Robert Hughes' death: a sad event for the world of art
by Leonel Capote Hernández
Robert Hughes (1938-2012), one of the best critics of arts of all time, died on Monday 6th of August in New York City. With his departure, the American art scene loses its most important voice in the last decades and English will miss one of the best non-fiction writers in this language. A lot of newspapers in the world have echoed this sad fact in the last few days, in spite of this, the influence of Hughes in our western culture will continue forever.
Hughes was born in Sydney, Australia as a member of a prominent intellectual family. He studied art and architecture at Sydney University and lived in Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States after he abandoned his native land. In all these countries he studied their art and architecture and this experience allowed him to write some of his most famous books and essays, for instance: Barcelona (1992), American Visions (1997), Goya (2003) and Rome (2006). For a lot of years, Hughes wrote about the arts in Time magazine. He never forgot his country of origin and as a token of it, he wrote the book Australia: Beyond the fatal shore (2002). With regard to this book the author said: "Americans have this contrary myth of space, because to them, space is freedom. It's the whole Go West, young man philosophy. You got to go and discover the paradise. In colonial Australia, space itself was a prison. You walk across the country, find nothing, then die. So Australians don't associate large space with freedom and opportunity the way Americans do. It's a totally different social myth(1)."
Hughes was not a politically correct critic, for this reason his writings are not boring and become believable. Many academic critics criticized him as an unwavering traditionalist fighting an unwinnable battle against the rushing flow of modern tastes. He was charged with being an "elitist" and he accepted this epithet with pride "in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense."
Hughes made easily accesible the arts to lots of people and with this intention he used the mass media and his considerable wisdom. He did not need a cryptic vocabulary to make easy the comprehension of the arts and in this way he played an important role in the English language. "Long live Hughes' writings and example". In fact, as Auden said some years ago: "Earth, received an honoured guest."
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