New Collections: Papers of Robert Hughes | Smithsonian Voices

It is unusual for an art critic to achieve widespread recognition – even celebrity – outside the art world. More than three decades as chief art critic for time magazine and as the author and narrator of several television documentary series, Robert Hughes (1938–2012) was one such rarity. Donated by Hughes’ widow, Doris Downs, the vast collection of his papers documents Hughes’ life and multifaceted career through extensive personal and professional correspondence; notebooks; drafts of articles, lectures, documentaries and book projects; audio and video recordings; photographs; press clippings; and other personal records.

Born and educated in Australia, Hughes left for Europe in 1964, eventually landing in New York in 1970 to take up his position at time. His first documentary, The shock of the new, was an eight-part series that attempted to demystify the development of modern art by placing it in the context of the cultural and social history of its time. When it aired in 1980–1981, it was seen by more than 25 million viewers, and the accompanying book quickly became his first of several bestsellers. Hughes’ papers include research files, correspondence, shooting schedules and production notes for all of his books and television projects. The original bound shooting scripts for every episode of The shock of the new bear extensive manuscript annotations, edits, and rewrites, indicating a surprising degree of last-minute revision for such a complex undertaking.

This improvisational quality is further explored in Hughes’ post facto observations of the process. On a series of notes, he describes, among other mishaps, the experience of arriving to photograph Claude Monet’s famous garden at Giverny, only to find that “the pond was a sea of ​​mud with little pieces of wire sticking out of it. Not a single lily can not see it. . . that’s why half the scripts for Shock of the New were written on the backboard of the station wagon. But unfamiliarity can also be an inspiration: it allows you to get a new sensation with the urgency of the first hit.”

Although Hughes avoided the social rituals of the art world and often chose to play the role of outsider in the culture he wrote about each week, he maintained close friendships with many artists. The reports include a set of fifteen Polaroid photographs documenting the gradual completion, over several sittings, of Frank Auerbach’s 1986 portrait of Hughes, for example, and nearly two dozen often extremely detailed letters from Auerbach about Hughes’ 1990 monograph. for the artist, which itself is described in a contemporaneous letter by artist RB Kitay as “on the best living artist book I can remember.

Also of note is a collection of fifty-six audio recordings of interviews, lectures, and travelogues dating from 1971 to 2006. Interviewees include artists Nancy Graves, Louise Nevelson, and Saul Steinberg; museum directors Thomas Armstrong, Philip de Montebello, and William Rubin; and writer Carlos Castaneda. Held for the purpose of research rather than publication in themselves, these records offer valuable context for Hughes’s critical and historical writings.

This text originally appeared in the Fall 2022 issue (Vol. 61, No. 2) of American Art Journal Archive.