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