Things I Didn’t Know: A Memoir

last updated 8 January 2015

Motherhood did not sit well with Robert Hughes' first wife. An eye-blink after she was through nursing their first child, she announced that the days of domestic tranquility were over and she needed to start sleeping with other men. Swinging London in the late '60s was teeming with libertines just like her, and so she was out almost every night, and coming home the next morning with drugs in her veins and traces of a new consort on her clothing or hair. Hughes was 'œshell-shocked,' 'œbewildered,' and not long faithful to his own marital vows. But hashish and single-malt whiskey consoled him too, and he might have never extracted himself from his funk if a call from New York hadn't come from out of the blue. It was an editor at Time, asking whether Hughes might consider becoming the magazine's next art critic.

Hughes soon raised the bar for critics in all fields, said Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post. Time mattered in 1970 in ways that it no longer does, and Hughes used his new perch to rail against mere trendiness and lay the groundwork for The Shock of the New, a 1981 survey of modern art that remains 'œthe definitive book on the subject.' Born in Sydney to a fairly wealthy Catholic family, Hughes began fashioning a brawling elitism in the 'œintellectual boot camp' of a Jesuit boarding school, said Ariel Gonzalez in The Miami Herald. Neither the church nor Australia suited his tastes for long, but both left their marks. He escaped to London already 'œallergic to cant' and impatient with mediocrity. He still 'œwrites better about paintings than many painters paint.'