldzahler is said to have replied: “Well. Someone in here is going to die poor, isn’t he?”
Is this mere score-settling? (“Do you know what Clem says about you?” Hughes recalls hearing. “He says you can write, but you’ve got a bad eye.”) It’s difficult to say. But a skunk stripe of nastiness sneaks into his memoir, in this section and in others.
In a drive-by aside, he refers to the American painter Helen Frankenthaler as an “overrated hack-ess”. He draws a bead on a female critic, with whom he had an affair decades earlier, noting that she “not only accepted freebies but positively raked them in”. He adds, chivalrously, that she was “one of the most extreme cases of misplaced self-confidence I have ever come across”. (He also refers to Frankenthaler as “the complete princesse juice” and gives his critic-girlfriend’s mother some Yiddish-inflected dialogue out of a bad cartoon.)
Watching president Ronald Reagan deliver a funeral oration for the astronauts who died in the space shuttle Challenger, Hughes describes their remains as “a sort of human pate”. Literature has a bad sex award. Where is its bad taste award?
Elsewhere in this unfinished memoir there is sclerotic overkill. Hughes was a longtime loather of television. When he writes about it here, you can sense his shirt buttons popping, to very little except unintentionally comic effect. Sample snippet from a tired aria: “more Americans had heard of John Wayne Bobbitt’s severed penis than of the French Revolution”.
There are many other things in The Spectacle of Skill. Before I mention them, I should pause to comment that I am a fan of Hughes. My parents subscribed to Time magazine; I grew up reading him. His columns were a weekly intellectual spanking (they reminded me how unlearned I was about art) and a flinty tutoring in painting and rhetoric. I still find him tonic.
Reading Hughes over time, you learned that there was often a worm in the bottle. “I am completely an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense,” he wrote in his first memoir. “I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work, or a good carpenter chopping dovetails, or someone tying a Bimini hitch that won’t slip. I don’t think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones.”
So far, so good, despite my urge to quibble over definitions (and uses) of so-called primitivism. But he is compelled to add: “Consequently, most of the human race doesn’t matter much to me,” words from which it is a short trip to a sharp cliff, even though he quickly tacks on the caveat, as if impelled by counsel, “outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights.”
Swallowing the worm, in terms of Hughes’ art criticism, meant understanding that this formidable writer had a far better feel for dead artists than living ones. This volume prints some of his criticism for Time, including perceptive essays on James Whistler and Jackson Pollock. He loathed most American art of the 1980s, The Spectacle of Skill reminds us. He took aim at that decade’s art with the kind of whooping enthusiasm with which Slim Pickens, in Dr Strangelove, rode a nuclear warhead toward the Earth.
He likened Julian Schnabel’s painting to Sylvester Stallone’s acting. He zinged Jenny Holzer’s “failed epigrams” and Barbara Kruger’s “smugly ‘challenging’ slogans”. He was no fonder, for the most part, of Francesco Clemente, Robert Mapplethorpe or Jean-Michel Basquiat.
He deplored the money that flooded the art market in the 1980s. “Art prices are largely about voyeurism and toxic snobbery,” he wrote. “They are what you see when you peer up the anus of ‘culture.’ ”
This large volume, welcome though it is, is unwieldy. The excerpts from some of Hughes’ other books — The Fatal Shore, about Australian history, Goya, Barcelona, Rome — rest uneasily next to his criticism and more personal writing. Out of context, these lumps feel undigested.
Hughes is a terrific writer about fishing. It gives you a sense of his ready wit and of his ability to spare himself least of all in his work, to note that the title of his fishing book, excerpted here, is A Jerk on One End.
© 2015 The New York Times