Robert Hughes, Time magazine’s art critic for 30 years, says he wrote this memoir to explore his life and its meaning. The results are decidedly mixed, and I ended up skimming sections—like his Catholic education. He arrived in New York in the late Sixties, after Abstract Expressionism had peaked and is interesting on Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, two prominent champions, who, he says, showed no interest or understanding in older art, or merely saw is as a precursor to the art of their time.
In her biography of Greenberg, Alice Goldfarb Marquis suggests he and Rosenberg were like a couple of Talmudic scholars arguing at great length, and in her account they did seem to generate more heat than light, leaving me to wonder what made them so important. But getting back to Hughes, he does lead the reader through his own education and growing self-confidence as a critic, two days of looking at Pierre Bonnard’s work, intriguing comments on Paul Klee, deciding that narrative has a valuable place in art, and noting that Tiny Tim believed in himself in the way that only the very worst artists, such as Julian Schnabel and Madonna, can do.
He does have a way with words. Now I want to re-read The Shock of the New and, after his descriptions of his time in Spain, I also want to read his book “Barcelona”. And maybe go back to Australia to see work by some of his favorite painters there.
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