Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and ArtistsFrom Holbein to Hockney, from Norman Rockwell to Pablo Picasso, from sixteenth-century Rome to 1980s SoHo, Robert Hughes looks with love, loathing, warmth, wit and authority at a wide range of art and artists, good, bad, past and present. As art critic for Time magazine, internationally acclaimed for his study of modern art, The Shock of the New, he is perhaps America’s most widely read and admired writer on art. In this book: nearly a hundred of his finest essays on the subject. For the realism of Thomas Eakins to the Soviet satirists Komar and Melamid, from Watteau to Willem de Kooning to Susan Rothenberg, here is Hughes—astute, vivid and uninhibited—on dozens of famous and not-so-famous artists. He observes that Caravaggio was “one of the hinges of art history; there was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same”; he remarks that Julian Schnabel’s “work is to painting what Stallone’s is to acting”; he calls John Constable’s Wivenhoe Park “almost the last word on Eden-as-Property”; he notes how “distorted traces of [Jackson] Pollock lie like genes in art-world careers that, one might have thought, had nothing to do with his.” He knows how Norman Rockwell made a chicken stand still long enough to be painted, and what Degas said about success (some kinds are indistinguishable from panic). Phrasemaker par excellence, Hughes is at the same time an incisive and profound critic, not only of particular artists, but also of the social context in which art exists and is traded. His fresh perceptions of such figures as Andy Warhol and the French writer Jean Baudrillard are matched in brilliance by his pungent discussions of the art market—its inflated prices and reputations, its damage to the public domain of culture. There is a superb essay on Bernard Berenson, and another on the strange, tangled case of the Mark Rothko estate. And as a finale, Hughes gives us “The SoHoiad,” the mock-epic satire that so amused and annoyed the art world in the mid-1980s. A meteor of a book that enlightens, startles, stimulates and entertains. |
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Page 135
Selected Essays on Art and Artists Robert Hughes. Édouard Manet After Édouard Manet died of tertiary syphilis in 1883 at the age of fifty - one , Émile Zola and Claude Monet helped carry his coffin to the grave . In life , his milieu had ...
Selected Essays on Art and Artists Robert Hughes. Édouard Manet After Édouard Manet died of tertiary syphilis in 1883 at the age of fifty - one , Émile Zola and Claude Monet helped carry his coffin to the grave . In life , his milieu had ...
Page 136
... Manet . In eyes that have viewed de Chirico's train stations , for in- stance , Manet's painting of a woman and a child at the Gare St. - Lazare acquires a strangeness that contradicts his intention of painting a peaceful urban scene ...
... Manet . In eyes that have viewed de Chirico's train stations , for in- stance , Manet's painting of a woman and a child at the Gare St. - Lazare acquires a strangeness that contradicts his intention of painting a peaceful urban scene ...
Page 137
... Manet was not exactly a modernist , he was certainly not an Impres- sionist . He never exhibited with the Impressionist group ; his aims were not compatible with theirs , much as they respected one another . Manet's firmly built ...
... Manet was not exactly a modernist , he was certainly not an Impres- sionist . He never exhibited with the Impressionist group ; his aims were not compatible with theirs , much as they respected one another . Manet's firmly built ...
Contents
of the City of Mahagonny | 3 |
Ancestors | 31 |
Nineteenth Century | 89 |
Copyright | |
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