Several glancing blows
Bryan Robertson
NOTHING IF NOT CRITICAL: SELECTED ESSAYS ON ART AND ARTISTS by Robert Hughes
CollinslHarvill, £16, pp. 429
FRANK AUERBACH: A MONOGRAPH by Robert Hughes
Thames & Hudson, £25, pp. 240
Reading Robert Hughes's cheerfully pugnacious essays on art and the manipula- tion of its market is a tonic experience. A born enjoyer, Mr Hughes is also quite undeceived about the promotional exces- ses that have so often undermined the integrity of the art world through the Seventies and Eighties. The input of big money from the early Sixties on is at the root of the trouble, attracting speculative collectors to emerge, urged on by greedy dealers and a few complaisant museum and K. unsthalle directors eager to join the international power game. Mr Hughes conveys an infectious and always intel- ligently objective enthusiasm for what is admirable, and there is still plenty of good art to admire, but he writes with an agreeably jokey sort of zest about the grosser malpractices and the more dubious reputations of the period under review. Containing nearly 100 essays covering a broad historical range, this compilation is excellent value for money. My only cavil is that most of the essays are short pieces of three or four pages written within pre- scribed dimensions for Time magazine and, read in a sequence contained within the covers of a book, there is thus an inevitable monotony both in format and in the encapsulated delivery of definitions and ideas in these pieces. The brisk pace opens out with the inclusion of some notable longer essays, on Goya, Berenson and Warhol among others, written for the New York Review of Books and the New Repub- lic. I do not feel at all patronising about Time magazine and I believe that in his regular appearances there, for the last decade or more, Mr Hughes has been writing the best art crticism for popular consumption in the English language. I only wish that he worked more often at greater length.
The introductory blast-off to the present collection is a new, extended essay, 'The Decline of the City of Mahagonny' which should be required reading for art schools, dealers and collectors. Here is the sad decline of New York as an art capital properly set out and analysed, together with sound reasoning for the attrition of standards, the decay of values. Elsewhere, the essays range from Caravaggio, Degas, Van Gogh and Rodin through to Eric Fischl, Malcolm Morley, Kitaj and Hock- ney. The reflexions on that noble genius, Thomas Eakins, are particularly fine and so are the pieces on other Americans, Homer, Sargent and Whistler. In the dis- missal of Warhol, however, I believe that what the artist made is confused with the often absurd antics of those who sur- rounded him. For me, Warhol was a fastidiously obsessed mortician — the elec- tric chair, Elizabeth Taylor near death, packaged detritus, suicide leaps — whose insight came too late for dissection by Jessica Mitford.
Mr Hughes can be very funny when in caustic vein — his prolonged bombard- ment of that ungifted poltroon, Julian Schnabel, has a fine 'sink the Bismarck' thoroughness about it, although he also puts Schnabel into precise historical con- text. But his loving and clear-eyed respect for true ability, not to speak of genius, is very plain in his assessments of Lee Kras- ner, Robert Motherwell, Saul Steinberg and David Smith.
It is tempting to try to peg Robert Hughes' wry and steely prose, sometimes faintly Jacobean in its smiling disfavour, to his Australian background. The sense of outrage that invigorated his great book about the early Australian settlements and convict horrors, The Fatal Shore, in milder form flickers in and out of his art criticism. Some Australians must be descended from warders as well as from convicts. Mr Hughes is no facile moralist but, like his compatriot, Peter Conrad, he shows a liking for a darkly glittering expression of good and bad, saved by irony from excess. There is a healthy scepticism about his approach to art and life which does not preclude absolute surrender to virtue but often brings a double-edged awareness to mind, like the old joke about Andre Gide, that in his novels he sometimes seemed to act like a judge who is seen to wink at the prisoner.
The monograph on Frank Auerbach is the best produced book on a British artist that I can recall: the proportion of black and white reproductions to colour plates seem exactly right to convey a sense of this artist's work and so is the inclusion of drawings, with an entire sequence of a single sitter — the image seen as an act of exploration. The sensitive duotone process gives proper value to middle tones in the black and white repro- ductions which are normally lost through present-day printing methods. The text is as alert, tough-minded and thorough in reference as one would expect.
Auerbach is a gifted and considerable artist whose work I respect and occasional- ly enjoy. But the claims made for his paintings and drawings have always seemed excessive. The characteristic plethora of lines in drawings that seek to trap a likeness in a human face seem both excessive and mannered, and not always meaningful. The semi-abstract abbrevia- tions of form appear gauchely contrived. I am not interested in the marks of struggle, only arrival, and those drawings and paint- ings in which the bare rudiments of a head with a few features struggle to emerge from an unfocused maelstrom of broad bars of paint or chalk do not convince me.
A particular virtue was once ascribed to early paintings which, in their thickness and heaviness, attest to the solemn accre- tion of surfaces painted and re-painted time after time to arrive at the final image — to achieve something analogous to the resonance of those ancient thels or mounds in Israel that conceal the layers of succes- sive civilisations within their buried ruins.
Some limitation in me does not respond to the concept of struggle as a romantic gesture. I see and feel only the final image. Auerbach's basic visual ideas remain essentially trapped within the period not long after the turn of the century, when Sicken explored Camden Town and Vene- tian heads in shadowy interiors, and Kokoschka and Soutine contrived a more psychologically telling degree of expressive / distortion.
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