Notebook: King Robert
"Notebook: King Robert," by Richard Rhodes, Winter 2006, p. 14
ROBERT HUGHES IS UPSTAIRS. I have a ten o’clock interview with him at Toronto’s King Edward Hotel and I’m waiting for the publicist to take me there. It’s a Monday and I spent the weekend reading his new book, a volume of memoirs (his first) called Things I Didn’t Know, which reads like an adventure story for art critics.
Hughes is one of only a handful of critics with a reputation that extends beyond the art world. He made his name in North America as the long-standing art critic at Time magazine, a post from which he reached 400,000 readers weekly from 1970 until recently. He also wrote books like The Fatal Shore, a noted history of Australia, and other titles on art and culture, including his 2003 biography Goya, written during Hughes’s recovery from a near-fatal car accident in 1999.
A harrowing account of that accident opens the new book. It made me wonder about exactly who I would be meeting; it would certainly not be the Robert Hughes of an early Time photograph that has been my image of him over the years. That would be a younger man with curling hair, dressed in leather, posing with a burly, gleaming motorcycle. I tell him this when we meet. He walks slowly toward me, one hand on a cane, the other extended to shake hands. “You’re meeting a broken man,” he says, but the voice and smile say otherwise.
Hughes turns out to be a delight, with a lovely habit of reworking every question into one that he actually wants to answer. He seems a long way from the fierce and scathing Robert Hughes who lampooned the contemporary-art scene of the 1980s in a verse poem called The Sohoiad that once ran in the New York Review of Books. Julian Schnabel bore the brunt of his disaffection and, for a while, Hughes seemed to set himself outside contemporary art—a route of ruin for any critic. But then he would write a story about some new, ribbon-like Brice Marden paintings and give a career-stalled artist powerful new momentum.
From his new book you learn that the experience of seeing art washed away in the Florence floods of 1966 shaped Hughes’s decisive belief in the value of the past for art. In his writing, Hughes retrieves that value with visceral phrases that live in the present tense. He writes about Piero della Francesca and Giovanni Pisano and Goya not as dead artists but as living artists with human traits, expressed succinctly and memorably, in their art. His prose, like the man himself, stands as an object lesson in vitality.
(Hear the half-hour interview at www.canadianart.ca.)
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