Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Robert Hughes

Looking at the “by the same author” list on the fly leaf of Robert Hughes’s latest book, Barcelona, published a few months ago, it is clear that we have been the happy recipients of an explosion of productivity. It began in 1987 with the expansive and masterly history of the discovery and colonization of Australia, The Fatal Shore, and has continued apace. It was followed by two monographs — one on Lucian Freud (1988) and one on Frank Auerbach (1990) — a new edition of The Shock of the New (1991), his survey of twentieth-century art, and a weighty collection of his articles, Nothing If Not Critical (1991). Six substantial publications in five years represents an output of Ackroydian prolixity, a veritable torrent of creative juices all the more impressive when one notes that, apart from The Shock of the New, the publication listed before The Fatal Shore’s appearance in 1987 was Heaven and Hell in Western Art, published in 1969. What had Hughes been doing during all those years between? The answer is: writing art criticism (and, doubtless, researching and writing The Fatal Shore). Hughes has been art critic for Time magazine since 1970; notching up a near quarter century as the art world’s most acute and uncompromising observer and interpreter. His position is pre-eminent and unchallenged: he is far and away the best art critic of his generation.

The reissue of the The Shock of the New provides a handy opportunity to reassess Hughes’s achievements. A swift random collation between the two books threw up no examples of editorial doctoring, except, as might be expected, in the final chapter, “The Future that Was,” which has been significantly altered. The first edition signed off in 1980 and, a decade and more further on, the scene had changed dramatically. Hughes’s conclusion in 1980 was gloomy, but one could detect an undertone that was cautiously upbeat. In the new edition his despair, not to say contempt, is conspicuous. That the worst excesses of the art market, with its obscene inflation of value, along with a frenzied hyping of reputation and image-mongering, have been played out in his own backyard, so to speak, probably explains Hughes’s dismay, but his savage indignation makes a potent fuel for his criticism. Hughes is an exceptionally fine writer and, as with many great critics, it is scorn and vituperation which set his pen bulging with spleen, but, in castigating the minor talents and ego-driven poseurs, he negatively defines what he regards as positive and estimable. As he excoriates the prancings and posturings of the contemporary art world, a credo emerges and, so I contend, sets standards of evaluation, creates parameters of excellence, which are very hard to refute. (Interestingly enough, his approbatory gaze has crossed the Atlantic and heavily favours figuration. The expanded final chapter makes it clear that Hughes regards certain British artists as repositories of those qualities he admires. As well as Freud and Auerbach the list includes Hockney, Hodgkin, Bacon, Kitaj and Kossoff.)

If the fundamental function of criticism is to make a value judgement, to establish a system of ranking, to say why this is good and that is mediocre, and in so doing to explain and justify why the critic believes this to be the case, then Hughes’s work over the years is as consistent and thorough as any. Of course all criticism is subjective, and of course it is just an expression of opinion, but in any argument the best arguer wins, other opinions are altered thereby and a consensus emerges. It is not set in cement, true, but broadly speaking, as a result of informed and intelligent critical discourse, standards are laid down and ideals are established which, if they are to be overturned by alternative criteria, have to be equally convincingly propounded and defended in their own right. This is the essence of the critical dance, if you like, and no one trips the light fantastic more effectively than Hughes.

Consider this statement, for example, which comes from Hughes’s terrifyingly effective critical demolition of Julian Schnabel:

Every significant artist of the last hundred years, from Seurat to Matisse, from Picasso to Mondrian, from Beckmann to de Kooning was drilled (or drilled himself) in “academic” drawing — the long tussle with the unforgiving and real motif which, in the end, proved to be the only basis on which the great formal achievements of modernism could be raised. Only in this way was the right to radical distortion within a continuous tradition earned, and its results raised above the level of improvisory play.

As a critical yardstick this seems to me unimprovable. Set this to work and see what it does for you. What winnowing! What wheat separated from chaff! Suddenly it feels like a window has been flung open in a hot and foetid room to admit a cool and vital breeze. Clear-eyed, refreshed, we can now see artist X and artist Y for what they truly are; stripped of obfuscation and meretricious jargon, they can be safely consigned to the crowded spielraum of fraudsters and hacks, no-talents and airheads. This is the function of good criticism; this is the crucial purpose of evaluation, and this is what Hughes has been doing for the last couple of decades with commendable rigour and unflagging energy.

It is not enough merely to expose failings and denigrate, even though, by extension, an alternative canon will inevitably emerge. But Hughes also writes with genuine enthusiasm and his tastes are eclectic and range throughout art history, as a glance at the contents page of Nothing If Not Critical will attest. But even in an area where you would expect his critical Geiger counter to be bleeping violently he seeks to extract whatever merit he can. The case of “Land Art”—the physical shaping of a terrain, the arrangement and manipulation of natural phenomena in situ—is instructive. Hughes writes of Complex One by Michael Heizer, a large geometrical hill of rammed earth, bookended by triangles of reinforced concrete set in the Nevada desert:

Seen in isolation on the desert floor, under the pale burning blue skin of the sky, with the low sagebrush stretching away to the sun-charred and eroded rocks of the girdling range, Complex One is a magnificent and gratuitous spectacle… Even its minatory look, suggesting a bunker or an abandoned installation, seems proper to the site — the edge of the Nevada nuclear proving grounds.

Whatever you may feel about “Land Art” as an aesthetic concept, you must admit that Hughes’s refusal to sneer at this Ozymandian gesture, and instead to try and capture what is impressive about Complex One, is admirable — and entirely successful. It helps, of course, if you can write as well as that. Intriguingly, in the 1991 edition, these lines have been subtly altered. The skin of the sky is no longer “pale” though it is still “burning blue,” and the sun-charred rocks have gone also, leaving only the “eroded girdling range.” “Le style est l’homme même”—Buffon’s old saw is very apposite when contemplating Hughes’s achievement. His style is not flowing and limpid, it has a knotted, intense quality, heavily adjectival and adverbial, with a large and precise vocabulary and a powerful forensic spin to his sentences. There is nothing evanescent or moody in Hughes’s writing. His approach reminds me of those lines of Seamus Heaney in his early poem Digging:

Between my finger and thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

There is something irreducibly Heaneyesque — its heft, its palpable physicality — about Hughes’s “digging” that his editorial pruning won’t ever disguise. In a fine and recent essay (a reprint of a lecture delivered at the New York Public Library, published in The New York Review of Books) about Robert Mapplethorpe (that, incidentally, fixes Map-plethorpe’s reputation once and for all as a modestly talented photographer), Hughes reveals that he is a part-time carpenter. And there is in Hughes’s writing a true craftsman’s love of technique and precision. “I can make a drawer that slides … I love the tools, the smell of shavings, the rhythm of work,” Hughes says with justifiable pride, and I’ll bet he knows the difference between a haunched tenon and a double-lapped dovetail joint as well. Everything has its own name, and for a writer there is a magical pleasure to be gained in using it correctly. From a reader’s point of view one of the delights of Hughes’s criticism is in encountering just this facility. At random from The Shock of the New: the boat in the background of a Matisse seascape is “lateen rigged”; Bonnard is described sitting “quiet as an old tabby”; colours are “rose, madder, lilac, chrome yellow, viridian”; about Sullivan’s Guaranty Building in Buffalo we learn that “Sullivan underplayed his horizontals by recessing the face of the spandrels from the face of the piers.” We may not know exactly what it means, but it sounds wonderful and possesses the unmistakable frisson of authority.

Naturally, Homer nods from time to time, and Hughes, like any critic who is obliged to write about stuff he would never choose to see as a member of the public or art lover, occasionally falls back on tried and tested routines. Thus Sean Scully’s abstracts

fairly breathe deliberation and earnestness. Their light and colour relate to the Old Masters, in particular to Velázquez’s silvery greys and ochres over a dark ground. Their gravitas is real.

Sorry, no sale. But these moments are exceptionally rare, which is why they draw one up short, and, by and large, Hughes copes extremely well when writing about abstract painting. What more is there to say, really, in front of a Rothko or a Jackson Pollock other than record colour tones and the textures of the paint surface? It has always seemed to me one of the more telling and covert arguments against abstract painting that abstraction so reduces analytical discourse. The critic, the viewer, is left nearly wordless, like an amateur oenophile trying to describe the taste of a St Emilion. “Nice, blackcurranty, metallic … er …” Stand in front of a colour-field painting — however big and imposing, with however much gravitas — or a slashed Lucio Fontana, or an Yves Klein monochrome square, and try and analyse your feelings and thoughts in more than three sentences. Great art, good art, in any medium should stimulate complex responses. An impoverished vocabulary indicates, if not a corresponding shallowness, then a simplicity that somewhat vitiates its claims to be taken so seriously.

Two other virtues in Hughes’s critical persona need to be highlighted. First he is a phrase-maker of fine pithiness and wit. An aphoristic twang characterizes many of his judgements that, unusually, seems entirely natural and unforced. Hockney is summarized as the Cole Porter of figurative painting, not its Mozart; “Fischl country is suburban Long Island. It smells of unwashed dog, barbecue lighter fluid, sperm”; now that communism has been defeated, the rise of the American Right’s homophobia is explained thus: “having lost the barbarian at the gates, they went for the fairy at the bottom of the garden”; “for all its drawbacks, onanism was the one kind of sex that could not be controlled by the State or the Parent,” Hughes remarks on the masturbatory fantasy that underpins Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors; Caravaggio “thrashed about in the etiquette of early seicento cultivation like a shark in a net.” The wit, the temerity, the sense of humour that inform Hughes’s criticism are a marvellously rich seam in his prose, and it can be malignantly efficient when it comes to attacking pretension or vainglory. But Hughes’s strictures are never delivered lightly, merely to break a butterfly on a wheel, and here we can acknowledge the second facet of his criticism that makes it so valuable. Hughes is a historian, and one of the highest scholarship as well, judging from the exegetical thoroughness of The Fatal Shore. All his writings are buttressed by a marked consciousness of the traditions out of which art springs, and his criticism is liberally seasoned with historical asides and cultural references from all disciplines. Like Ruskin, too — and it is a just comparison — Hughes is signally aware of the socio-political dimensions of art and the art world. Indeed it could be claimed that his art criticism during the eighties gives a clearer sense of the blight of the Reagan years and of the various educational and cultural disasters afflicting the USA in particular and the West in general than many an op-ed columnist or professorial pundit. The Mapplethorpe essay is exemplary in this regard. Stimulated by the storm that arose over a publicly funded exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s erotic photographs, Hughes not only shows Mapplethorpe the exit door from the pantheon but also analyses the cultural malaise that produces both phenomena: a misplaced radical-chic veneration and a complementary right-wing fundamentalist witch-hunting. In addition, he outlines a defence of quality in art — as opposed to a catch-all relativism — that is as eloquent in its simplicity as in its passion. Expanding on his own fair skills as a carpenter Hughes remarks that

… when I see the level of woodworking in a Japanese structure like the great temple of Horyu-ji, the precision of the complex joints, the understanding of hinoki cypress as a live substance, I know that I couldn’t do anything like that if I had my own life to live over. People who can make such things are an élite; they have earned the right to be. Does this fill me … with resentment? Absolutely not. Reverence and pleasure, more like. Mutatis mutandis, it’s the same in writing and the visual arts. Not all cats are the same in the light … [but] these differences of intensity, meaning, grace can’t be set forth in a catechism or a recipe book. They can only be experienced and argued and then seen in relation to a history that includes a social history.

As a justification of a critical modus operandi this seems to me to be hard to better. And, moreover, it is one that Robert Hughes has been practising for almost thirty years: as artists and critics, aficionados and enthusiasts, writers and readers, we are all the richer for it.

1992