Art critic and writer Robert Hughes is dead at 74

SYDNEY, Australia – Influential Australian art critic, historian and writer Robert Hughes has died at age 74 in New York after a long illness, his family said Tuesday, August 7.

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, August 6.

“He had been very ill for some time,” said a statement from his wife Doris Downes, who was with him when he died.

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 wanted to know more about the world,” she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, adding that “he worked with fervor on anything he put his mind to.”

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 paintings from the settlement to the 1960s, which is still considered 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 the international bestseller The Fatal Shore, that examined the harsh life of convicts during the early European settlement of Australia. Time magazine called it “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, 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. Turnbull said he never fully recovered.

“It was a life changing event… and climbing out of that experience was a very, very hard one — one that was possibly never fully achieved,” she said.

Hughes also had to deal with his only son, Danton, committing suicide at age 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, an art critic at the Sydney Morning Herald, said Hughes 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.

“We’ll look at Bob Hughes. We’ll look at the stuff that he’s written. We’ll always go back and say he was a truly great writer and somebody who, in the ranks of art critics, I think of all time, will rank very, very high.” – Agence France-Presse