Reading art criticism can feel like plowing through an annual report. How can those tortured words have come from an experience of art? What is really being said here? Where's the bottom line? In this regard the criticism of Robert Hughes, art critic for Time magazine from 1971 to 2002, is distinctive for its life and blood. The life comes from his keen sense of what art looks and feels like. The blood comes from those who offend Hughes. Part of the pleasure of reading his criticism is found in the quick evisceration of troubling art or ideas. His essays are literate, informative, and thought provoking.

The Australian–born Hughes has published several books on art, and made two popular PBS series: The Shock of the New in 1980 and American Visions in 1997. In addition Hughes has written about the founding of Australia (The Fatal Shore), the city of Barcelona (Barcelona), the plague of political correctness (The Culture of Complaint), and fishing (A Jerk on One End). The quality and popularity of his work have given Hughes prominence in cultural affairs. A 1997 New Yorker profile suggested that he was a successor to the British critic Kenneth Tynan, and went on to describe his popularity in Australia, where there was talk of a political career for the outspokenly republican, anti–crown expatriate.

But things have not gone so well for Hughes in the decade since the New Yorker profile was published. In 1993 Hughes created a ruckus by announcing at an MIT conference on government funding of the arts that "the job of democracy, in the field of art, is to make the world safe for elitism." This is not the critical sentiment multiculturalists want to hear, and Hughes has been increasingly excoriated by the cultural Left for being mean–spirited and out of touch. At the same time, while his aesthetic standards are seemingly related to conservative values, Hughes has repeatedly attacked conservatism for a coarsening of political thought, which he believes began with Ronald Regan. Moreover, as he has aged, Hughes has exhibited distaste for Christian fundamentalists, and seems to go out of his way to bait them. What nourished such a union of high–minded aesthetics and general cultural spleen?

A good place to find out is Things I Didn't Know, Hughes' new memoir. The book opens with a long chapter about his nearly fatal car wreck in Western Australia in 1999, which entailed a harrowing convalescence, disabilities he'll bear for the remainder of his life, and an increasingly nasty series of legal battles. The latter were fueled in part by Hughes' inflammatory remarks after his first trial ended with a "no case" judgment. These remarks precipitated more trials and a rapid fall from grace with the Australian press and public.    

According to Hughes, writing is like fishing because it is solitary, and there is no certainty about what might be caught. Thus the memoir is a troll in the dark waters of his past, seeking to fathom meaning from whatever is hooked. His catch of the day is often interesting, but not everything was worth keeping. This book lacks the taut structure of Hughes' best work, and would have benefited from editorial liposuction.

Things I Didn't Know has been widely reviewed, but no review I've seen has more than glancingly noticed the place of Christianity in Hughes' life. Perhaps that is because so many of his references are gratuitous swipes. But Christianity is present in Things I Didn't Know from the first pages—where, in a delirium after the accident, Hughes, thinking he was about to receive extreme unction, kept calling his doctor "Father"—until the last, where he is hired to be the art critic for Time on the strength of his second book, Heaven and Hell in Western Art.

The Hughes family emigrated from Ireland to Australia in 1839, and flourished in trade, real estate, and public life. His grandfather was Lord Mayor of Sydney and his brother Tom was the Attorney General of Australia. Their father, a World War I hero, was a "righteous and inflexible man" and a "fiercely orthodox catholic" who died of cancer when Hughes was twelve. It is against the shadow of that absent figure that Hughes "at least partly" cast himself, choosing to become "a political skeptic, an atheist, a liberal, a voluptuary, and, in most ways, a disappointment." 

Ignatius Loyala is credited with the saying, "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man." Hughes demonstrates both the wisdom and the shortcomings of that idea. He was educated at Riverview, a Jesuit boarding school in Sydney. The stamp of Jesuit character is seen in his criticism. When he describes Ignatius as being interested in "the palpable and the concrete" instead of "metaphysical speculation," with an emphasis on how feeling substantiates knowing, he could be describing his own work. His observation, that Ignatian Christianity is "argumentative rather than contemplative" and "didn't have truck with heretics," sums up his approach nicely.

The Jesuits recognized Hughes' literary gifts and encouraged them. His English teacher began to supplement his reading, giving him everything from Gibbon to an anthology of James Joyce. Hughes once left the Joyce book out in public, and the resulting conflict between Catholic rectitude and the desire to nourish a budding writer is both touching and emblematic of Jesuit education. It is clear that Hughes is grateful for that education.

How did they lose him? By his own hand, so to speak. He locates his loss of faith in the burden of adolescent sexuality, which erupted at Riverview, and left him unable to control himself and unable to confess since he knew it would happen again. He felt his sins were past redemption, and his idea of God "swelled grotesquely, vengeful and all seeing as a police inspector, angry as an insulted father."

The young Hughes tried to compensate for this by studying Catholic history and apologetics. He wrote essays imitating Chesterton—"not such bad training for a young writer"—and Belloc. He went so far as to join a Catholic Action group preaching in a public park in Sydney, matching decibels and arguments with Fascists, Stalinists, and Trotskyites. But this did nothing to sustain his rapidly ebbing faith, and by the senior year, he began to disbelieve. "It was an awful feeling at first, but one got used to it and it didn't seem so bad after awhile, as long as no one knew about it."

So apparently it was the flesh that did Hughes in. Yes, the book has some weightier intellectual objections to the faith, like the problem of theodicy, as well as critiques of distinctly Catholic beliefs, like the magisterium. But generally there is not the kind of sustained theological reflection that one finds in the British literary critic James Wood's The Broken Estate. Woods, who repudiated his evangelical beliefs at the age of fifteen, seems to have a clearer idea of what is at stake. For Woods the problem of faith revolves around the question of truth or falsehood. For Hughes, in the end, Christianity seems to have been an impediment to a sybaritic life.

One of the admirable aspects of Hughes'criticism has been his opposition to the idea that unbridled self–expression equals art. We find that critique here too when he evaluates the underground London of the 1960s. Yet his own passage through the counterculture came with a cost. The human wreckage surrounding his first marriage to a pathologically promiscuous and substance–abusing fellow Australian leads him to weakly affirm that free love isn't free. But overall he doesn't see much of a parallel between the discipline necessary for significant art and the kind of restraint that makes human relations flourish.

And what of art?  There are many wonderful encounters in the memoir. In one Hughes finds himself standing before Duccio's magisterial Maesta, tears streaming down his face, inwardly reciting lines from Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium": "Art, I now realized, was the symbolic discourse that truly reached into me."  And, he adds, "I was beginning, at last, to derive from art, from architecture, and even from the beauty of organized landscape a sense of transcendence that organized religion had offered me—but that I had never received." What exactly is this transcendence? Hughes is quick to say he is not confusing art with religion, much less trying to make a religion out of art. He is not turning art into "a signpost to some imagined, hoped for, but illusory experience of God." Evidently the deeply felt experience is his best hope.

Though scruffier and less optimistic than his predecessors, Hughes is the latest traveler down a path that was blazed in the 19th century by Matthew Arnold. The path leads away from religious belief, around the manifold misery of the world, onto an island of refuge, where "culture" provides sustenance. Over the last half century that path hasn't been traveled much, as artists and critics have demanded more from art—often to its detriment—by seeking an instrumentality that occurred naturally with the Maesta. I sense from the memoir that Hughes may be finding his island a little small now. The consolations of culture may—like hormones—fade with age. How could he have known?

Ted Prescott, a sculptor whose work has been widely exhibited, is professor of art at Messiah College.

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