Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows part of a studio interview with Australian art critic and writer Robert Hughes conducted by arts journalist and television presenter Andrea Stretton. Hughes talks about his self-doubt in regard to his own writing and about other people’s feelings of self-doubt, with particular reference to the painter Paul Cézanne. Hughes’s comments about Cézanne are accompanied by images of three of Cézanne’s paintings. Stretton and Hughes sit facing one another with a table between them in front of a minimally decorated set.

Educational value points

• In the clip Robert Hughes (1938–) describes self-doubt as part of the creative process not only for artists and writers, but also for those like himself who critique. Although doubt can immobilise the creative process Hughes believes that overall it enhances it. Hughes goes on to make a connection between obstinacy and self-doubt and cites Cézanne as embodying both characteristics. He says only mediocre talents lack self-doubt.

• Three paintings by Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) are shown to illustrate Hughes’s point about the way Cézanne confronted a motif again and again with an anxious determination to achieve the kind of expression that he was seeking. Cézanne returned repeatedly to the subjects shown, the image of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the still life with fruit and the pines growing among rocks, as if seeking to express something about the subjects that remained elusive.

• Hughes, one of Australia’s best-known expatriate intellectuals, has worked as a journalist in Australia, in Britain – where he moved in the early 1960s – and in the USA, where he was an art critic for Time Magazine for more than 30 years. He has written 12 books, mostly about art and history, including the international bestseller The Fatal Shore (1986). He wrote and hosted two television series The Shock of the New (1979) and American Visions (1997).

• Hughes’s facility with language is evident in this clip, and indicates why he has achieved such success as a speaker and writer on art and history. In describing his apprehension when embarking on the creative process of writing he uses language that anyone can understand: ‘You hold your nose and you jump in’. He describes Cézanne as a man of ‘heroic obstinacy’, the words encapsulating his admiration for Cézanne as an artist and a person.

• Andrea Stretton (1952–2007) shows her skill as an interviewer, acquired over many years in television broadcasting, through the knowledge she reveals of Hughes’s writing and in her warm yet respectful manner. During her career her probing and informed questions were always delivered in a manner that indicated a genuine desire for enlightenment. She was a producer and a presenter of television arts programs on SBS and the ABC from 1987 to 2001.