THE SHOCK OF THE NEW: The Life and Death of Modern Art

by Robert Hughes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 1980

Like Hilton Kramer, a critic he approvingly quotes, Hughes is reactionary: he reacts continually, and with a certain pugnacious glee, when things do not quite turn out as originally advertised. One of those things is modernist art--out of whose spluttering history Hughes has made a Kenneth Clark-like series for the BBC, the origin of these illustrated essays. Owing to the visual jumpiness a TV series demands, Hughes is all over the place--literally (Van Gogh's Provence, Monet's Giverny, Cezanne's Mont Ste. Victoire) and metaphorically: backpedaling from DeKooning to Kandinsky; terming Picasso--whom he has real antipathy for--a ""walking scrotum"" and his early interest in African sculpture ""a dainty parody of the imperial model""; minutely explaining Duchamp's Large Glass as a masturbation allegory; skewering (along the lines of Peter Blake) the majority of modernist architecture as authoritarian. In general, then, Hughes' is a cultural politics of complaint, pointing to but never describing some vague state of social satisfaction and moral/artistic integrity that the art of this century ostensibly plays no part in: ""There is no intensity without rules, limits, and artifice."" So it becomes more than just a matter of curiosity to see what Hughes actually does approve of. Length of attention is indicative, a corollary of his sympathies: he speaks volubly of Dada, of Rauschenberg and Johns, of Robert Motherwell--punning, anthologizing, highly processed work all; Robert Rosenblum's far-fetched but glossy thesis linking Caspar David Friedrich to Mark Rothko along the same sublime/transcendental arc is bought whole. There's a certain polish to these eclectic nods, true, but finally little depth. A scattershot book, in sum, intermittently entertaining, but without a base or core.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1980

Categories: NONFICTION