Robert Hughes

A critical analysis of the life and work of legendary Spanish artist Francisco Jos de Goya y Lucientes provides an illuminating study of the enigmatic artist's varied works from the context of the turbulent world of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spain. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

Goya

Links 1,500 years of Catalan history with the architecture, painting, sculpture, music, and poetry of Barcelona to pay tribute to the accomplishments of Catalunya culture

Barcelona

Criticizes Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Jessie Helms, and Ronald Reagan, political correctness, academic obsessions with theory, the art world, American infrastructure, and other targets

The Fraying of America

Culture of Complaint

A comprehensive history of Rome covers the city's evolution from the Roman empire through the early years of Christianity to the Renaissance and the modern era, addressing topics from government and architecture to its influence on culture and politics.

A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History

Rome

The most controversial art critic in America--author of the bestselling The Fatal Shore and The Shock of the New--looks with love and loathing, wit and authority, at art and artists from the past to the present. Hughes evokes and defines the essences, works and worlds of a wide range of artists.

Selected Essays on Art and Artists

Nothing If Not Critical

Met lit. opg. Critical description of various aspects of American culture. One chapter is mainly concerned with American censorship concerning the arts.

"The Wilderness and the West" discusses the work of landscape painters such as Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, and the Luminists, who viewed the natural world as "the fingerprint of God's creation," and of those who recorded America's westward expansion - George Caleb Bingham, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Remington - and the accompanying shift in the perception of the Indian, from noble savage to outright demon.

The Epic History of Art in America

American Visions

"A selection of the best writing by the most important--and thunderously outspoken--art and culture critic of our time, including approximately 125 never-before-seen pages from the unfinished second volume of his memoir, which he was working on at the time of his death in 2012. With an introduction by Adam Gopnik"--

selected writings of Robert Hughes

The spectacle of skill

Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh

The founding of Rome is shrouded in legend, but current archaeological evidence supports the theory that Rome grew from pastoral settlements and coalesced into a city in the 8th century BC. It developed into the capital of the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic and finally the Roman Empire. For almost a thousand years, Rome was the most politically important, richest and largest city in the Western world.

la saga del politicamente corretto

La cultura del piagnisteo

From Robert Hughes, one of the greatest art and cultural critics of our time, comes a sprawling, comprehensive, and deeply personal history of Rome—as city, as empire, and, crucially, as an origin of Western art and civilization, two subjects about which Hughes has spent his life writing and thinking. Starting on a personal note, Hughes takes us to the Rome he first encountered as a hungry twenty-one-year-old fresh from Australia in 1959. From that exhilarating portrait, he takes us back more than two thousand years to the city's foundation, one mired in mythologies and superstitions that would inform Rome's development for centuries. From the beginning, Rome was a hotbed of power, overweening ambition, desire, political genius, and corruption. Hughes details the turbulent years that saw the formation of empire and the establishment of the sociopolitical system, along the way providing colorful portraits of all the major figures, both political (Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Nero, Caligula) and cultural (Cicero, Martial, Virgil), to name just a few. For almost a thousand years, Rome would remain the most politically important, richest, and largest city in the Western world. From the formation of empire, Hughes moves on to the rise of early Christianity, his own antipathy toward religion providing rich and lively context for the brutality of the early Church, and eventually the Crusades. The brutality had the desired effect—the Church consolidated and outlasted the power of empire, and Rome would be the capital of the Papal States until its annexation into the newly united kingdom of Italy in 1870. As one would expect, Hughes lavishes plenty of critical attention on the Renaissance, providing a full survey of the architecture, painting, and sculpture that blossomed in Rome over the course of the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, and shedding new light on old masters in the process. Having established itself as the artistic and spiritual center of the world, Rome in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries saw artists (and, eventually, wealthy tourists) from all over Europe converging on the bustling city, even while it was caught up in the nationalistic turmoils of the Italian independence struggle and war against France. Hughes keeps the momentum going right into the twentieth century, when Rome witnessed the rise and fall of Italian Fascism and Mussolini, and took on yet another identity in the postwar years as the fashionable city of "La Dolce Vita." This is the Rome Hughes himself first encountered, and it's one he contends, perhaps controversially, has been lost in the half century since, as the cult of mass tourism has slowly ruined the dazzling city he loved so much. Equal parts idolizing, blasphemous, outraged, and awestruck, Rome is a portrait of the Eternal City as only Robert Hughes could paint it.

'In some ways it's a ridiculous human passion, ' Robert Hughes writes of fishing but, for him, it has been a lifelong obsession and the pastime that he loves best. In A Jerk on One End he brings the wit and insight that have characterised his art criticism and his other writings to bear on the subjects of fish and fishing. He traces his love of fishing to his boyhood on Sydney Harbour and recounts the high and low points of his career with rod and reel, from his first catch to the hair-raising tales of shark hunts he has picked up from other fishermen. Mixing memoir and history with folklore and anecdote, he has produced a book that is a celebration of the delights and beauties of fishing and, in its final pages, a powerful and reasoned plea for the protection of the ecology of the ocean.

Reflections of a Mediocre Fisherman

A Jerk on One End

A beautifully illustrated hundred-year history of modern art, from cubism to pop and avant-guard. More than 250 color photos.

The Hundred=Year History of Modern Art

The Shock of the New

“I am completely an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work, or a good carpenter chopping dovetails . . . I don’t think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one . . . Consequently, most of the human race doesn’t matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate.” Robert Hughes wrote with brutal honesty about art, architecture, culture, religion, and himself. He translated his passions—of which there were many, both positive and negative—brilliantly, convincingly, and with vitality and immediacy, always holding himself to the same rigorous standards of skill, authenticity, and significance that he did his subjects. There never was, and never will be again, a voice like this. In this volume, that voice rings clear through a gathering of some of his most unforgettable writings, culled from nine of his most widely read and important books. This selection shows his enormous range and gives us a uniquely cohesive view of both the critic and the man. Most revealing, and most thrilling for Hughes’s legions of fans, are the never-before-published pages from his unfinished second volume of memoirs. These last writings show Robert Hughes at the height of his powers and can be read only with pleasure and a tinge of sadness that his extraordinary voice is no longer here to educate us as well as to clarify and define our world.

Selected Writings of Robert Hughes

The Spectacle of Skill

René Magritte

De tous les artistes qui se sont joints au surréalisme d'André Breton, Magritte est le seul qui ait réussi à cerner et à rendre avec tant de justesse l'univers des rêves qui vit en chacun de nous. Magritte ne partageait pas l'obsession publicitaire de Salvador Dali, il était tout simplement peintre. Pourtant, malgré sa discrétion, il a déclenché une véritable révolution dans notre subconscient et nous oblige à nous pencher sur notre être intérieur.

Les essentiels de l'art Magritte

The authoritative, epic history of the British colonisation of Australia. In 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III, the British Government sent a fleet to colonise Australia. Documenting the brutal transportation of men, women and children out of Georgian Britain into a horrific penal system which was to be the precursor to the Gulag and was the origin of Australia, The Fatal Shore is the definitive, masterfully written narrative that has given its true history to Australia. 'A unique phantasmagoria of crime and punishment, which combines the shadowy terrors of Goya with the tumescent life of Dickens' Peter Ackroyd, The Times ‘An enthralling account... brimming over with rare and pungent characters, and tales of pathos, bravery, and horror’ Peter Matthiessen, author of The Snow Leopard

The Fatal Shore

Frank Doran

The Story of Foresterhill

The People's Hospital

Robert Hughes, who has stunned us with comprehensive works on subjects as sweeping and complex as the history of Australia (The Fatal Shore), the modern art movement (The Shock of the New), the nature of American art (American Visions), and the nature of America itself as seen through its art (The Culture of Complaint), now turns his renowned critical eye to one of art history’s most compelling, enigmatic, and important figures, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes. With characteristic critical fervor and sure-eyed insight, Hughes brings us the story of an artist whose life and work bridged the transition from the eighteenth-century reign of the old masters to the early days of the nineteenth-century moderns. With his salient passion for the artist and the art, Hughes brings Goya vividly to life through dazzling analysis of a vast breadth of his work. Building upon the historical evidence that exists, Hughes tracks Goya’s development, as man and artist, without missing a beat, from the early works commissioned by the Church, through his long, productive, and tempestuous career at court, to the darkly sinister and cryptic work he did at the end of his life. In a work that is at once interpretive biography and cultural epic, Hughes grounds Goya firmly in the context of his time, taking us on a wild romp through Spanish history; from the brutality and easy violence of street life to the fiery terrors of the Holy Inquisition to the grave realities of war, Hughes shows us in vibrant detail the cultural forces that shaped Goya’s work. Underlying the exhaustive, critical analysis and the rich historical background is Hughes’s own intimately personal relationship to his subject. This is a book informed not only by lifelong love and study, but by his own recent experiences of mortality and death. As such this is a uniquely moving and human book; with the same relentless and fearless intelligence he has brought to every subject he has ever tackled, Hughes here transcends biography to bring us a rich and fiercely brave book about art and life, love and rage, impotence and death. This is one genius writing at full capacity about another—and the result is truly spectacular.

Robert Hughes

Books

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