Two other virtues in Hughes’s critical persona need to be highlighted. First he is a phrase-maker of fine pithiness and wit. An aphoristic twang characterizes many of his judgements that, unusually, seems entirely natural and unforced. Hockney is summarized as the Cole Porter of figurative painting, not its Mozart; “Fischl country is suburban Long Island. It smells of unwashed dog, barbecue lighter fluid, sperm”; now that communism has been defeated, the rise of the American Right’s homophobia is explained thus: “having lost the barbarian at the gates, they went for the fairy at the bottom of the garden”; “for all its drawbacks, onanism was the one kind of sex that could not be controlled by the State or the Parent,” Hughes remarks on the masturbatory fantasy that underpins Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors; Caravaggio “thrashed about in the etiquette of early seicento cultivation like a shark in a net.” The wit, the temerity, the sense of humour that inform Hughes’s criticism are a marvellously rich seam in his prose, and it can be malignantly efficient when it comes to attacking pretension or vainglory. But Hughes’s strictures are never delivered lightly, merely to break a butterfly on a wheel, and here we can acknowledge the second facet of his criticism that makes it so valuable. Hughes is a historian, and one of the highest scholarship as well, judging from the exegetical thoroughness of The Fatal Shore. All his writings are buttressed by a marked consciousness of the traditions out of which art springs, and his criticism is liberally seasoned with historical asides and cultural references from all disciplines. Like Ruskin, too—and it is a just comparison—Hughes is signally aware of the socio-political dimensions of art and the art world. Indeed it could be claimed that his art criticism during the eighties gives a clearer sense of the blight of the Reagan years and of the various educational and cultural disasters afflicting the USA in particular and the West in general than many an op-ed columnist or professorial pundit. The Mapplethorpe essay is exemplary in this regard. Stimulated by the storm that arose over a publicly funded exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s erotic photographs, Hughes not only shows Mapplethorpe the exit door from the pantheon but also analyses the cultural malaise that produces both phenomena: a misplaced radical-chic veneration and a complementary right-wing fundamentalist witch-hunting. In addition, he outlines a defence of quality in art—as opposed to a catch-all relativism—that is as eloquent in its simplicity as in its passion. Expanding on his own fair skills as a carpenter Hughes remarks that
… when I see the level of woodworking in a Japanese structure like the great temple of Horyu-ji, the precision of the complex joints, the understanding of hinoki cypress as a live substance, I know that I couldn’t do anything like that if I had my own life to live over. People who can make such things are an élite; they have earned the right to be. Does this fill me … with resentment? Absolutely not. Reverence and pleasure, more like. Mutatis mutandis, it’s the same in writing and the visual arts. Not all cats are the same in the light … [but] these differences of intensity, meaning, grace can’t be set forth in a catechism or a recipe book. They can only be experienced and argued and then seen in relation to a history that includes a social history.
As a justification of a critical modus operandi this seems to me to be hard to better. And, moreover, it is one that Robert Hughes has been practising for almost thirty years: as artists and critics, aficionados and enthusiasts, writers and readers, we are all the richer for it.
1992
American Art
(Review of American Visions: The Epic History of Art
in America by Robert Hughes)
During the composition of this mightily impressive, beautifully written, astute and capacious book, Robert Hughes found himself describing it to others as “a love letter to America”—a description which he now qualifies with the reminder that “different stages of an affair produce different letters and some are not free of reproach to their brazen, abundant, horizon-filling subject.”
Pursuing the analogy, we might observe that the relationship starts off with some cautious flirtation, is duly consummated, enjoys a passionate middle phase and then, as doubts and suspicions crowd in, turns acridly sour. By the book’s end Hughes’s love has turned, if not to hate, to something close to contempt.
If American Visions is the history of a love affair gone bad, it is also the history of a nation. Hughes, as well as being the doyen of art critics, is also a historian of the first rank (as The Fatal Shore, his history of the founding of his native Australia, and Barcelona testify). One of the extra pleasures of this richly pleasurable book is that on its completion one has read, almost by accident, a learned and succinct account of the last 300 years or so of America’s existence, taking in and placing in context all the familiar milestones, from discovery to colony to revolution, to republic, civil war, industrialization, depression and eventual world dominance. Hughes does this effortlessly, it seems (which means the vast scholarship and writerly skill are implicit), braiding his cultural exegesis with his historian’s, giving us the history not only of the development of the visual arts in America but also of its multiform, energetic, striving and troubled people.
As far as the art is concerned, it was a slowish beginning. Pueblo architecture and Amish quilts apart, the painting produced in pre-revolutionary America is naive and on the quaint side. Tardily, artists of merit evolve as the eighteenth century turns into the nineteenth: Copley, the brothers Peale (Rembrandt and Raphaelle—clearly their parents had ambitions for the boys); but the one dominant figure of this period is Thomas Jefferson, brimful of prodigious talents—statesman, writer, farmer, inventor, collector and architect of real note. Hughes’s mini-essay on Jefferson is a gem; the book is studded with such glinting nuggets, models of concision and insight.
The first artist of real status to emerge, and one who seems quintessentially American, is Frederick Church, the Caspar David Friedrich of American art, whose vast apocalyptic canvases drew huge crowds. But the interest we have in the painters of the nineteenth century (Eakins and Winslow Homer aside) is largely topographical (Thomas Cole, Audubon), or cultural-historical (Remington), rather than aesthetic. Hughes is wisely cautious about making grand assertions (one is always aware, behind one’s back as it were, of the muted roar of Europe’s contemporaneous artistic achievements). For example, he posits Whistler as America’s first great painter, but with the rider that it is “absurd to class him with Degas or Manet.”
Indeed one is always conscious, because of the historical context into which the art history is woven, of America’s other claims to fame as the twentieth century begins and advances—the industrial might, the innovations in architecture and consumerism, its increasing hegemony in the world—to such an extent that the accomplishments in the visual arts seem nugatory.
There are two exceptions. Hughes uses the word “genius” only once in the book and applies it to Frank Lloyd Wright. I think he could also have appended it to Edward Hopper. Hughes’s admiration for Hopper is of the highest, but it strikes me, inspired by Hughes’s long view of the twentieth century, that Hopper emerges as the indisputable great modern American artist: painterly diligent, visionary, unique (Europe has produced nothing like him). And as the artistic efforts of this century end in a wet fart of faddery, flim-flam and self-indulgence, one wonders if we shall ever see his like again.
The long view puts everything in perspective. Even the golden years of American painting—the 1950s and 1960s—when New York was the demonstrable capital of the art world, now require some careful reassessment. Here Hughes is at his most incisively authoritative. While authentic geniuses may be thin on the ground, twentieth-century American art produced its fair share of legends and icon-makers, notably Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. There were artists of real talent—Davis, de Kooning, Diebenkorn, Kelly, Johns and Rauschenberg perhaps—and talents that flickered brightly for a moment (Kline, Lichtenstein, Rivers and Guston), but now the fuss has died down true merit will out and a lot of it looks thin stu
ff.
Hughes’s thesis is subtle and persuasive and I apologize if my summary makes it seem all crude, broad strokes. Much of the blame for the decline in American art in the last half of the century is laid at the door of the art critic Clement Greenberg, champion of Abstract Expressionism and later of movements dubbed Post-Painterly Abstraction and Colour Field Abstraction. Greenberg’s disastrous “triumph,” Hughes avers, was to suppress the evidence of skill—pictorial skill in an artist’s repertoire being deemed a snare and a delusion. As a result of Greenberg’s baleful influence (unparalleled in any critic before or since), America evolved a system of art education “that has repealed its own standards,” that destroyed a whole tradition in a generation or two by not teaching its skills, “and that was what happened to figure painting in the United States between 1960 and 1980.” NO ONE CAN DRAW ANY MORE is the stark and frightening message. The art world is now reaping that whirlwind, and the stiff breeze is being felt on these shores also.
Hughes has plenty of positive things to say about contemporary American art, though it is clear that the current scene and its swarming Varps (Vaguely Art Related Persons) fill him with despair. He writes superbly, of course, and indignation often brings the best from his pen; for example, when he describes the art world of the eighties:
pumped by its own fetishism, by billionaires competing in the auction room like mountain goats clashing horns over possession of a crag or a mate.
What has made his criticism so trenchant over the last four decades is that it has always been based on sound and immovable principles: namely a firm belief that the bedrock of all serious art is technical prowess, a graphic literacy. Only that virtuosity coupled with “the long tussle with the real motif” justifies the experimentation and horizon-expanding efforts of modernist art. Without this we are left with “imps and goblins,” their whimsical games and silly, talentless daubings: “the sleep of reason” duly producing its monsters.
1997
Graham Sutherland
Ingres said it takes thirty years to learn to draw and three days to learn to paint. That may be putting it a little strongly, but one can understand the fundamental thrust of his argument: it is to do with delineation, with establishing the primacy of the line in art. And if there is one area of artistic practice where this primacy holds incontrovertibly it is etching, once defined as “drawing at its most expressive.” In etching, the abstract and suggestive qualities of the line dominate and are given a further authority through the medium of printing. Graham Sutherland began his artistic life as an etcher, and it is in that fascinating and meticulous craft, it seems to me, that some of the clues to his artistic personality reside.
In etching there is a freedom denied the engraver, the freedom of the needle running easily over a grounded plate, whereas the engraved line—the burin cutting into the copper—has a necessary precision and discipline, a pondered finality. But every etching is an original drawing. The plate is prepared, the edge bevelled and the surface cleaned, the ground—beeswax and bitumen—is applied. The needle is poised. The implement held in your hand is closer to a nail or a knife than anything else. No pliant brush, no blurriness or shading of graphite or chalk, just a point. And the gesture it makes, its signature, however fluid, however graphic, is still a kind of cutting, a scratch, an incising. There are many variations of technique to be learned, many tricks of the trade to suggest distance and tone and differing effects of light, but etching is, in the end, purely a matter of expressive line.
Those early Palmeresque etchings of Sutherland, with the whole frame filled, dark with the precise scribble of cross-hatching, possess an assurance and mastery of technique that are mightily impressive. Inch by square inch the trees and the hills and the sky are rendered with the needle. The plate is immersed in the acid bath and the exposed metal eroded—“bitten”—according to the artist’s judgement: just a scratch here, the merest graze, here biting deeper, a scar, a furrow formed to hold the ink in a darker seam. But in the final process of etching, luck and experience apply: too many factors are at work—temperature, acid strength, character of the lines—to make for certainty. It is a job to be done indoors in an atmosphere redolent of the workshop rather than the studio. Perhaps this was something Sutherland responded to or even welcomed? He left school at sixteen and was apprenticed to the Midland Railway Works in Derby, where he worked with lathes and rivets, and welded plates to boilers for steam engines, before he quit the industrial world for Goldsmiths School of Art to specialize in printmaking.
Imagine, then, the almost terrifying freedom and immediacy of outdoors after the deliberate procedures of the print room—from the acid bath to the messy application of watercolour, from the permanency of the etched line to the rapid transit of pencil over a sketch pad balanced on your knee. Sutherland clearly responded to nature, as the faintly cod and cosy pastoral of those early etchings demonstrates, but the evident passion of the Pembrokeshire gouaches and oils in the mid 1930s testifies to a deeper liberation. This was not simply a numinous identification with landscape. There is—paradoxically—in that uncertain tremulous line of Sutherland, a liberation of technique. It is as if he cannot believe that the horizons have receded, that the light in the atmosphere is not produced by an electric bulb. Just as the lifer, once released, once through the prison gates, is more likely to savour the demotic pleasures of a coffee in a greasy spoon rather than embark on a holiday in Bali, so too Sutherland’s new freedom never goes all out for the full Romantic orgasm. The focus is precise: the entrance to a lane, the stark contortions of a blasted tree, the prickly grip of gorse on a sea wall. This is not a Turneresque visitation of the egotistical sublime, it is an altogether more cautious feeling-out, a tentative survey of new possibilities, new geometries, new worlds.
The artistic process reflects this exactly. First comes the raw exposure to the subject matter: the roving eye waits to alight on something, anything, that holds it—stone, rock, fissure, fall of water, bole of tree—and the sketch is made on the spot. Then possibly a series of sketches from different angles. A colour wash is added. Back in the studio a selection is made and is then squared up for copying and placing in the frame of the finished canvas. Wordsworth defined poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” and Sutherland’s working practice partially replicates this. But there is something dogged about the way the initial serendipitous coup d’oeil is worked up and worked on until its fitness as the subject of a painting is deemed suitable. Patience, thoroughness, endless practice, precision … These are the virtues of the etcher’s craft, and Sutherland transported them to his painting. Keith Vaughan testifies to the example Sutherland presented to a younger painter—the sheer number of hours he spent at work, its relentless daily routine. For those artists who rely on easy afflatus, or a facile or natural talent, or happy accident, a painter such as Sutherland can seem dauntingly intense and an almost shaming rebuke. Everyone else begins to look lazy, an amateur.
Sutherland was born in Streatham in 1903, his family and upbringing redoubtably middle class. He was a day boy at Epsom College (as was John Piper, by uncanny coincidence) which he left early—not deemed intelligent enough to continue to tertiary education—and was pointed at that dependable middle-class career, engineering. Whatever it was that made him want to go to art school and chuck his engineering apprenticeship was probably the saving of him, for there was no precocious talent on offer, no bohemian role model that made him hanker for life as an artist. He was handsome and polite, with a diffident charm, and he married his first girlfriend, Kathleen, a sustaining and vitally important union that was to last to his death. In short, or in superficial terms, there was nothing extraordinary about Graham Sutherland except his vocation. Looking at the life and at the work one can see it as a series of unfoldings, of revelations. The apprentice engineer discovers he can draw, the student masters the technicalities of printmaking, then responds to the vision of Samuel Palmer, which leads him in turn to landscape, where
his own vision supersedes and a new style and way of seeing are created.
Even with portrait painting this process repeats itself. An excellent rather than naturally brilliant draughtsman, Sutherland was reluctant to attempt a likeness, yet in relenting to pressure and undertaking a commission to paint Somerset Maugham he produced one of the great portraits of the twentieth century. And continued to do so in subsequent commissions. There is no braggadocio, no easy profligacy in the Picasso manner, no bludgeoning personality, saturnine or sensational. Simply, the work exists, a half century of extraordinary effort.
And at its back, at its root, is that evocative line, the Sutherland line, his style, worth considering in more detail. It is idiosyncratic, unflowing, full of pauses, changes of angle. Not feathery, not sinuous, but quite strong, supplemented by little dashes, dots, squiggles, overlays, hatchings. In the studies for the landscapes the broad ovals and rectangles of black or colour are embellished or bordered with a fritter of pencil or pen marks, small circles, a series of curves to suggest the contoured bark of a tree, nervy shadings or meticulous renderings of the texture of lichen, or the rutted imprints of a country road. These leaves from the sketch pads are heavily worked between the broader, smoother swathes of colour. The swift scratches of a pen—a suggestion of a furrowed field—fringe a wash of green; a freckling of leaf shapes separates two aqueous crescents of ochre; feathery strata, veins in rock, worm between rough squares of umber and aquamarine.