Australian critic Robert Hughes dead

Updated

Influential Australian art critic and writer Robert Hughes has died in New York aged 74.

Hughes, who was known for books such as The Fatal Shore and Shock of the New, died in hospital in the Bronx after a long illness.

Liberal MP Malcolm Turnbull, who is married to Hughes' niece, posted a statement from Hughes's wife Doris on his website confirming the death.

Mr Turnbull took to social media to express his sadness at the news.

"Robert Hughes, critic, historian, fisherman, has died today in New York City. Farewell my dear old mate. Rest in peace," the Liberal MP tweeted.

Hughes, who was born in Sydney, worked in London before moving to New York in 1970 where he made his name as an art critic for Time magazine.

"They wanted somebody who could actually write about art in a way that wasn't - but here I sound like I’m blowing my own trumpet - in a way that was not condescending and it was intelligible to people who were not art experts," he told Andrew Denton in 2006.

In 1987 he published international best-seller The Fatal Shore, which examined the harsh life of convicts during the early European settlement of Australia.

Shock of the New, Hughes' television series on modern art, was broadcast in 1980 and accompanied by a book of the same name.

In 2000 he explored his relationship with modern Australia in a television series titled Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore.

During the production of the show he was involved in a near-fatal car accident, which his niece Lucy says changed his life.

"Climbing out of that experience was a very, very hard one and one that possibly was never fully achieved," she told ABC News 24.

Searching for answers

Hughes admitted he had a streak of cruelty as a critic.

"You can't be a critic and not have a harsh side, you know, because otherwise you turn out to be a sort of Pollyanna ... you know, become this total arsehole who wanders around the world thinking every sprig of clover is a rose," he told Denton.

RIP Robert Hughes, one of my writing heroes. I regret that I joined @TIME too late to be your colleague. #RobertHughes Bobby Ghosh, writer/editor at TIME Magazine

Read more tributes

Hughes said Father Gerald Jones, who took his school class on an excursion to a European art show, sparked his interest in art.

"There was this painting which was on a kind of irregular square of brown hessian with what looked like a spider's backside and a kind of red squabble, and I looked at that and I thought, 'that can't be art. That can't possibly be art. What is this?'," he told Denton.

"And I said to Father Jones, 'that's not art, is it?' And he said, 'well, Robert, if you're so certain that it's not art, perhaps you could tell me what you think art is?'

"And thus my inglorious career was launched, because I had to find try some kind of an answer for that, and I'm not sure that I have but, nevertheless, it got me going."

'A man's man'

Speaking on ABC Radio this morning, Mr Turnbull said: "Bob really opened up the eyes of Australians to their history in Fatal Shore."

"He was a consummate story-teller, a great historian, one of the greatest art critics of our times," he said.

Hughes's niece Lucy, who is Mr Turnbull's wife, told ABC 702 Sydney she remembered him as a "dazzling" presence from her childhood.

"He was actually a real man's man - he was a hunter, a shooter and a fisher," she said.

"He was a dazzling performer in the kitchen, as he was at the typewriter."

She later told ABC News 24 she admired Hughes' intelligence.

"[He had] a lifelong sense of curiosity world and always wanting to know more about the world," she said.

"I think that the work that he had to undertake to do the research to write The Fatal Shore was extraordinary and he applied that sort of knowledge and expertise and passion to whatever task he put himself to."

Topics: author, arts-and-entertainment, united-states, australia

First posted