Australian art critic and writer Robert Hughes dies
AUSTRALIA: Influential Australian art critic, historian and writer
Robert Hughes has died aged 74 in New York after a long illness, his
family said Tuesday.
Hughes, whom the New York Times once proclaimed the world's most
famous art critic, passed away at the Calvary Hospital in the Bronx on
Monday.
"He had been very ill for some time," said a statement from his wife
Doris Downes, who was with him when he died, without giving further
details.
His niece Lucy Turnbull, married to high-profile Australian
politician Malcolm Turnbull, said her uncle was a "real man's man -- he
was a hunter, shooter and a fisher".
"(He had) a lifelong sense of curiosity and always wanting to know
more about the world," she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation,
adding that he worked with fervour on anything he put his mind to.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard said Hughes would be "very, very sorely
missed".
"Robert Hughes was one of our finest voices," she said. Born in
Sydney in 1938, Hughes studied arts and architecture at Sydney
University.
He left Australia for Britain in the early 1960s, writing for
publications such as The Times and The Observer before landing a
position as art critic for Time magazine in 1970, where he made his
name.
Outspoken and sometimes abrasive, he went on to write "The Art of
Australia", a comprehensive review of Australian painting from
settlement to the 1960s, which is still considered an important work.
Hughes further established himself with his 1980 BBC "The Shock of
the New" television series and book, which has been widely hailed as one
of the most provocative accounts of the development of modern art ever
written. In 1987 he published international best seller "The Fatal
Shore", which examined the harsh life of convicts during the early
European settlement of Australia, a work Time called "a staggering
achievement".
"I think that the work that he had to undertake to do the research to
write 'The Fatal Shore' was extraordinary and he applied that sort of
knowledge and expertise and passion to whatever task he put himself to,"
Turnbull said. While in his homeland in 1999, Hughes had a head-on car
crash that nearly claimed his life and Turnbull said he never fully
recovered.
"It was a life-changing event... and climbing out of that experience
was a very, very hard one, and one that was possibly never fully
achieved," she said.
He also had to deal with his only son, Danton, committing suicide
aged 34.
Despite living overseas for more than 50 years, Hughes never
relinquished his citizenship and became a prominent supporter of
Australia's republican movement.
John McDonald, art critic at the Sydney Morning Herald, said Turnbull
helped put his homeland on the map.
"People knew Australia often through Robert Hughes... but his way of
life, his turn of phrase, his interests were things which transcended
Australia," he wrote in the newspaper.
AFP
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