Robert Studley Forrest Hughes, AO was an Australian art critic, writer and television documentary maker who has resided in New York since 1970. He was educated at St Ignatius' College, Riverview before going on to study arts and then architecture at the University of Sydney. At university, Hughes associated with the Sydney "Push" – a group of artists, writers, intellectuals and drinkers. Among the group were Germaine Greer and Clive James. Hughes, an aspiring artist and poet, abandoned his university endeavours to become first a cartoonist and then an art critic for the Sydney periodical The Observer, edited by Donald Horne. Around this time he wrote a history of Australian painting, titled The Art of Australia, which is still considered to be an important work. It was published in 1966. Hughes was also briefly involved in the original Sydney version of Oz magazine, and wrote art criticism for The Nation and The Sunday Mirror.Hughes left Australia for Europe in 1964, living for a time in Italy before settling in London, England (1965) where he wrote for The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Observer, among others, and contributed to the London version of Oz. In 1970 he obtained the position of art critic for TIME magazine and he moved to New York. He quickly established himself in the United States as an influential art critic.In 1975, he and Don Brady provided the narration for the film Protected, a documentary showing what life was like for Indigenous Australians on Palm Island. In 1980, the BBC broadcast The Shock of the New, Hughes's television series on the development of modern art since the Impressionists. It was accompanied by a book of the same name; its combination of insight, wit and accessibility are still widely praised. In 1987, The Fatal Shore, Hughes's study of the British penal colonies and early European settlement of Australia, became an international best-seller.Hughes provided commentary on the work of artist Robert Crumb in parts of the 1994 film Crumb, calling Crumb "the American Breughel". His 1997 television series American Visions reviewed the history of American art since the Revolution. He was again dismissive of much recent art; this time, sculptor Jeff Koons was subjected to criticism. Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore (2000) was a series musing on modern Australia and Hughes's relationship with it. Hughes's 2002 documentary on the painter Francisco Goya, Goya: Crazy Like a Genius, was broadcast on the first night of the BBC's domestic digital service. Hughes created a one hour update to The Shock of the New. Titled The New Shock of the New, the program aired first in 2004. Hughes published the first volume of his memoirs, Things I Didn’t Know, in 2006.
Educated by the Jesuits.
Art critic for TIME magazine since 1970.
He was awarded the AO (Officer of the Order of Australia) in the 1991 Queens Birthday Honours List for his services to Art and the promotion of Australian culture.
(June 2009) New York City, New York
Despite being the star performer for 12 seasons of "Hey Dad..!" , he has not participated in any "Hey Dad..!" cast reunions.
Up until the "Hey Dad..! Scandal" broke in 2010, Robert worked regularly as a voice-over artist.
Has one daughter, Jessica, and two grandchildren.
Went to Crows Nest Boys High School.
Has four siblings - two older and two younger than him.
(December 2010) London, England: Living with his wife.
(December 2012) Extradited to Sydney, Australia, freed on $50,000 bail and awaiting trial.
(October 2009) Living in Singapore.
(August 2012) London, England: Arrested and charged with committing 11 assaults against five girls between 1985 and 1990 in Sydneys northern suburbs.
(March 2010) Living in Singapore.
In Silverwater Prison. [April 2014].
He was awarded the A.O. (Officer of the Order of Australia) in the 2005 Queens New Years Honours List for his services to the arts through music, particularly as a composer, and for the promotion of Australian music through representative organizations for musicians.
He was awarded the MBE in the 1978 Queens Birthday Honours List for his services to music.
(February 2009) Hallet Cove, Southern Australia
Son of Blanche Reed.
Agent Eugene Lee got the Chicago Bears to sign Hughes after he wasnt picked in the NFL draft. He was cut on 3 September 2011, even though he had scored 2 TDs against the Cleveland Browns three days earlier.
RB for Notre Dame (2007-2010).
[on Marc Chagall] He had a lyric, flyaway, enraptured imagination,allied to an enviable fluency of hand.
But it was time to move on. I was feeling really stale and it can be,debilitating for an actor to be so closely identified with one,character. I thought I had to make the break.
That is not part of me at all.
For the machine meant the conquest of horizontal space. It also meant a sense of that space which few people had experienced before – the succession and superimposition of views, the unfolding of landscape in flickering surfaces as one was carried swiftly past it, and an exaggerated feeling of relative motion (the poplars nearby seeming to move faster than the church spire across the field) due to parallax. The view from the train was not the view from the horse. It compressed more motifs into the same time. Conversely, it left less time in which to dwell on any one thing.
What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.
What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?,In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.
Nevertheless, what was made in the hope of transforming the world need not be rejected because it failed to do so – otherwise, one would also have to throw out a good deal of the greatest painting and poetry of the nineteenth century. An objective political failure can still work as a model of intellectual affirmation or dissent.
Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.
Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre,that great condenser of moral chaos, The City.
Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker.
When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.
Machines were the ideal metaphor for the central pornographic fantasy of the nineteenth century, rape followed by gratitude.
Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art. .
