The Upside-Down Critic

What to make of Robert Hughes’ Australian roots.

By Mia Fineman

In his recent memoir, Things I Didn’t Know, art critic Robert Hughes pinpoints the moment he decided to leave his native Australia to begin a new life as a permanent expatriate. It was a warm evening in 1962. Hughes and his mentor, popular historian Alan Moorehead, were talking shop as they pounded down Gewürztraminer at Hughes’ apartment in Sydney. “If you stay here another ten years,” Moorehead told him, “Australia will still be a very interesting place. But you will have become a bore, a village explainer.”

Hughes heeded his friend’s advice, staying first at Moorehead’s villa in Tuscany, then moving to London, where he lived on the fringes of hippie counterculture (“all dope, rhetoric, be-ins, and powdered bullshit,” as he recalls) and wrote art reviews for the “quality Sundays”: the Times, the Telegraph, the Observer, the Spectator. In 1970, he got a call from Time (on a neighbor’s phone; his had been disconnected) offering him a job as the magazine’s art critic. His anecdote about this incident is a perfect snapshot of the good old days of cultural journalism: The editor who called him was drunk from his habitual three-martini lunch; Hughes was stoned to the gills on hash and, in his paranoia, assumed he was talking to the CIA. They worked it out; he took the job, moved to New York, and over the course of 30 years churned out hundreds of eloquent, witty, briskly opinionated columns for his target audience of intelligent, nonspecialist readers.

Hughes’ forays into television further broadened his exposure and established him as a celebrity art critic. He honed his amiably pugnacious persona as writer and presenter of The Shock of the New (1980), an eight-part series on modern art for the BBC, and American Visions (1997), his PBS survey of four centuries of American art. The series and their accompanying books are exemplary works of cultural history for a mass audience, masterpieces of education-as-entertainment. Hughes has turned out to be a “village explainer” in the best sense, bringing the insights of a clear-eyed expat to a village that encompasses most of the English-speaking world. At the same time, his memoir reveals just how formative an influence Aussie culture of the ’50s was, in particular its aspirational yet skeptical relationship to European art. It helped produce a critic of rare bluntnesswho also has blinkers of his own.

Hughes is a bravura performer, both on the screen and on the page. He writes with astounding verve, in a voice that slips easily between boisterous vulgarity and polished eloquence. In Things I Didn’t Know, which chronicles his career through 1970, he says the single greatest influence on his approach to criticism was George Orwell. For Hughes, Orwell’s no-nonsense prose style and clear, everyday language offered an astringent antidote to the “airy-fairy, metaphor-ridden kind of pseudo-poetry” that filled the art magazines of the early ’60s. As a result of this early trainingand probably also as a matter of temperamentHughes’ writing is muscular and dazzlingly lucid; he refuses to indulge in sublime metaphysical musings or languid adjectival swooning, opting instead for precise, verbally nimble descriptions of art’s effects. His critical perspective is that of an erudite outsider, which makes him immensely appealing to a mainstream readership: He knows his stuff, but he hasn’t drunk the Kool-Aid.

Hughes’ skepticism served him well during the boom years of the early ’80s, when inflated reputations sprouted like mushrooms in the rich soil of n overheated art market. Bad reviews are always the most fun to read, and for sheer entertainment value nothing beats his poison-pen takedowns of art stars like Julian Schnabel (whose “work is to painting what Stallone’s is to actinga lurching display of oily pectorals”), or Jeff Koons, whom he described as having “the slimy assurance & of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida.” (Hughes’ pop-culture metaphors are vicious fun, and far from “airy-fairy.”) His “SoHoiad: or, The Masque of Art,” a satire in heroic couplets published in the New York Review of Books in 1984, remains the snarkiest skewering of the contemporary art world that has yet seen the light of day.

Hughes can be just as vivid when writing about the art he loves. He has described the boys in Caravaggio’s paintings, for example, as “overripe bits of rough trade, with yearning mouths and hair like black ice cream,” and evoked Francis Bacon’s famous screaming pope “smearily rising from blackness like carnivorous ectoplasm.” In general, his taste tends toward art with a sensuous, intelligent physicality, a tactile sense of craftedness, and subject matter you can sink your teeth into. Goya is a longstanding favorite (his superb biography of the artist was recently issued in paperback), and he has published persuasive encomiums to contemporaries including Lucian Freud, Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Crumb.

But all critics have their blind spots: particular styles or tendencies that they categorically dismiss, unable or unwilling to engage with the work on its own terms. Hughes’ is conceptual art, particularly the ludic, cerebral variety that began with Duchamp and has been carried on by generations of artists, from Joseph Beuys and John Baldessari through Tracy Emin and Maurizio Cattelan. For Hughes, most conceptual art is too intellectualized, too disembodied; it lacks the substance and sensual immediacy that defines truly great art. “Art requires the long look,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1990 collection of essays, Nothing If Not Critical. “It is a physical object, with its own scale and density as a thing in the world.” While this is true of most art up through the 19th century, the new century ushered in a new way of thinking about art as a set of concepts, a mode of interaction, a manner of seeing and apprehending the world that mayor may notbe tied to a discrete physical object. To reject this approach entirely is to cut oneself off from much of what’s interesting and compelling in the art of the last 100 years. And it’s here, in his refusal to engage with this core tenet of contemporary art, that Hughes still exudes a faint whiff of provincialism.

Though he has lived and worked outside Australia for more than 40 yearsmore than half his lifetimeHughes has never renounced his Australian citizenship; in American Visions, he confesses that he has always found “a degree of freedom” in his status as a resident alien. This jealously guarded outsider’s perspective is one of his great strengths as a criticit has enabled him to look at art with fresh eyes and to dissent from the majority opinion, particularly concerning contemporary artbut it’s also the source of his greatest weakness. To Hughes, conceptual art looks like nothing more than an insider’s mind game. And while it’s true that much conceptual art is trivial or banal or needlessly hermetic, the track record of traditional, object-based art is no better. I would love to see Hughes set aside his doubts (at least temporarily), step inside the circle, and grapple with conceptual art on its own terms. But perhaps it’s too much to expect even our greatest village explainer to explain it all.

How did Tchaikovsky die?

On the eve of an ambitious BBC retrospective, Adam Sweeting reports on the controversies that still surround the composer’s death

In summer 2005, the BBC launched a blitz of round-the-clock Beethoven on TV and radio in what was supposedly the biggest retrospective of the works of a single composer in the corporation’s history. Now they’re about to do it again with Tchaikovsky, unveiling a swathe of films and drama-documentaries, followed by a week-long broadcast of the complete works of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky on Radio 3 in February.

Tragic: Tchaikovsky (played by Ed Stoppard) with his brother Modest (William Mannering) in the forthcoming BBC docu-drama

Conductor Charles Hazlewood features prominently in four of the TV programmes, and is delighted to have had the chance to rectify what he sees as a historical distortion of Tchaikovsky’s music. He deplores the way many post-Second World War conductors converted his work into a glutinous syrup  “especially Herbert von Karajan, who should have been shot for the disservice he performed”  and wants instead to “show that this is music of enormous visceral power and at times coarse brutality, as well as of almost unbearable sweetness”.

Perhaps Hazlewood has been reading the former New York Times critic Harold C Schonberg, who wrote that “for a long time Tchaikovsky, so loved by the public, was discounted by many connoisseurs and musicians as nothing but a weeping machine”. Misunderstood or not, Tchaikovsky’s music remains some of the best-loved and most-performed in the symphonic, ballet and operatic repertoires.

Hazlewood’s drama-documentary re-creates some of the most important episodes in the life of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, but it sidesteps the controversy that still surrounds the composer’s death. Despite decades of debate, no scholar has delivered the final word on whether Tchaikovsky’s death was misfortune or suicide. Hazlewood says: “We’ve deliberately left it quite open-ended. My personal view is that he wasn’t trying to commit suicide. I think he probably snogged the wrong bloke and got cholera  simple as that.”

Death from cholera was the official version endorsed by doctors in St Petersburg after the composer’s demise on November 6, 1893, and repeated by early biographers. Supposedly, Tchaikovsky had drunk a glass of unboiled tap water, which seems a reckless thing to do during an epidemic of a fatal water-borne disease. None the less, his death was imputed to carelessness rather than deliberate self-destruction.

But almost immediately, alternative versions of the story began to circulate, most of them predicated on the idea that the composer had died not from disease, but from arsenic poisoning. Some surmised that he had killed himself in despair at his homosexuality, or fear of its disclosure.

The composer’s drinking and gambling binges suggested another possible motive for self-extinction. While another variant had Tchaikovsky contracting cholera from a male prostitute, many dismissed the cholera story precisely because it was considered a disease of poverty, much too squalid a fate for the famous and solidly bourgeois Tchaikovsky.

Fellow-composer Rimsky-Korsakov was dubious about the cholera diagnosis because quarantine regulations weren’t followed. Tchaikovsky received a steady stream of visitors duing his final days, and his body was not sealed in a zinc coffin as was the normal practice.

Tchaikovsky’s sister-in-law, Olga Tchaikovskaya, claimed that he was poisoned by one of his doctors, Vassily Bertenson, at Tsar Alexander III’s behest. Elsewhere, it was rumoured that the Tsar drove the composer to suicide by commanding that “Tchaikovsky must disappear at once,” after the caretaker at Tchaikovsky’s apartment building reported that the composer had seduced his son.

The most durable of the suicide theories is the one advanced in 1980 by Alexandra Orlova, a Soviet musicologist who had emigrated to the USA. In a story supposedly told to her by an elderly historian, Alexander Voitov, Tchaikovsky had committed a sexual indiscretion too far, becoming involved with the nephew of a certain Duke Stenbock-Fermor. Homosexuality was illegal in Russia, with offenders liable to penalties including deportation to Siberia and being whipped with birch rods.

The apoplectic Duke wrote a letter of complaint to Tsar Alexander III, passing the letter via Nikolai Jakobi, chief prosecutor of the Russian senate. Jakobi had been a classmate of Tchaikovsky’s at the St Petersburg School of Jurisprudence, and conceived the notion of convening a “court of honour” of fellow alumni, who would pass judgment on the tormented symphonist. It was they, according to Mme Orlova, who decreed that Russia’s greatest living composer should commit suicide to avoid besmirching the reputation of the School of Jurisprudence.

This story proved seductive to several eminent scholars, finding its way into biographical entries on Tchaikovsky in The New Oxford Companion to Music and The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (though the latter amended its findings to “not proven” in its second edition). However, marauding posses of rival specialists were soon picking holes in the Orlova thesis, and many considered that Alexander Poznansky last year delivered the coup de grâce with his exhaustively researched volume, Tchaikovsky’s Last Days: A Documentary Study.

Among other apparently lethal blows to the Orlova version, Poznansky revealed that there was no Duke Stenbock-Fermor, but there was a Count of that name. However, he was an equerry to Tsar Alexander, and would not have needed an intermediary to deliver a letter to his own boss.

As for the supposed threat to the reputation of the St Petersburg School of Jurisprudence represented by Tchaikovsky’s gay rampages, Poznansky depicted the school as a hotbed of all-male debauchery which even had its own song hymning the delights of homosexuality. In addition, the author characterised Russian court and artistic life as rife with homosexual affairs, to the extent that Tchaikovsky’s behavior would barely have raised an eyebrow among the champagne-imperialists of fashionable St Petersburg.

advertisementAs the Russian music specialist Prof Richard Taruskin commented, “Homosexuality was regarded, and indulged, as a form of libertinage. Russia was a feudal society until 1861, and ‘gentlemanly games’ were a traditional droit du seigneur.”

This doesn’t entirely account for the neurosis and self-loathing revealed in many of Tchaikovsky’s letters, which suggest the composer felt greater concern about his sexuality than academics writing a century later would have us believe. His marriage to besotted music student Antonina Milyukova in an attempt to eradicate his “pernicious passions” and put on a show of conventional respectability was an act of feverish desperation, ending catastrophically for both partners.

But perhaps the greatest disservice to Tchaikovsky’s work (other than spinning it in a blender of queasy Germanic suariness) would be to represent it as solely the expression of homosexual angst. The 19th-century critic James Huneker thought he could hear a homosexual “pathology”, while latterday “queer theorists” like to analyse his work through a politicised prism of gender and sexuality. Tchaikovsky would probably have preferred his listeners to appreciate him as a master melodist, inspired orchestrator and peerless musical craftsman.

This story proved seductive to several eminent scholars, finding its way into biographical entries on Tchaikovsky in The New Oxford Companion to Music and The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (though the latter amended its findings to “not proven” in its second edition). However, marauding posses of rival specialists were soon picking holes in the Orlova thesis, and many considered that Alexander Poznansky last year delivered the coup de grâce with his exhaustively researched volume, Tchaikovsky’s Last Days: A Documentary Study.

Among other apparently lethal blows to the Orlova version, Poznansky revealed that there was no Duke Stenbock-Fermor, but there was a Count of that name. However, he was an equerry to Tsar Alexander, and would not have needed an intermediary to deliver a letter to his own boss.

As for the supposed threat to the reputation of the St Petersburg School of Jurisprudence represented by Tchaikovsky’s gay rampages, Poznansky depicted the school as a hotbed of all-male debauchery which even had its own song hymning the delights of homosexuality. In addition, the author characterised Russian court and artistic life as rife with homosexual affairs, to the extent that Tchaikovsky’s behavior would barely have raised an eyebrow among the champagne-imperialists of fashionable St Petersburg.

advertisementAs the Russian music specialist Prof Richard Taruskin commented, “Homosexuality was regarded, and indulged, as a form of libertinage. Russia was a feudal society until 1861, and ‘gentlemanly games’ were a traditional droit du seigneur.”

This doesn’t entirely account for the neurosis and self-loathing revealed in many of Tchaikovsky’s letters, which suggest the composer felt greater concern about his sexuality than academics writing a century later would have us believe. His marriage to besotted music student Antonina Milyukova in an attempt to eradicate his “pernicious passions” and put on a show of conventional respectability was an act of feverish desperation, ending catastrophically for both partners.

But perhaps the greatest disservice to Tchaikovsky’s work (other than spinning it in a blender of queasy Germanic sugariness) would be to represent it as solely the expression of homosexual angst. The 19th-century critic James Huneker thought he could hear a homosexual “pathology”, while latterday “queer theorists” like to analyse his work through a politicised prism of gender and sexuality. Tchaikovsky would probably have preferred his listeners to appreciate him as a master melodist, inspired orchestrator and peerless musical craftsman.

BBC2, 9pm: Tchaikovsky: Fortune and Tragedy (part 2 of Charles Hazlewood’s drama-documentary). BBC4, 10pm: Discovering Tchaikovsky: Pathétique (Charles Hazlewood examines the Sixth Symphony)