A true artist of criticism

GIFTED story-teller Robert Hughes was a colossus in the international art world.

Robert Hughes

ROBERT Hughes was the most celebrated critic of any of the arts in Australian history, and one of the most famous anywhere in the world. But he was, first and last, an art critic, plying his trade for decades from 1970 as the influential critic of Time magazine.

Hughes, who died on Monday afternoon US time in a hospital in the Bronx, New York, was the author of a pioneering study, The Art of Australia, written when he was in his early 20s and which later became a famous ABC-TV series.

It was followed in 1980 by the first of the book-length studies that dovetailed with the BBC/Time Life doco series, The Shock of the New, about modernism, and in 1997 American Visions, a monumental study of American art.

Between them, however, there was The Fatal Shore, Hughes's book about convict Australia and one of the great works of Australian literature. It riveted the attention of the world with its powerful depiction of our bloody and dramatic foundation.

In 1999, Hughes was involved in a car accident in Western Australia, which led to a controversial set of legal trials and left him crippled.

In 2005 he made a major study of the great Spanish painter Goya and in 2006 published his memoir Things I Didn't Know.

His last book, published last year, was a study of the city of Rome, mingling history and art criticism in the familiar, provocative Hughes manner.

He was the greatest essayistic writer - arguably the greatest writer of non-fiction - in Australian history and he was also a magnetic and dazzling talker and a highbrow TV talking head.

Hughes was so histrionically commanding and debonair, and had such a born storyteller's mastery of the vivid metaphor and the arresting anecdote, that he rivalled legends of the medium such as Kenneth Clark and David Attenborough on their own turf.

He brought to the practice of bread and butter, shirtsleeves journalism, at every level from the thousand-word review to the multi-million-dollar TV series, a tremendous panache, a muscular individualism and a scaled artistry.

Whether he was writing a 10,000-word essay about fishing (a great enthusiasm before his accident) for The New York Review of Books or dashing off a one-liner for an interviewer, he had the same poise, the same "relaxed correctness of carriage". These were qualities writer A. A. Phillips saw as the opposite of the cultural cringe, and they made Hughes seem the most Australian of the handful of famous expatriates born just before World War II.

He was born in 1938 to a family he described once as "very establishment, but not rich". His brother was the eminent QC and former Liberal attorney-general Tom Hughes, 17 years his senior.

Their father, whom Robert revered, died when he was 11 and his days at Sydney's St Ignatius College Riverview seem to have been his blacking factory. He was known as "f . . . ing Churchill" because of his precocious pomposity and he said that the corporal punishment of the Jesuits gave him the faintest hint of what life might have been like for the convicts.

He was grateful, though, for the Latin they taught him and the poetry they made him learn and the Catholicism of his childhood colours all his work. By the time he reached Sydney University, where he studied architecture but didn't take a degree, he was in the process of outgrowing it.

He met Clive James and scribbled and did cartoons first for Honi Soit then for Tom Fitzgerald's Nation and The Bulletin.

As a young man he wanted to be a painter but decided early on that for all the confidence of his drawing he was too derivative. "I was the dabbest De Kooning imitator in the southern hemisphere," he said with that mixture of confidence and self-mockery that never left him.

So a world elsewhere, Europe in the first instance, beckoned. "I had this great hunger," he said, "for a Mediterranean lifestyle, little knowing that one of the last places left where you could actually enjoy a Mediterranean lifestyle was Sydney, Australia."

And so he found himself in Orbetello, 143km north of Rome, on his way to see Australian writer Alan Moorehead, who had told him he should get out of Australia.

Moorehead, the author of Cooper's Creek and The Fatal Impact, was an abiding influence on Hughes and helped to cultivate his early interest in the breadth of the historical context that sustains art.

The Art of Australia (1966) in its first form was the polemical book of a brilliant young man, throwing colour around in every direction but crackling with energy.

The first version of the book was written in 1961 when Hughes was 23. Even the highly revised and resonant version that first made Hughes famous in Australia with its 1970 TV version could make Edmund Campion, the Catholic priest-historian, say that the young Hughes used adjectives the way the chefs of Normandy use butter.

Eventually Hughes found himself in London freelancing. There he hooked up with the agents of his fame at the BBC, doco makers who wanted to popularise art without compromising it.

He also hitched up with the turbulent bisexual Danne Emerson, who was the mother of his son, Danton, who was to die tragically by his own hand in 2001.

In 1970 Hughes was headhunted by A.T. Baker of Time to become the magazine's regular art critic. He was so certain he would not get the gig that he asked for a byline in the days when Time was written anonymously. He got it and his life - and the world of letters - was transformed by his transference to New York.

His friend Clive James said once, "I think he just needed something that big at his feet."

Hughes said that he shuddered to think what would have happened to him if he had not collided with Time and New York. The job allowed him to be the natural custodian of classic art, which he already was by instinct, while allowing him to fight his battles and make his judgments of his contemporaries.

The collection of shortish accounts of the widest range of painters collected in Nothing If Not Critical (1990) is a dazzling exhibition of his skill across the board and in the vicinity of the world's great museums and the imaginary museum of world art history.

It's here you can read Hughes talking about Caravaggio's figures as "rough trade with hair like black ice-cream" and here, too, that you can read him describe Rothko as a painter striving with an impulse to sublimity like that of a Hebrew prophet without ever finding the ideal means to express that vision.

Much of Hughes's deepest sympathy lay with painters who had retained the full panoply of traditional skills and figuration. With Lucian Freud, say, or with Frank Auerbarch, on both of whom he wrote monographs.

Hughes's famous rhetorical scorn as a critic was sometimes misunderstood. I once reminded him, in 1987, that he had said of Andy Warhol that if the Nazis had established a long-lived Reich Warhol would have screen printed them all - a double dolloped denunciation. Warhol had just died and Hughes looked at me with a stricken expression and said, "Did I? He was all right, Andy."

You weren't going to catch this Catholic speaking ill of the dead and his reaction gave a glimpse into how much his "critical stance" was a matter of occasion, not bile.

That was at the moment when The Fatal Shore had just been published. When Hughes lay, as he feared at the time, dying, at the time of his West Australian accident, he kept saying, over and over, "Please God let me live to write a masterpiece." In fact, he had already written it.

The Fatal Shore is a beautifully imagined work, extraordinary in its sweep and its prose, a vision of convict Australia as a gulag, and also of Hughes's apprehension about the power of hope and wonderment in this new land.

It was not for nothing that his one-time enemy Bernard Smith said Hughes had done for Australia and its convict inheritance what the great French historian Jules Michelet had done for the people of France when he took their revolution and gave it back to them as a form of folk experience.

Stuart Macintyre, no friend to non-academic history, compared The Fatal Shore to the classic English historian Edward Gibbon. Praise doesn't get higher.

Here is the end of The Fatal Shore, on Port Arthur: "The visitor today, wandering through what remains of the penitentiary with other tourists, can hardly grasp the isolation it once stood for. Perhaps that is easier deduced from Nature itself, from the barely penetrable labyrinth of space that England chose as its abode of crime; and to see that, one need only go to the black basalt cliffs that frame the Tasman Peninsula, crawl through the bushes to their unfenced rim and gaze down on the wide, wrinkled, glimmering sheet of our imprisoning sea."

He followed The Fatal Shore with his shining if uneven study Barcelona (1992) in which he bites off huge quantities of Catalonian history, but succeeds in writing some of the very greatest criticism of Gaudi and his Sagrada Familia that has been written.

His American Visions (1997) - written in the midst of a depression that was like an ongoing nightmare to Hughes - is full of a fury to incorporate the glory of the greatest American art and the drama of the history it comprehends and comes out of. So we get Hughes's hymns to the great Saint Gaudens' statue of General Sherman in Central Park, but also the full text of Sherman on war as hell.

Hughes's own life turned into a hell when he found himself, in the aftermath of an accident in 1999, having driven on the wrong side of the road apparently. It led to a protracted series of trials in which he initially pleaded not guilty to dangerous driving. The case was first dismissed then pursued again by the West Australian government.

There was plenty of opprobrium against him, a grim irony since he was never fully to recover. He ended up pleading guilty and paying both a small fine as well as settling out of court a defamation suit brought by the people in the other car. The whole thing cost him $250,000.

He was supported by his brother, Tom, and by his nephew-in-law, Malcolm Turnbull, whom he adored. He told me that Turnbull and his wife, Hughes's niece Lucy, behaved like saints, nursing him during all the long and painful ordeal that followed.

It is typical of Hughes that he did not stop writing as a consequence of the accident that put him in a wheelchair.

There was the study of Goya, which brought together his old preoccupations with pain and the effortless sense of drama of a great spectacuralist of the imagination.

It's natural that this later work, written under such difficulty, doesn't have quite the same brio as the effortlessly buoyant work of the man who still in late middle age dressed like a duke, could go to a Broadway first night in torn sandshoes and liked nothing better than to fish on the open sea. But every last word he wrote was alive and impassioned.

With his booming, leathery Sydney voice, his grace and his handsomeness and a gift for language that was fundamental and huge we will never look upon his like again. No figure in Australian history has had the same sort of soaring self-confidence without ever for a second surrendering a jot or a vowel of his harbourside self-possession.

He was, on top of that, a kind and considerate man, far less vain, for all the richness of his critical and literary gifts than most academics, far less cocky than a lot of journalists.

He is survived by his third wife, Doris Downes Hughes, and his stepchildren, Freeborn Garrettson Jewett IV and Fielder Douglas Jewett. His first wife, Danne Emerson, and his son, Danton, predeceased him.

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes AO, art critic, historian, writer. Born Sydney, July 28, 1938. Died New York, August 6, 2012, aged 74.