The Art of Australia

by Robert Hughes

A comprehensive account of Australian art between the founding of the colony in 1788 & 1966. It traces the twin threads of the desire for independence in Australian vision & the obsessive influence of European & American models. 134 black & white reproductions, 8 color plates.
Acknowledgements
List of illustrations
Preface to the second edition
Introduction
The colony 1788-1885
The Heidelberg School 1885-1896
Landscape with various figures
The expatriates 1890-1930
Post-impressionism 1913-1938
The Angry Decada 1937-1947
The Stylists 1939-1950
Figures and images 1950-1962
Myths and personae 1947-1962
Abstract painting 1938-1966
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

Genres: Art, Art History, Nonfiction

331 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating, outspoken and, for its time, polemical view of Australian painting from 1778 to 1964 with, as the author puts it in the preface to his second edition, "[a] few excursions up to 1966 [that] dealt principally with Australian artists living in London whose work I could see."

The book was written before aboriginal art began to be appreciated by australian and international art circles in the 1970s and thus, sadly, omits any mention to aboriginal rock paintings, arts or crafts, in fact there is no entry for aborigines in the index. While the book is ostensibly about the art of Australia, it only covers the history of western-style drawing, painting and engraving. The only reference to sculpture is a passing mention of Colin Lanceley´s mid-1960s work.

The story of (western-style) Australian art up to the nineteenth century is the story of how provincial art slowly outgrows its colonial dependence, and, in particular, how european-based perceptions and culture slowly come to terms with a very different landscape and very different cultures and evolve their own myths and images. I believe that there are many interesting parallels between the evolution of latin-american art and australian art: aborigines and the amerindians are first depicted according to hellenistic models and then grotesquely caricatured, nature is forced into an unreal and highly distorting european mold, and both peoples´art are, by and large, largely ignored or belittled until well into the twentieth century. From the nineteenth century onwards, as artistic avant-garde movements appear, it also becomes the story of how Australia responds to them, sometimes ten or more years after these movements appear and have reached their pinnacle in Europe or USA. Up to the close of the book, only a handful of Australian artists had achieved some kind of international recognition and they have, up to now, certainly had less of an impact on twentieth century art than recognized latin-american artists like Diego Rivera, Siqueiros, Orozco, Frida Kahlo, Botero, Guayasamín, Lam, Matta, Rufino Tamayo, Jesús Soto, Carlos Cruz Diez, Oscar Niemayer or Carlos Raúl Villanueva, to name just a few.

The book closely follows the evolution of Australian landscape painting in particular, from misleading pastoral fantasies on a european theme, to sweeping german romanticism, to the predominance of blue and gold palettes, to plein-air attempts to emulate what was believed to be impressionism, to post-impressionism, to gilded stylism to more contemporary attempts to capture the essence of the continent´s interior. The book also follows some fascinating developments in portrait painting and, more recently, the invention of autochtonous myths, starting with Sidney Nolan´s fabled Ned Kelly series, which signalled a major change in the direction of Australian art, a direction which, in retrospect, seemed bound to finally provide aboriginal art with the long-overdue recognition and appreciation it deserved.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the reproductions are in black and white; I highly recommend the non-Australian reader google images for works by the painters in order to develop a better understanding of the the evolution of Australian art and an appreciation for artists such as Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Frederick McCubbin (the main figures of the so-called Heidelberg School), John Russell (who befriended Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh and Monet in France), Roy de Maistre (who developed a colour theory loosely based on an a synesthetic analogy between colour and sound), Margaret Preston (who later played an important role in building appreciation for aboriginal art), Albert Tucker, William Dobell, Russell Drysdale, Charles Blackman (and his extraordinary Alice in Wonderland series), John Brack, John Olsen, Ian Fairweather, and, of course, Sidney Nolan.

Robert Hughes (1938-2012) finished writing this book when he was twenty four years old, before he left Australia for Europe and later the United States where he became Time magazine´s leading art critic and before he had a chance to actually see and closely examine european and american masterpieces he had come across in magazine reproductions. It was his second published book (the first was on the australian artist Donald Friend) and even though he claims to have heavily revised it for the second, 1970, edition, he became unsatisfied with it, as he points out in his preface to that edition:

It seems to me that the most interesting issue raised by Australian painting is the complex, partly sociological, issue of its pendant relationship to the European tradition, both old annd new. A history of Australian art should be written in terms of its overseas prototypes. I did not write The Art of Australia in such terms because I was largely ignorant of those prototypes [...]

With all its deficiencies, I still hope that The Art of Australia may be of some interest. I doubt whether I would now endorse everything about the twenty-four year old who wrote it. His luxuriant metaphors and tendendy to jib at formal analysis are irritating. But I am still fond of him, and feel a certain responsibility for his first book.

Robert Hughes always kept his youthful energy, his outspokenness, his evident love and understanding of modern art and a wonderful eye for the telling and relevant anecdote which you can find in this book. He later learnt to prune "luxuriant metaphors", which are particularly irritating in the last chapters of the book. In my opinion, in this book he does not succeed in communicating his perceptions and ideas on abstract art, which he finally manages to do so brilliantly in his later The Shock of the New. However, recklessly judging from a recent two part video, Australian Art: 1788 till Now (A romp) , by australian gallery owner, Michael Reid (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lV8Sp-...), Hughes´ outline of australian art history up to the 1960s still appears to be sound.

[F. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yes, it's Robert Hughes, one of the greatest art critics of Australia, if not the greatest. Yes, this book is very comprehensive in regard to Australian history. But it left a lot to be desired. While the comprehensiveness was a strength in this book, it was also a weakness in that Hughes tried to include too much, to the point where his arguments turned into rambles and lost focus.

Also, for a book about Australian art, Hughes spends a great deal of time attacking it. Either it's too "derivative" when artists try to emulate European or American artists, or it's "provincial" when there's references made to the Australian landscape.

I appreciate the fact that he was only 25 when he wrote this, so perhaps his ideas were premature. But, given how much I've heard people in art circles praise this book, I expected something a bit more objective, or at least argued with more diplomacy, rather than just a hate fest about Australian art.

Being so jargon-heavy also makes this book fairly inaccessible to those who aren't of an art historical background. It merely exemplifies the snobby art critic stereotype, which is self-defeating for an industry that needs more support and funding by the public, not less. Unfortunately, I won't be able to recommend this book.

[PJ Ebbrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I read Robert Hughes' prose, I can hear him talking to me. He has been my favourite art critic since watching him on The Shock of the New. Here, he looks at his native homeland artists, as this is an early book. It cover up to the early 70s. Great reviews and I found one new artist, who I have never heard of before; even though I had been to Aus.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I must say I was surprised at Hughes' audacity to be writing like this in the sixties at such a young age (just 27). He was pretty harsh on artists like Heysen and Streeton and with Australian art in general during the first 100 years after settlement, but I really enjoyed his perspective and his courage in taking on the art establishment. Obviously, he continued in this vein all his life ...