Following the death of Australian art critic and author, Mr Robert Hughes, in New York this week, a Charles Sturt University (CSU) academic says his eloquent non-fiction contribution to art and letters will live on.
Dr Neill Overton, lecturer in art history and visual culture, and postgraduate courses coordinator, at the CSU School of Communication and Creative Industries in Wagga Wagga, said Mr Hughes was a great descriptive communicator.
“To some art historians, his work is ‘journalistic’, but I would have hoped so and I treat that as a compliment,” Dr Overton said.
“Hughes’s work could sum up a complex art period with a succinct, compelling description that cut right through most of art history's veils of obtuse language, because his language had clarity, point and purpose, which is the best of journalism.
“In particular, his book on modern art, Shock of the New (1980), and its accompanying BBC eight-part television series, offered a series of thematic arguments about the purpose of art. When you look at the chapters of this book, it is not a tired chronology of dates, names, and places; it is a series of well-considered themes and propositions - The Mechanical Paradise, The Faces of Power, The View from the Edge, and so forth.
“He was a thoughtful, direct communicator of arguments and propositions regarding what art was and is, and this is the reason why this book is still on the University’s modern art course required reading list, as it is throughout the world. His wit and deft intelligence radiates on every page.”
Dr Overton says Robert Hughes was forthright as a speaker, articulate, measured, and never over-inflated his opinions and analysis with obscure art jargon. As a writer, his word-pictures and eloquence will carry forward with force and a singular voice to the next generation of visual thinkers.
“Sometimes, this is the deft, highly visual turn of phrase that he glides with in his writing, so simple, yet stuck in my mind in permanent ink. For example, in Shock of the New, (chapter one, The Mechanical Paradise), ‘ ... the view from the train was not the view from the horse.’ This is succinct and perfect,” Dr Overton said.
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