Australian
Screen

an NFSA website

Masterpiece Special – Robert Hughes (1997)

play
clip
  • 1
  • 2
The expat education content clip 1, 2

Original classification rating: PG. This clip chosen to be PG

Clip description

Robert Hughes is dismissive of anyone who says you can see the great art works online or in books. He says that it is important to travel to the world’s art galleries to see the real thing. He insists that the first duty of a good art critic is to develop a visual memory by seeing and absorbing a lot of art. He insists that he needed to leave Australia to truly appreciate great art.

Curator’s notes

by Janet Bell

Robert Hughes left Australia to develop his visual language. He says he has always read prodigiously and has a great facility with language. He’d begun a law degree but soon realised that his older brother Tom (now Tom Hughes QC(Queen’s Counsel)) would always be the legal star in the family. Hughes is from a grand Catholic family and grew up in Sydney’s moneyed eastern suburbs. He recalls that the family would sit around the dinner table in the pre-television era, talking about the issues of the day. His years with the Jesuits at Riverview taught him Latin and rhetoric, and he was trained to learn by heart large slabs of John Donne, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Thus Robert Hughes developed the extraordinary memory that has always served him so well in his art criticism.

Teacher’s notes

provided by The Le@rning FederationEducation Services Australia

This clip shows part of a studio interview with Australian art critic and writer Robert Hughes and arts journalist and television presenter Andrea Stretton. Hughes explains why it was essential for him, unlike a literary critic for example, to go overseas in order see art, sculpture and architecture not available in Australia. Hughes says that developing a ‘visual memory’ requires seeing works repeatedly. Hughes and Stretton sit facing one another with a table between them in front of a minimally decorated set.

Educational value points

  • Hughes argues that as a young art critic in the 1960s it was necessary for him to leave Australia to view artists’ works repeatedly and thereby build up what he calls ‘mature taste’. That involved becoming conversant in the breadth of an artist’s work and in the influences that culture and landscape had on them. In the 1960s international exhibitions of art rarely came to Australian cities and the only Australian university art history course was offered in Melbourne.
  • Hughes explains that, just as golfers need to practise their strokes and literary critics need to read widely, so an art critic needs to build up ‘visual memory’, the ability to recall information that has been presented visually, to inform his or her writing. Hughes argues that although Australia has excellent examples of the old masters, such as Poussin’s 'The Crossing of the Red Sea’, those artworks cannot be adequately appreciated and critiqued in isolation.
  • Robert Hughes (1938–) is one of a number of well-known expatriate Australians (others are Germaine Greer and Clive James) who have been criticised for choosing to live abroad. The reasons for the criticism are many and complex but include a feeling that they are out of touch with modern Australia and a defensive response to their occasional criticism of it. The columnist Gerard Henderson has described expatriate critics as ‘fly-in, fly-out experts’.
  • Some of the reasons for Hughes’s appeal as a television communicator are revealed in the clip. His description of himself as a ‘bad, inept, promising young painter’ is disarming and his passionate love for the paintings of his youth is communicated clearly. He seeks and finds examples familiar to many people – the need to read widely or practise a golf swing – to use to explain his need to develop his skill as a critic.
  • Hughes’s decision to leave Australia has resulted in him becoming arguably the best-known and most influential art critic in the world and one of Australia’s most renowned expatriate intellectuals. Hughes worked as the art critic for Time Magazine for more than 30 years and has written 12 books, including the bestseller The Fatal Shore (1986). Two television series, The Shock of the New (1979) and American Visions (1997), made him a household name.
  • 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.