Tuesday, August 07, 2012

Robert Hughes, R. I. P.

NYTimes.com: Robert Hughes, the eloquent, combative art critic and historian who lived with operatic flair and wrote with a sense of authority that owed more to Zola or Ruskin than to his own century, died on Monday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. He was 74 and had lived for many years in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.

Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.

2 comments:

Todd Mason said...

Another of the Vidal generation of literary figures just as comfortable, and often as entertaining, on camera. A pity.

Deb said...

I loved his seminal overview of modern art, "The Shock of the New," especially his characterization of Vegas as " the Disneyland of terminal greed" and of Dali as having "the greed of a salamander, the political conscience of a Torquemada, and the vanity of an aging drag queen." All these years later, that still makes me chuckle.