Robert Hughes Biography Quotes 10 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes was born on July 28, 1938, in Sydney, Australia, into a comfortable middle-class Catholic family whose expectations were respectable and practical rather than artistic. Sydney in the 1940s and 1950s was still culturally provincial by European standards, yet it carried the brash self-confidence of a nation reshaping itself after war and immigration. Hughes grew up with an alert sense that Australian culture was real but not yet fully articulated - a place where taste, class, and power were often negotiated in public institutions, newspapers, and clubs as much as in galleries.

Even early, he showed the temperament that would define him: impatient with cant, attuned to status games, and hungry for the wider world. Friends and later colleagues recalled a young man who read voraciously and argued relentlessly, already treating ideas as moral stakes. That moral seriousness - his belief that art mattered because it revealed how people lived and what they believed - made him unsuited to a quiet life in local professions and drew him toward criticism, a vocation that let him test the claims a culture made about itself.

Education and Formative Influences

Hughes attended St Ignatius' College, Riverview, a Jesuit school whose discipline and rhetorical training sharpened his instinct for structured argument even as he drifted away from orthodox belief. He briefly studied architecture at the University of Sydney, an education that left him with a builder's eye for space, materials, and the social uses of design, but he did not complete the degree; the pull of writing and the cosmopolitan art world proved stronger. In the early 1960s he left Australia for Europe, living in Italy and later London, absorbing Old Master painting, modernism, and the museum culture that would become both his classroom and his battleground.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

In London Hughes began publishing art criticism and quickly gained notice for prose that was both sensuous and combative; by the late 1960s he had moved to New York, writing for major magazines, most prominently Time, where he became one of the most influential English-language art critics of his generation. His breakthrough as a public intellectual came with television: the 1980 BBC series and book "The Shock of the New" made modern art legible as a drama of ideas, money, and politics rather than a private code for initiates. He followed it with "The Fatal Shore" (1986), a monumental history of Australia's convict era whose scale showed that his subject was ultimately power - how societies discipline bodies and manufacture myths. Later books such as "Nothing If Not Critical" (1990) consolidated his reputation, while "American Visions" (1997) and its companion series read the United States through its art as a struggle among landscape, technology, race, and capital; personal catastrophe also intervened when a 1999 car crash seriously injured him and killed his son Danton, an event that hardened his tone and deepened his contempt for euphemism.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Hughes believed criticism was not decorative commentary but a public ethic: to describe what one sees, locate it in history, and refuse the lies that culture tells when it is embarrassed by its own motives. His style fused architectural clarity with a novelist's appetite for character, and he wrote as if the reader deserved both pleasure and rigor. He distrusted art-world bureaucracy, celebrity piety, and the inflation of prices into meaning; behind his bravura was a fear that modern culture had replaced judgment with hype and called that liberation. Hence his bleakly funny definition of the critic's place in the media machine: "One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs". Psychologically, Hughes was drawn to artists whose ambition was inseparable from uncertainty, because doubt proved the work was wrestled into being rather than marketed into existence. His sympathy for creative anxiety and his contempt for smugness meet in the line: "The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize". That same moral lens shaped his attacks on the commodification of culture, where the market pretends to be history; when he remarked, "The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive". , it was less a quip than a diagnosis of a society that confused value with price and substituted investment logic for aesthetic experience.

Legacy and Influence

Hughes died on August 6, 2012, in New York City, having spent decades as a bridge between academic art history and mass audiences, and as a scourge of the euphemisms by which institutions defend themselves. His influence endures in the model he offered: criticism as narrative, history as argument, and style as a form of accountability. Admirers cite his ability to make looking feel urgent; detractors recall his severity and relish for combat. But even opponents acknowledged that he raised the standard for public writing about art, insisting that images belong to the world - to politics, to memory, to money, and to the conscience of the viewer.