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Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (Knopf, 1997) Reissued in paperback by Knopf in 1999. Tackling three centuries of American art history in one book is daunting, but Robert Hughes has written an engaging 620-page opus with ease and precision. Looking in from the outside as an Australian living in the U.S., Hughes has developed a keen sense of what makes American art singularly ours. In nine chapters, Hughes writes about more than paintings and furniture; he braids together the ideas, movements, and people that form the cultural propulsion which artists use to make their creations. From the Quakers to Jackson Pollock, John Singer Sargent to Robert Rauschenberg, he covers many schools of thought and social history. As Hughes writes in the introduction, "[American Visions] should not be seen as a primer, but it is definitely meant as an introduction to its subject for those who feel the same curiosity about it as I did when ... I moved to New York in 1970." Hughes wrote the book in conjunction with a television series co-produced by BBC-2 and Time Warner, which was shown in America on PBS. In The New York Times, Lee Siegel called American Visions a "beautiful and essential book" by an author with an "exacting and intuitive gift of description." Buffalo News reporter Richard Huntington called him a "master at the succinct, sometimes slightly vulgar, putdown ... he characterizes the cultural epiphany found in Europe as 'six weeks of vomiting at sea, and then -- Chartres.'" The Boston Globe wrote that Hughes is "burly enough to repel his (verbal) attackers, solid enough to traipse through miles of gallery and museum aisles." Hughes's three years of work on American Visions "distill[s] 350 years of American history into striking visuals and pithy comments." Robert Hughes has been in the news not only for his keen sensibilities and sensational writing style, but also for his tumultuous private life. In the writing of American Visions, the New Yorker wrote, "(The book) took a terrible toll on Hughes's health, hurling him into a spiral of depression from which he is only now emerging. After a crash course of anti- depressants and intensive psychotherapy, Hughes was able to finish American Visions on deadline." A subsequent divorce, near-fatal car crash, and loss of his son have kept him in the headlines. Hughes has been Time Magazine's art critic for more than 30 years. He has written several books on art, most famously The Shock of the New, which paved new ways of thinking about modern art. Last year, he published Goya, a passionate, personal biography of the artist. MORE: PBS Interview with Hughes 1997 Interview with Salon New York Times Magazine Profile of Hughes Short Time Magazine Bio |
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