There are two ways to handle being a cultural public figure. One is to be guarded, and to speak with scholarly precision. The other-when his big project casts its “Independence Day” shadows across the art world and his NEWSWEEK counterpart wants to do a story about him-is to invite this critic, in a voice that’s half Rumpole of the Bailey, half Oral Roberts, to his SoHo loft for a chin-wag about the state of things. In his digs, Hughes looks as if his 58 years were amply spent; he has an Oliver Reedish face (nose flattened in youth by a cricket bat) and a small paunch betraying the effects of a peripatetic life and his nature as, shall we say, a man of appetites. He pours two fingers of something called Old Sheep Dip, and starts the pasta boiling. With shards of blackened fish and mushrooms, it’s pretty good. “There’s no silence anywhere in America anymore,” he says. “We’d have just set up in some distant state forest, to shoot a segment on landscape painting, and instantly Winnebago doors would slam. Children in beanies would appear asking what the film was about. The cameraman would answer ‘Child sex slaves of the West-wanna be in it, Sonny?’”
In the flesh, Hughes is less stentorian than he is in “American Visions.” There, lie turns up in BBC field-guide multi (light blue shirt and khakis) in Shaker meeting halls, and out in Arizona with an artist who’s making a meteor crater into a sculpture. During eight one-hour episodes, Hughes tells Americans about their visual culture in pontificating tones: America, the most religious country in the West, has produced no great religious art. He dusts off intriguing facts: Santa Fe is the oldest European city in America. And he rolls out his nonpareil phrasemaking: the sculpture of chief Crazy Horse being dynamited into the Black Hills of South Dakota is “an art deco paperweight the size of a small Alp.”
“American Visions” is an opinionated cultural history, told in college-graduate words for thinking adults–something you almost never see on American television. It’s also as revisionist as Hughes ever gets. He reminds the viewer how slavery under-pinned practically every early American accomplishment, including the democratically elegant architecture of Hughes’s own favorite American, Thomas Jefferson. And he exposes an Albert Bierstadt painting called “The Last of the Buffalo” – with an Indian doing the killing-as propaganda covering the fact that white men with rifles almost exterminated the species in order “to destroy the Indians’ food base and reduce them to beggars.” If Hughes has a personal nit to pick, it’s with hagiographically inclined feminists who can’t see that Georgia O’Keeffe’s skull paintings “verge on kitsch surrealism.” Still, “American Visions” is more perceptive, less melodramatic and fresher than “The Shock of the New,” his 1981 PBS series about modern art that turned Robert Hughes into the world’s most well-known art critic.
The pressures of living up to being No. 1 eventually brought about a kind of desperation. Three years of suitcase living while shooting “American Visions” exacerbated his troubles into a full-blown crisis, which put a severe strain on Hughes’s second marriage. (He has a son, Danton, a sculptor in Australia, from his first.) Hughes says things are patched up now. “I went into an acute, agitated depression,” he says. Fortunately, Hughes had a kill-or-cure project in front of him-to write the book. “It was a huge test,” he says, “in the midst of a massive crisis of self-confidence: after all this television, did I still have any real critical faculties?” He got up every morning at 4, with a daily quota of 1,200 words. The whole project took nine months, straight through. “If I didn’t get the book on the shelves by the time the program aired, all was in vain.” He did, and the book is better than the program. On the page Hughes can give full throttle to his rhetoric. Take this on Thomas Cole’s “Consummation” (1836) from the “Course of Empire” series of paintings: “There is something rather prissy about Cole’s version of the awful delights of imperial Rome. No orgies-but he clearly had a great time doing the architecture of this marzipan city… [in] its nutty grandiosity and bathroom-like newness.” The pessimistic coda of the book rings like a courtroom closing argument: “Cultures do decay; and the visual culture of American modernism, once so strong, buoyant, and inventive, and now so harassed by its own sense of defeated expectations, may be no exception to that fact.”
Born in Sydney into a family of lawyers, Hughes spent five years at St. Ignatius boarding school. (“It helps to be a 17th-century Catholic like me to understand Bernini.”) After a brief stint at the University of Sydney, he followed the first of many loves, Brenda the ballet dancer, to England. He returned brokenhearted to paint “vaguely de Kooning-esque landscapes” to “subsidize my efforts as a writer.” Soon he took off again, for Europe. “In ‘68 I was staying with [sculptor] Xavier Corbero in Barcelona,” he recalls, “in a masia filled with German girls in blond helmet hair and white vinyl boots.” He managed to get enough written in London to attract the notice of Time, which brought him to the United States as its art critic. Hughes has been able to construct a remarkable career not just because he’s got what he calls a “near-eidetic memory” and a flair for serpentine sentences, but because he’s an English-speaking Alexis de Tocqueville who decided, What the hell, I’ll stay. Australians charm Americans by simply out-Americaning them. Their smiles are quicker and wider, their handshakes faster and firmer. They call you “mate” right away. Hughes has also made himself huge in art criticism by a simple and brave gambit: he’s taken over the center by arguing volubly with the fringies on both sides, instead of-as most of us do-seeking refuge in the middle by conceding a little to every edge. In “American Visions” (the book), Hughes ridicules the right for thinking art can change behavior: “Show people the wrong photo by Robert Mapplethorpe and suddenly America will be full of millions of priapic fists seeking the wrong orifices.” He condemns the left for its strident identity politics: “It is a very short step from the 1960s idea that the personal is political to the 1990s belief that the personal should be submerged in the tribal.” In these premillennial dog days, with so little basso pro-fundo art being made, we’re lucky to have him around as our great baritone scold. Besides, the man can cook.
