The New Criterion

Television is the least discriminating of cultural forms, and one doesn’t expect it to provide a sensitive account of the history of art. Nonetheless, small-screen films about painting and sculpture are quite numerous on the European side of the Atlantic: ambitious producers like to make them, for they carry prestige within the television business and can be surprisingly popular in the world at large. Some years ago, looking for a rival to Sir Kenneth Clark’s acclaimed set of programs entitled “Civilisation,” the British Broadcasting Corporation invited Robert Hughes to write and narrate eight hour-long scripts in which he would describe some of the themes of twentieth-century painting. His Shock of the New (first published in 1981 and now revised) both records and expands the text used for the series. It is a book, certainly, but its manner belongs to the original medium. Hughes had formidable qualifications for the television exercise. He is evidently no lover of study or reflection and he is not a popularizer. That is, he never gives the impression that he knows more than he is saying. Thus he avoids the de-haut-en-bas accent that many viewers found irritating in Clark (who, besides being a pioneer of commercial television, was a scholar and a genuinely cultivated man). Hughes is demotic, a pugnacious enthusiast for modern art. His regular readers know that there is something thrilling in his egotism. Self-portraiture was part of the television programs and it is also part of the book. Not that Hughes says enough about himself: it’s just that The Shock of the New has a voice as well as a literary style, the tone of a man reading what he himself has written to be put on the teleprompter.

Hughes says that the separate chapters of The Shock of the New are about five times longer than their original scripts. I think that when he expanded them he entered difficult territory. The lengthier version opens Hughes to criticism from people who know more about, say, Matisse than he does. In fact his reliance on secondary sources shows that there is no topic in modern art about which he has particular and individual knowledge. But Hughes is a man who can put carping professors back in their places. No, the problem with the book as it now stands is that it bores the reader. Hughes the writer has a problem with the attention span of his audience. His opinions can be exhilarating, his explanations are usually dull. There is a pleasure to be found in reading instant and suprematist judgments. “The lingo of avant-gardism was brain-dead in English by the Eighties, but it survived in other languages, especially German.” Bash! and on we go to the next subject. But the lingering impression is that Hughes’s own lingo is enlivening in snatches, and that we would not wish to have any longer discussion—not from his pen—of the language of art criticism in different contemporary cultures.

Hughes published a book in Britain last year about the German-born immigrant painter Frank Auerbach, who lives in London. The text wasn’t too long but it felt too long. Its meat was contained in an abbreviation published in The New York Review of Books. On the evidence of the pieces reprinted in Nothing if Not Critical (Hughes is silly to associate himself with Shakespeare’s foulest and most designing villain), he loses force when his pieces extend beyond about four thousand words. So it is with many of us, but I worry that expatiation in Hughes’s writing is effective only when he has shady dealings within his sights. Articles on the Rothko scandal, Berenson’s elastic probity, and Warhol’s public image are good from beginning to end. He has no clue about the true value of Rothko’s painting—connoisseurship as a matter of high taste and visual acumen might have been invented by die Martians, as far as Hughes is concerned— but he has a sort of relish for impropriety, and the Warhol essay is carried along not only by impatience with this inadequate artist but also by social horror.

It has been Hughes’s ill fortune to have covered art in New York during the Warhol period. Little wonder that there is so much scorn in his writing. But do we not detect a faint hint of rivalry when he describes Warhol? In 1982 Hughes deplored

the shallow painter who understood more about the mechanisms of celebrity than any of his colleagues, whose entire sense of reality was shaped, like Reagan’s sense of power, by the television tube. Each, in his way, coming on like Huck Finn; both obsessed with serving the interests of privilege. Together, they signify a new moment: the age of “supply-side” aesthetics.

Or are we meant to feel an equation between Huck and Australian-born Bob Hughes, who gives us just three or four tantalizing glimpses of his early life? We would like to know more about Hughes the celebrity because he is himself so “supply-side.” Read these books, including the Auerbach monograph, and you still do not know which artists he treasures, only the artists of whom he approves. Conveniently, he supplies a list of them. They are Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Motherwell, Antoni Tàpies, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Arthur Boyd, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Ilya Kabakov, Avigdor Arikha, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Nancy Graves, William Tucker, Joel Shapiro, Frank Auerbach, Howard Hodgkin, R. B. Kitaj, Anselm Kiefer, Susan Rothenberg, Neil Jenney, Sean Scully, Elizabeth Murray, Martin Puryear, Tony Cragg, “and maybe one of two hopeful group events such as the collaboration of Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival).”

The justice or otherwise of this list of artists is not an issue. The problem is that one cannot imagine Hughes writing a book in their praise. He—and they—might benefit if he wrote exhibition catalogues, for this is the purest form of appreciative criticism. But that would not be in his style. The muse of Nothing if Not Critical is no goddess of the liberal arts. Hughes’s inspiration is decline. The folly of much art of the Eighties makes his prose crackle. However, he cannot provide a shape to our decline. (Nor, in fairness, can any other writer.) The most interesting chapter of The Shock of the New is, unusually for Hughes, helpless. It is entitled “The Future That Was” and its purpose is to cover the years since the book was first issued. The obligation to give historical form to the period defeats him. He also, in this chapter, fails to write convincingly about those very artists—Jenney, Kiefer, Scully, Hodgkin, et al.—whom he elsewhere asserts to be producing the best art of our time. He should write more considered pieces about them, and not in a book that purports to be history. We know that Hughes has a historical sense, for it is displayed in his book The Fatal Shore, which had nothing to do with art. Television gave Hughes his opportunity to become an inventive art historian and simultaneously ruined his chances in that area. It is the enemy of cultural history. With a touch of a button it can summon past events, but it cannot show that we are enriched by knowledge of them. Neither can Hughes. He is a tough victim, but a victim nonetheless.