Ray Hughes dead at 72: Art loses some of its colour

Ray Hughes had no truck with the pretentiousness of some gallery owners but was fiercely loyal to those artists he chose to show.

Artist Jun Chen stands behind Ray Hughes, subject of Ray Hughes, finallist in the Archibald Prize 2017. Picture: WireImage

I last saw Ray Hughes, who died last week, aged 72, at the Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW. He had been painted by Jun Chen as a dejected, broken figure confined to a wheelchair, glimpsed in the opening of a pair of curtains. To someone who hadn’t seen him for several years, the image was shocking and moving. It was thus even more of a surprise and a pleasure to meet him at the preview, wheelchair-bound indeed but bright and full of his familiar roguish humour.

Hughes, who began his career as an art dealer in Brisbane, moved to Sydney in the mid-1980s and soon established himself as a significant presence in the Sydney gallery world. He introduced several Queensland artists who had been previously unfamiliar to Sydney audiences, of whom the most significant proved to be Bill Robinson. But Hughes also had an eye for art from beyond the narrow confines of the contemporary art world.

He loved showing work from Africa; at one point he exhibited rugs from Afghanistan in which tribal weavers had incorporated motifs that had been forced upon their consciousness by the war against Russian occupation that predated the more ­recent conflicts in that country. And most importantly he helped to introduce contemporary Chinese art to Australian collectors: in the ensuing decades, contemporary Chinese art grew from a specialised interest to an irresistible fashion.

Hughes was a larger-than-life character who affected loud suits and even louder ties, deliberately flouting the conventions expected either of traditional or contemporary art dealers. In private, he was thoughtful and perceptive, but he liked to disguise this ­beneath a veneer of brashness. There were countless examples but one that I always recall came at the end of an opening when he climbed halfway up the stairs of his Surry Hills gallery and ­announced that we had all freeloaded long enough on his booze and that we could now either pull out our chequebooks or piss off.

Hughes in front of a portrait of himself, an entry in the Archibald Prize 1997.

Hughes’s manner and the ethos of his gallery were a refreshing change from the humourless earnestness of the postmodernists, who had first become a force with the Futur*Fall conference at Sydney University in 1984 and had gone on to dominate the later 1980s before eventually running out of steam in the late 90s.

Meanwhile less art came to be packaged in ever more theory, and although postmodernists were ­always speaking of wit and irony, no one was actually allowed to smile, let alone laugh.

It was particularly amusing when Yuill Crowley, then perhaps the most purist PoMo gallery in Sydney, moved into the top floor of the Hughes gallery building. On nights when openings co­incided, the crowds could not have been more different; a few blokey young artists with cans of beer in hand would venture upstairs to ­inspect the work at Yuill/Crowley — but seldom would the pursed-lipped feminists and cranky art theory students in black enter the Sodom and Gomorrah of ­Hughesland.

I didn’t always agree with ­Hughes about the merit of the ­artists he liked, but his love of art was genuine, irresistible and infectious. His private apartment was hung with pictures from floor to ceiling, and he was personally generous and encouraging to his stable of artists.

In these ­respects he had much in common with other legendary Sydney dealers of a couple of ­decades ago, however different they may have been in personality and in the images they chose to cultivate in their professional lives.

What men like Chandler Coventry, Frank Watters and Rex Irwin shared with Hughes was a deep love of art and a great loyalty to the artists they represented. Watters has apparently never let an artist go, no matter how little money he or she makes for the gallery. And when Channy Coventry was in the last months of his life, he would lie in bed at night looking at pictures on the wall with a torch.

These were and are dealers with character and passion, and their clients and collectors were people who loved pictures and ­objects and filled their houses with them. Watters once told me how a new collector had asked whether the purchase he had just made would be a good investment. “No,” was Watters’s reply.

These days, contemporary art has become a transnational business, increasingly involved with the corporate world. Prices have been grossly inflated and reputations manipulated in a far more professional way than was ever possible before. And now faceless art advisers direct clients with no instinctive interest in art to buy ­increasingly expensive work for investment.

Hughes will be missed by friends but he is also missed in an art world that needs more dealers with character, conviction and passion to foster collectors of the same nature, for they are the true supporters of the careers of artists and thus of a deeper artistic culture.