Nothing If Not Critical by Robert Hughes

Nothing If Not Critical by Robert Hughes

From 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.

Robert Hughes was born in Australia in 1938. He has lived and worked in the United States since 1970. He has been art critic for TIME magazine for more than 25 years. His books include monographs on painters Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach, a history of Australian art, Heaven and Hell in Western Art (1969), The Shock of the New (1981), The Fatal Shore (1987), a book of social criticism entitled The Culture of Complaint (1995), Barcelona (1992), and a collection of reviews, Nothing If Not Critical (1990). Hughes is the recipient of a number of awards and prizes for his work, most recently an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780394580265
ISBN 10	0394580265
Title	Nothing If Not Critical
Author	Robert Hughes
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Alfred A. Knopf
Year published	1990-10-10
Number of pages	429
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.