Robert Hughes Quotes
July 28, 1938 – August 6, 2012
More Robert Hughes Quotes
Its clones have hung on so many suburban walls over the decades that it has become the Mona Lisa of the vegetable world.
Robert Hughes— On Vincent Van Gogh's Sunflowers. In Time, 13 April 1987.
It is the nature of carnivores to get power and then, having disposed of their enemies, to deploy the emollient powers of Great Art to make themselves look like herbivores.
Robert Hughes— "Komar and Melamid" (1982)
The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.
Robert Hughes— "Alex Katz" (1986)
The protein of our cultural imagination.
Robert Hughes— Of the US Museum of Modern Art. In Time, 14 May 1984.
There's no geist like the Zeitgeist.
Robert Hughes— New York Review of Books, 27 Oct 1983
In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.
Robert Hughes— "Introduction: The Decline of the City of Mahagonny"
The desire to be primitive was very much a function of fin-de-siècle imperialism; it appealed to strong egos and domineering minds.
Robert Hughes— "Introduction: The Decline of the City of Mahagonny"
What strip-mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture.
Robert Hughes— "Introduction: The Decline of the City of Mahagonny"
Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton gives us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroidising, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent.
Robert Hughes— "John Singer Sargent" (1986)
It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.
Robert Hughes— "Vincent van Gogh, Part I" (1984)
The sense of not having the whole story that comes from living close up to traumatic events.
Robert Hughes— "R.B. Kitaj" (1981)
Like most artists who have made an invention of some kind, he tends to overplay the significance of his own and goes on about it as though it were a Rosetta Stone, with whose help all representation can be rescued from one-eyed falsehood.
Robert Hughes— "David Hockney" (1988)
Everything that would be said against the Eixample's heirs, from Le Corbusier's 'ville radieuse' to Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, was already said, with far less justice, about the Eixample itself. And all its critics concurred that the basic mistake was to have left the planning of a city in the hands of a socialist.
Robert Hughes— Page 284 (Barcelona (1992))
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
Robert Hughes— "Modernism's Patriarch (Cezanne)", Time Magazine, June 10, 1996
