Booknotes

Mr. ROBERT HUGHES, AUTHOR, "AMERICAN VISIONS: THE EPIC HISTORY OF ART IN AMERICA": I was carrying the coat. I was not wearing it when I came through US Customs.

Mr. HUGHES:: That was when I first came to the United--well, it--it was when I came to the United States to try out for Time. And it wasn't my first visit to the United States, but it was the one that caused all the trouble.

Mr. HUGHES:: Because they'd asked me to come and try out to see if they liked me and I liked them. They--they--they were looking for an art critic, and in some moment of aberration they--they got me. It was purely accidental, as all things are. There was a--a book that I'd just brought out called "Heaven and Hell in Western Art," and it sold about three and a half copies in the United States and, very luckily for me, one of those copies found its way to the then-managing editor of Time, Henry Anatole Grunwald, who said, `Well, let's try this fellow.' And through a rather protracted business, they ran me to Earth in London. And our marriage was cracking up and all things favored a--a retreat from England, so I thought I'd go and see what it was like in the States. Of course, I thought I was going to stay for two years.

So, anyway, Barbara met me at the airport, and there I was. What she didn't mention was that I'd come from Italy and I had all these bags of an herbal mixture called potpourri, which I'd got from the Pharmacia de Santa Berria Novella in--in Florence. And I was going to give them to friends as presents. And the guy going--was going through my bags, and he saw these plastic bags full of this herbal mixture sitting on top, and he said--but the--I mean, his eyes lit up and he thought, `I've got another one.' And he--and he said, `What's that stuff?' And I said, `It's potpourri.' And he said, `What?' And I said, `Potpourri.' `How do you spell it?' `P-O-T'--and I--and--so I nearly didn't make it into the United States.

Mr. HUGHES:: This? It's a book. It's called "American Visions," which my editor subtitled "The Epic History of Art in America." It is a book vastly expanded from a television series that I did for PBS and for the BBC. And it is basically, I suppose, a kind of rather opinionated social history of the United--of American art.

Mr. HUGHES:: Yeah, that's right. So that is--it's not a condensation of the book. That had to be written again from scratch. I wrote the whole issue, something that I've never tried before. But it's amazing what the prospect of hanging can do.

Mr. HUGHES:: Yeah, it's--it's a...

Mr. HUGHES:: Intensely relieved and very like going fishing. It's a wring-out, you know, a project like this. It's to--the whole thing took me four years, and--and--and I was a month, more or less, on the road promoting it. And the--the--there was no rest for the ungodly, and--and I'm just glad it's over and I'm glad it came out well.

Mr. HUGHES:: Oh, yeah. Oh, sure. Well, not during the whole period; that would have been unendurable. But I went--you know, I crashed at the end of the series. The--I mean, it wasn't a fatal crash, but I woke up one morning and I thought, `Yikes, life is devoid of meaning and horrible in all respects,' you know. I mean, I don't know whether you've suffered from this, but it's a--yeah, it's a medical problem. It's not lot like you suddenly grow horns and a tail and turn into something, you know, tur--although I must say my wife rather felt as if she was dealing with the little creature from "Alien" sometimes.

But, no, it was--I--I--no kidding, it was bad. And they--and--and it was caused by overwork, you know, with all the trials, of course, that go back into childhood. And--but, anyway, then I sort of woke up and realized, `Well, I've got to write this damn book. I've got to write two hundred and s--something thousand words of copy in the next nine months.' And so I had to put myself, more or less, on military discipline. You know, I'd get up at 4:00 every morning and have my tea--I was too wired up to have coffee, which, you know, was a nuisance, but there it was--and write fif--1,200 to 1,500 words a day and do four--four miles a day on the treadmill, if possible and--and just bang it through. Because if the series comes out, and you don't have a book there, obviously, it's not the best business practice. No, it was--it--it was very hard. I mean...

Mr. HUGHES:: What's it feel like? It feels terrible. You--you--you know, the--the--luckily, if you've just got one thing to concentrate on, you can concentrate on that, or at least so I feel. If I haven't had the book to write, I would have been in big trouble. The--you feel as though your life is essentially without meaning; you know, that stuff that you've done is not going to last, and that the--Oh, how can I put it?--it deprives you of--of--of pleasure in the company of others. It makes you solecistic and sort of self-enclosed without being successfully introspective. And it's an altogether miserable business.

What I did was I, you know, did what I would have--I would never have contemplated normally. I went along to see a shrink. I mean, finally, at the age 57, I--I went to a shrink. But, you see, good Catholic boys don't go to shrinks. What they do is they go to confession, and that sort of gets rid of the--of the, you know--of one part of it without actually sorting anything out. So I went to see a shrink. I took drugs. I--you know, and I've got to say it all helped a lot. The shrink was a fellow fisherman, and it was a little difficult to sort out whether we were discussing, you know, fly-fishing for striped bass or my own deeper problems. But we--we did, in the end.

Mr. HUGHES:: That picture was taken about two months ago.

Mr. HUGHES:: It's in my loft. The bare and Spartan and messy appearance of the loft is not a matter of set dressing; it's a mat--you know, the--the bookshelves you see are empty. I'm moving all of my books out in order to rebuild the loft.

Mr. HUGHES:: On the corner of Prince and West Broadway, in su--in SoHo, in New York.

Mr. HUGHES:: Oh, God, since 1970, '71. Yeah, that's right, 1971. And I moved to New York in 1970. I stayed in the Chelsea Hotel for a few months, and then somebody said to me--actually, it was Barbara, the person that we referred to earlier--said to me, `You know, if you want cheap, large space, then there are these really cheap big ware--warehouses down in this unnamed part of New York.' A lot of artists were living there; I went and got one.

Mr. HUGHES:: Yes.

Mr. HUGHES:: I think it's fairly well-known. I certainly didn't ask him. It's in the literature.

Mr. HUGHES:: Grant Wood. I mean, whether he was a practicing gay or not, I have absolutely no idea. But, you know, he--the--the--I mean, he was a man of--of, pictorially, very refined tastes. And he had a--I mean, the big infl--you know, far from being a sturdy son of the Midwestern soil, he was--I mean, he was, in fact, born in--in--in--in Iowa, it's true, and he lived there a good deal of his life. But the big influences on him were 15th century Flemish po--portrait painting, with its very high finish and intense concentration of craft, and it is said his mother's willow-pattern china. And, periodically, Grant Wood could be prevailed upon.

Yes, there I am in front of the--the house in "American Gothic," which is not the real house in "American Gothic"; it's a fake "American Gothic" house, which has been built closer to Grant Wood's former art school. But the--the--sometimes he would be prevailed upon to put on a pair of blue bib overalls and, you know, sort of stand in close proximity to a tree so as to look like a farmer. But that was all part of the promotion of the--of American regionalism in the '30s.

Mr. HUGHES:: It--it means that it's the American "Mona Lisa." Now the fame of a painting is a really mysterious thing. I mean, nobody really knows whether "Mona Lisa" got famous, although I have some theories. This one became fantastically famous, I think, in part, through its ambiguity. The--the--I mean, first of all, it's a very, very memorable image, one which strikes deep into people's ancestral memory, or what they would like their ancestral memory to be. You know, there he is, the stern, Puritan father holding up the pitchfork defending the virtue of his not-very-alluring daughter. And the--the--it is humorous and, at the same time, it's hard to be sure whether he's--whether Wood was praising that kind of Midwestern rectitude or not. So people project on it.

That comes from a painting by Gilbert Stuart, the so-called La--no, not the Lansdowne portrait. The--it's--Stuart got to paint Washington three times from the life. This is derived from the unfinished picture and, of course, it's on the American dollar bill. That's the--that's the canonical image of George Washington.

Mr. HUGHES:: I think it was a good idea. Well, first of all, they're not putting a painting on the dollar bill; they're put--they're putting one of zillions of engraved images which were derived from the painting. It's not a reproduction of the painting, but it is, you know, a version of--there it is. Yes, that's--that's Washington. And as you can see, it's reversed by the engra--you know, I mean, the--the--in--in--in that one, he's facing to his right, and on the dollar bill he's facing to his left. That's because it's, you know, engraved.

Mr. HUGHES:: I can tell you a lot about Gilbert Stuart. Gilbert Stuart was--I mean, first of all, he was a tremendously able and--and an immensely fluent portraitist. He was a great believer in the--in the--you know, in multiplying his images. He used to unabashedly refer to his portraits of Washington--oh, well, there's Martha Washington, too, yeah--he would refer to his portraits of Washington, for which there was an immense demand, as his $100 bills. So--and--and he painted, I think, Martha and George in the same week, if not in the same day, you know, from the life a--I think, at Mt. Vernon. Yeah.

Mr. HUGHES:: There were three original ones of Washington which were done from the life with the great man present. But he then spun off from those at least 114 versions. And that was what you had to do, you know. The--the----you couldn't tie the president up indefinitely with photo ops or, at any rate, with painting ops. And--and so the--the--there--there--there was a real demand for effigies of Washington, also served by people like the--the Peales, both f--you know, f--I mean--I think--I think it was Raphaelle Peale--no, it wasn't Raphaelle. Oh, my God, so long after the book, I'm getting confused. Charles Wilson Peale was the father who founded this dynasty of--of artists, and one of his sons--Was it Rubens? Raphaelle?--I can't remember--specialized in port--in portraits of Washington just like his dad had. And there are hundreds of them all over the United States.

And--but, of course, this is an age before mechanical reproduction, and here we have Copley, certainly the greatest American portraitist of the 18th century, and this is the--again, it's our canonical image of Paul Revere, you know, the--the--the intelligent, skeptical, determined American craftsman as citizen. I mean, it's one of the archetypal portraits of a skilled American.

Mr. HUGHES:: That's right.

Mr. HUGHES:: That's right.

Mr. HUGHES:: You can see the reflection of the window which is behind the artist, and that burning spot on the sort of a teapot that Revere has just finished making is a reflection of the window. And, of course, that's the light source for all the light in the--in the picture. Yeah.

Mr. HUGHES:: There--a lot of things are special about him, but I would say the thing that is most special is that he was the--well, he was the first resident American to really make a rather grand style out of what was actually rather liny and plain and, you know--and came out of the New England limner tradition. He couldn't, at first, attain the sort of grace notes of the--of 18th century English portraiture. But with that extremely craftsmanlike approach of his and that ple--you know, and that plainness, he actually produced something which I think was more valuable than that. He produced something which was, you know, sort of s--completely sober, unfussed, unflattering, all the moles and warts and wens in place, you know.

And, you know, he was the first great American empi--you know, great American empiricist, which, I might add, this guy that we're looking at now, John Trumbull, was--was not. I mean, Trumbull yearned to be a history painter. The problem of being a history painter in the 1820s was that Americans, then as now, were less interested in their own past than in their own future. There's a very interesting letter from, I think, Adams to Trumbull on this--possibly Madison to Trumbull on this subject saying, `I see no interest in the public around us in the commemoration of the events of the Revolution.' And this was when the negotiation was going on for the four pictures, of which that is one, which now decorate the rotunda of the Capitol here in Washington. Already, Americans, in other words, were complaining about the selective amnesia of their--of their citizenry.

Mr. HUGHES:: How do I do it?

Mr. HUGHES:: Man, I've been over my ears in it for the last five years, you know. I have to--you know, I--I mean, my main problem is going to be clearing this stuff out of my head in order to get on with a book on Goya or whatever the next one will be.

Mr. HUGHES:: I've been an art critic working in America for 27 years. Inevitably, some stuff rubs off. But I'm extremely curious about America, you know, the--the--I mean, I'm curious about America in the way that foreigners are. I'm not a citizen; I'm an Australian. But nevertheless I'm a--I'm what's called an alien--an alien resident, you know, one of them (makes gesture with fingers to simulate antennae on head).

Mr. HUGHES:: Yeah. Yeah.

Mr. HUGHES:: My wife's American. They can't take that green card away from me, not now. The--I haven't said anything about Clinton in this book, you know. The--no, I'm going to stay that way because, beyond a certain age--and I'm 58--the--the leopard has difficulty changing his spots. I mean, I have--for instance, I'm interested in politics, but the only country in which I can be politically active is Australia. I mean, it would seem sort of ridiculous to abandon my Australian citizenship when my family has been active there for so long. I mean, I'm not coming from somewhere in order to completely remake myself, you know.

Mr. HUGHES:: He was the attorney general, my brother Tom, yeah, in--during the Vietnam years. The--he was--he was attorney general at the same time, actually, that Mitchell --that Mitchell was the attorney general here. He met Mitchell. He was--you know, he was given a trip over here to find out more and better ways of dumping on Vietnam protesters. And he was horrified by Mitchell because Tom is a true conservative and not, you know, a--an egregious schemer like Mitchell.

Anyway, the--there was a--no, I mean, our lot have been pretty much embroiled in Australian politics since the 1900s--the--the early 1900s. And the--you know, and I--there's a family history there that I'm kind of--that--you know, that I'm proud of and would not wish to renege on.

Mr. HUGHES:: I work at home in Shelter Island. I have a house there with a barn. Upstairs in the barn, there is my writing room; downstairs, there's my wood shop. When I run out of paragraphs I go down and, you know, absentmindedly cut a few dovetails, and then I go back up again and--well, you know, I mean, one of the frustrations of writing this bloody thing was that I--I didn't get the nose of a boat outside Coecles Harbor once during the whole year. I didn't catch a bluefish; I got a couple of bass on fly. That was it.

But the--the--anyway, I have my art library there. The--half of the top floor of the barn is books; half is writing room. I get up early in the morning and, you know, I do what you do: I work. And--and the--the--I found it excellent for concentration. It's a little frustrating because, you know, Shelter Island, unlike other parts of eastern Long Island, has absolutely no social life of any description, you know, which is actually quite a good thing, you know. I mean, all those hotshot agents with their big cocoa-colored Mercedeses full of tortellini salad are afraid of the water, and so they don't come across on the ferry and that. And, also, you know, if you're at some utterly boring dinner party, you can jump up--or my wife can jump up with a stricken expression on the face and say, `My God, it's nine--it's already 9:00, and the last ferry leaves at 9:45. I'm terribly sorry, Samantha. We have to go,' you know.

The--look, the biggest lesson about work I ever had--because when I was a kid, I--of course, I thought--you know, when I was in my 20s, I thought that it was done by inspiration--the--was from Alan Moorehead, now alas dead, who took me under his wing and was, so to speak, my surrogate father as a writer. And he did this thing which I found utterly incomprehensible. I c--you know, it seemed so strange. He would get up at six in the morning, and at 7:00 he'd be in this little writing room up the--you know, up the hill at the back of his place in Italy. And he would stay there until 11:00. I mean, he wouldn't come out. He wouldn't--you know, he wouldn't take telephone calls. He wouldn't do anything like that. And--surprise, surprise--at the end of the morning he'd usually have 700 words.

Mr. HUGHES:: I have a very good memory. It think it's beginning to decay a bit under the--you know, the influence of age, booze and other things. But, no, I think I've got a pretty good memory. I used to be--you see, I--when I was a boy and when I was at Jesuit school, they would make you--no apologies about it--memorize huge chunks of stuff. But I, you know, had a--some people found this onerous; I found it delightful. I mean, I can still--no, I'm not going to do it, but you know, I can still quote ad libitum from numerous Shakespearean tragedies. I can d--I can recite you "The Waste Land" by heart, if you like. But I'm not going to. We've got better things to do.

Mr. HUGHES:: Yes, it is.

Mr. HUGHES:: Yes.

Mr. HUGHES:: That--that is a painting painted in the 1890s called "Memories of 1865" by Jo--by John Frederick Peter, who was a magic realist who--whose paintings actually were quite popular in America. But the--one of the interesting things about Peter is that he has this exceptionally nostalgic kind of coding. You know, this is--it's called "Memories"--of s--"of '65" because that's the year Lincoln was assassinated. And there's Lincoln's daguerreotype, and there's this old rusty bowie knife, which was one of his studio props, which was picked up on a Civil War battlefield and it's hanging over him as--hanging over the image of Lincoln like the sword over Damocles. And the deliberation of the thing is shown by that card there, which reads something--`of the house,' which was a common kind of card used, I think, in table settings at the time, and it originally read, `head of the house,' so the knife is figuratively cutting off the head, and it's an allusion to the assassination of the president.

Mr. HUGHES:: Peter--well, you mean, around Lincoln...

Mr. HUGHES:: There's a lot--there's a tremendous amount of photography. Lincoln was the first president whose image was really, really ramified by photography. But that's, of course, because there was a popular demand for his work. He was the first president of the age of photography who really was regarded as popular in a, you know, almost demigodlike way, at least for Northerners. And the--but official paintings of Lincoln are, for the most part, pretty dull. I mean, the--you know, as American or any other official portraiture tends to be. But it's the--you know, it's the photographs that--that we remember him by.

Mr. HUGHES:: J--by Jasper Johns.

Mr. HUGHES:: This was done in 1955, and what a stir it caused then. Strangely enough, you know, the...

Mr. HUGHES:: Well, because, you know, the--the--it caused a big stir in the art world because i--people couldn't be sure whether they were looking at a flag or at an image of a flag. I mean, it clearly was an image of a flag, but if so, you know, the painting consisted of nothing but the flag, and so it set up all sorts of odd, I suppose you might say, philosophical or ontological vibrations around itself. The one thing that didn't happen was that, unlike later artists who incorporated the flag into their work, Johns didn't run into any flak for defacing the flag or for blasphemy against it.

Mr. HUGHES:: Johns is--now he--I mean, well, he's--he's--he's certainly one of America's leading painters. He was always bracketed with Bob Rauschenberg, you know, the--in the '50s. He m--he--he's sometimes regarded as one of the fathers of pop art, but he's not really, you know, because pop art is a very different kind of enterprise to Johns. But Johns was infatuated with popular culture, and he wanted to find images which, as he put it, were so well-known that they were not well-seen: flags, targets, stuff like that. And I think, you know, the early work, up to about 1960--it's always a terrible thing to say that you like an artist's early work better than his late, but I do, you know, without in--without disrespect.

Mr. HUGHES:: Absolutely. They're obsessed with the flag. In Australia, or even in France or--or in England, you don't have those rituals surrounding it. I mean, America, you know--in America, there are specified ways of folding it. It must--must not be allowed to touch the ground. Politicians always wish to bring in, you know--or, at any rate, politicians on the right--many of them would like to see an--an actual amendment to the Constitution protecting this icon from defacement or burning or whatever. I mean, if you burnt an Australian flag, you know, nobody would give a damn, which, I guess, is why people don't burn them.

The--you know, it--the flag, to Americans, is a curious kind of almost living presence. It has this sort of eucharistic aspect which it--it generally lacks in other countries. I mean, I daresay that if you pulled out a tricolor, you know, and--and started ostentatiously trampling on it in front of the Champs le de--de--de Depute in Paris, some cop might come up and give you a whack with his baton and tell you to move along. But they don't have constitutional amendments about it, I think.

As for the Union ja--but then there's that double side because one wants to preserve--they wo--Americans like to preserve the flag against blasphemy or defacement, but at the same time they make everything out of it from--from, you know, girls' underpants to advertising signs at gas stations. I mean, nobody thinks there's anything weird--which I do, rather--about a gas station so surrounding itself with hundreds of Old Glories just for the purpose of advertising.

I mean, that sort of seems di--I'm--I have a next-door neighbor out in Shelter Island--well, not quite next door--who has this flagpole on the back of his house. And at--at night Old Glory goes up and he has a spotlight on it. And it's sort of irritating, actually. You wonder why he's making such a--a flapdoodle over it. Is it to say, `I'm American. I live in America'? But we know he's American; we know he lives in America. It's nutty. He's a retired cop. Anyway...

Mr. HUGHES:: Yeah.

Mr. HUGHES:: Oh, sure. You get it on cassette. Absolutely. Please do.

Mr. HUGHES:: I don't know. `I do not concern myself with these mundane preoccupations.' I think, actually, they haven't priced it yet.

Mr. HUGHES:: Yeah.

Mr. HUGHES:: About doing television of any kind, or this?

Mr. HUGHES:: 1982, after I'd fin--after I finished "Shock of the New."

Mr. HUGHES:: Well, it wasn't called "American Visions" then. The--I was looking around, and I thought, `You know, they--there is a terrific subject here, and it's really strange--a terrific subject for television. And it's really weird that nobody in America has tried this one.' And so I started checking it out, and the mo--the more I did, the more convinced I became that there was a pro--you know, a really interesting television series to be made about American art and its social meanings, as it were.

And originally, I wanted to do 10 programs. There--there wasn't the money for that. And there wasn't any money for it, initially. I mean, the BBC shelved it because what they we--they were going through a sort of period of the MTV itchies, you know. The--the didactic miniseries was a thing of the past, you know. He--here I was, this sort of little velociraptor careering around after Kenneth Clark's T. rex, and--but this sort of stuff was extinct. It's not extinct; it never will be.

Mr. HUGHES:: Yeah.

Mr. HUGHES:: Oh. Well, that's an interesting criticism because it's perfectly true and perfectly not. It is true that the nature of television somewhat changes the arguments you can make. You know, television is bad for abstract argument; it's good for show-and-tell. The--it demands a simple narrative, very simple--iconically so. And the--the--and it's certainly true that the book is richer than the television series. But I think within terms of what telly can do, series is reasonably successful. And there are parts of it that I think are hokey, yeah. The--but I'm not going to tell you what they are, and I'm sure there are--I'm sure you know what they are, anyhow.

But I--I--I mean, what Richards essentially is saying here is that the book is a better account than the television series of American art and its various ramifications. And I would not disagree with him there; it is. But at the same time, I think the telly series has a certain value and interest...

Mr. HUGHES:: ...particularly for people who might have no previous expe--not much previous experience of American art.

Mr. HUGHES:: It took three years.

Mr. HUGHES:: Yeah. I mean, I was thinking about it before then, you know, and I would send resentful and intrusive faxes to the BBC saying, `Come on, why don't you (makes guttural noise) or get off the pot?' you know. But the--the actual planning and work on it was about three years.

Mr. HUGHES:: That's right. And Australian television ran it before the BBC did. It went out in Australia in July last year, then in England in--in October and finally here, thank God.

Mr. HUGHES:: Well, it's not that they're more interested in it. It's just that they had first dibs on it. The one thing that I wanted to avoid was having it go out last year because I--in America because I would not have had the book ready by then. And, you know, to be brutally candid about it, you know, the--the--the series, as with all previous television series--whether we're talking about Sagan's "Cosmos" or Ken Burns on the Civil War or back 30 years ago with Kenneth Clark, the series has to function as an extended commercial for the book.

Mr. HUGHES:: They love the--they love the series in Australia.

Mr. HUGHES:: They thought it was a very fair and reasonable and balanced portrait of America with a few jabs and, you know--and the same in England. They--the--the--this is the curious thing. I mean, the--the--a couple of rather crankish critics who've--who've said that this series and book are intended as a kind of assault upon the image of America, you know, written by this weirdo, liberal, foreign leftie--nothing could be further from the truth. But the idea of having a souffle with no ground glass in it at all, I think, would be intolerable.

Mr. HUGHES:: Oh, I haven't read this one.

Mr. HUGHES:: Yeah.

Mr. HUGHES:: Gelernter.

Mr. HUGHES:: Now that is not true. That is not what I'm saying. I'm saying that American culture is in some trouble and I'm saying that quite a lot of what is being promoted as the most promising or whatever art of the last 10 or 15 years has been no good. But I'm not painting an absolutely negativist picture of the current art scene.

Mr. HUGHES:: Well, I--you know, when a car begins to slow down and emit curious noises from the transmission and smoke starts coming out from underneath the hood, you don't actually need to be an engineer to perceive that something is going wrong with it. I am deeply tired of people with quick cultural fixes. The--the--there was a whole industry, as you well know, living in Washington of, you know, peop--you know, I mean, running all the way from A to B, you know, from Bill Bennett to Arianna Stassinopoulos or whatever that ghastly woman's name is.

The--the--there is this whole industry in--in--in--trying to persuade people that various unspecified movements in the direction of virtue and--and--and--and--and--and charity and what have you are going fix to what's wrong with America. I don't think that any--you know, if there is one single way of fixing what's wrong with the--with the art world, I am quite unaware of it. I think the truth is that cultures do go into sort of slack water sometimes. You know, they do go into periods in which their energies are dissipated and not filled.

Now I think it's entirely possible that we might have a few better artists around if you had better art training, but I don't think that would be the--you know, an automatic quick fix. The--the--it's very hard today for an artist to navigate satisfactorily in a cultural environment in which so much of the air in the room is taken up by mass media. This was not a problem in the 19th century. There were no competing mass media, there were no elo--there was no television, there was no film, etc., etc.

People's sense of reality is so much generated by mass media today, mediated by it, that the arts of painting and sculpture, drawing and what have you seem distinctly powerless against the cataract of images that we get from other media.

Mr. HUGHES:: Oh, well, I'd send them--I'd send them to the Whitney Museum in New York--oh, I'd send them to New York, you know, th--so they could have a look around. Washington--I mean, the--the National Museum of American Art here, which is a branch of the Smithsonian, is probably the fundamental collection of American art in this country. Now the strange thing is that it's not as well-known as it ought to be. I mean, you'd think it was--this was a complete impossibility that you could have a National Museum of American Art in the capital of America that was not all that well-known in comparison, say, to the National Gallery.

Mr. HUGHES:: It's one that's connected to the National Portrait Gallery, yeah, and the--the--and its collection is really extraordinarily interesting. I mean, there's great stuff in the Corcoran, too, you know, the--the--here in Washington. I would send them to--I mean, those two are the obvious standouts.

Of course, there's no place--there's no single place which is a repository of every possible kind of American architecture, you know, but, you know, where are the places you have to go to see that? All over. Chicago--I was about to say Atlanta, but not Atlanta obviously, but--but the South, you know, Virginia, New York. It depends on what you're looking for. The--I would certainly send them to Chicago for the collection of the--of the National Museum--I mean--I mean, of the--of the Art Institute and of the Terra Museum, which has some very, very good specifically American paintings.

Mr. HUGHES:: What would it be?

Mr. HUGHES:: I'd like to have a great Hopper.

Mr. HUGHES:: Both of them. They're too great for me. "Early Sunday Morning", such an extraordinary picture, totally magical.

Mr. HUGHES:: Edward Hopper--don't call him Ed; he would have bit your head off. Edward--Ed--Edward Hopper was a deeply inhibited, professional, unspectacular artist who told more truth about the conditions of life in the American--you know, the sort of spiritual condition of life in the American city than anybody else in the 1930s. He was an extraordinary poet, educated. I mean, he was--he was trained by Robert Henri, who was the leader of the Ashcan School. He studied in Paris. And as one can see from the pictures, he was very deeply formed by period--by French illustration of the 1890s, and people like--also like Manet.

And he was better at painting the spaces between people than just about anybody. You know, you always feel as though you're intruding on something that you see--the--I mean, there we are, "Nighthawks," you know, one of the canonical American pictures. He had a tremendous effect upon popular culture. Cameramen love him. The house in "Psycho" is a Hopper house. The house in "Giant on the Prairie" is a Hopper house.

Mr. HUGHES:: He died in 1967. He was born in 1890--no, 18--1880-something, I think. I c--I can't remember his birth date. His other places were Cape Cod, as you can see there, you know, that--that ex--that haunting picture of that blonde standing in the slightly-too-small doorway of that little cottage in the sea light, you know, with the light just falling on her breasts early in the morning. Wonderful picture.

And he--no, Hopper really defined a side of the American imagination as--as no one has done. That--that's, in part, a sort of--almost a joke picture. If you shift it a little bit that way, you can see a portrait of his wife, Joan Nivensen, who was a real shrew, yelling at him out of--you know, at this failing gas station owner, who is Hopper himself. The road is empty. He's being bypassed by history. His wife...

Mr. HUGHES:: ...is--is nagging him.

Mr. HUGHES:: If I could have anything at all?

Mr. HUGHES:: Well, I can't say that I'd turn down a great Pollock. I would like to have a--I would like to have one really, really good Winslow Homer watercolor. I think he just is the greatest watercolorist practically since Turner, who's an astonishing virtuoso of watercolor, and also, the life that he--he depicts is one which I dearly love. You know, everything to do with the sea. And--yeah, that's an oil. That's in the--that is here in Washington. That's in the National--National Gallery here.

Mr. HUGHES:: We--Winslow Homer was a--well, he's a man about whose character not a hell of a lot is known because he--his four favorite words, according to such friends as he had, were `mind your own business.' And the--he started off painting--or, rather, drawing reportage of the Civil War in the 18--you know, he--he--he was there at the front in the 1860--in the early 1860s. This picture here, "A Veteran in a New Field," is probably, I think, the most moving, the--the least direct of all pictures to do with the Civil War. I mean, the man is a veteran who's come back, he's mowing the wheat, but it also alludes to the terrible massacres of Antietam and Gettysburg, you know, which took place in wheat fields.

"Prisoners From the Front," young Union--youngish Union officer surveying these four--these three prisoners. You know, there's this little--there's this hellfire Kentuckian or Virginian in the front, you know, looking as mean as hell, sort of--he's got a face like McVeigh. There's a--an old man who's too old to change and there's this cracker kid who's too young to know anything. I mean, when people say this is an objective picture. Of course, it's not. It's a piece of wartime propaganda.

Mr. HUGHES:: The tr--well, sl--slavery itself was, naturally. But I--it--it--the--the--it's an interesting fact that it doesn't--you know, I mean, certainly there are 19th century genre paintings of slaves and there's one very good one by--by Eastman Johnson of esca--of some escaping slaves on a hor--a horse. It's a very fine picture, that. But by and large, slavery doesn't show much--show up much in the--you know, in the painted record of American life or, at any rate, write comments on slavery don't. The--and when they do, they're usually in the form of, you know, the sort of jolly--jolly old water--watermelon-chewing--you know, it's--it's sort of like an…opera. It--it--it--it presents the slave household as a kind of simple Arcadia--or tends to.

Mr. HUGHES:: I hope so. I would be a hypocrite and a fool to deny that I hope it would.

Mr. HUGHES:: I don't know how much money is a lot. It's going well. They have a first printing of 100,000. It'll take a while to shift 100,000 to--to $65 per, but I have no doubt that we'll be reprinting by Christmas. This is actually--if I can so say without sounding like some sort of snake oil salesman, I think this book actually does fill some kind o--you know, it does find its niche, you know, in America at present because people are really curious about American art, much more so than they were when--I mean, Americans are--much more so than when I first got here. And, you know, so much of the American story is inscribed in its art that I think, you know, it may fit into a kind of general interest in American self-consciousness.

Mr. HUGHES:: Five million. Five--half--half a million for the newsstands and 4--4 1/2 million for subscribers.

Mr. HUGHES:: I have no idea. Actu--but--but that they can sort of do in a more ad hoc way, you know. You don't have to do a while big edition of videos and then hope you sell it. You can, you know, gear it more to the demand.

Mr. HUGHES:: Oh, yeah.

Mr. HUGHES:: Hard work, help.

Mr. HUGHES:: The trust of my friends.

Mr. HUGHES:: Don't be ashamed of it. Don't think you can bash your way through it before it's time. But just remember, it's going to pass, which is the hardest thing of all to remember. And above all, you know, try and--try and get on, you know. I mean, if you've got some project, you know, tr--you--you--you--if you--if you--see, I'm very lucky. I--you know, I own my--I'm living as you do doing s--things that I really like doing. Most people don't. But if you're lucky enough to--to do that, you know, use it.

Mr. HUGHES:: You can't.

Mr. HUGHES:: You can't. It's like treading on a water moccasin. You don't know it's there and suddenly wango, you know. And the--the--it hits very quick and it's--of course, it's totally unfamiliar. This is the thing. You just have no idea what's happening to you. You know, you--the--the--und--it's not as though you wake up one morning and the entire world is changed. But, you know, it--in my case, it changed over about a week. I kept thinking, `I can shove this to the back of my mind, get rid of it,' but I couldn't and it just kept snowballing.

Mr. HUGHES:: I feel immensely relieved, hopeful and really looking forward to a holiday. I'm going to go to Australia, back home to Sydney. I have a week's promotion to do on the book there, and then I'm going up to a place called Wilpo, which is on the Gulf of Carpentaria on the Arafura Sea. It's that big bite out of the top of Australia. And it's just full of big fish and, you know, crocodiles that you wouldn't want to meet. And I'm going to take my godson, young Alexander, with me and also his father, who's never been there. And we shall sit around the campfire, eat boiled mud crabs and sing sad songs about the perfidy of women, you know, and the--the...

Mr. HUGHES:: I have one son.

Mr. HUGHES:: He's nearly 30.

Mr. HUGHES:: He's a sculptor.

Mr. HUGHES:: My wife--my present wife, Victoria, yeah. Oh, she--she--she's a garden designer. She does--I mean, she--basically, you know, she's what they used to call a housewife. It's...

Mr. HUGHES:: She picked me up after a lecture in 1977. I was doing a lecture on Bob Rauschenberg in San Francisco. And after a certain amount of preamble in the form of a note left at my hotel, this beautiful redhead appeared from out of the audience and said, `OK, we're going to dinner.' And we've been together, more or less, ever since. I was very, very lucky.

Mr. HUGHES:: Yes, but badly, but enough to know how difficult it is to make a good picture. I used to--actually, to hold--you know, to have exhibitions and, you know, sort o--and the sale--the--the sales from them would sustain my toddling steps as a young writer. But when I went to live in Italy in '64, the--I r--I re--I realized one day--I was living in Port Erkeno, which is just about the only completely art-free town in all of Italy, because Alan Moorehead was there, and the--I--I realized after one of the--you know, I had this little motorcycle and I used to go everywhere, you know...

Mr. HUGHES:: No, it wasn't a Hon...

Mr. HUGHES:: No--oh, oh, yeah. I used to ha--when I got to New York, I got myself a Honda 750 and then a Harley. I used to have a Norton 750, but in Italy I had a--a thing called a Moto Guzzi. And the--it was n--not a large caliber bike. It was about a 400. But it got you around. And the--the--and so I went to every provincial museum and crypt and church and God knows what, you know, in that circle, up, you know, from northern Natzia, which is north of Rome, where I was, up to Florence and Siena and the--the--and over to--over to Wimbry.

At the end of two and a half years of that, I--although, you know, I'd never studied art history, I had overcome my initial fears of presenting the work to somebody--to people who had. I realized that I'd seen an awful lot of stuff, you know, not in slides either. See, I'm very, very--I'm a very strong believer in the relation of works of art to their environment. It makes a huge difference if, say, you're looking at a--you know, the terrace landscape in the back of a 15th century Italian crucifixion, say a Piero della Francesca, and the--the--and then you walk outside and there is that sa--essentially that same terrace landscape in the hills. And the--the--it gives the thing a location. It gives the thing a cultural context. There are all sorts of, you know, sort of ramifications of that. Italy taught me that.

Mr. HUGHES:: Quite a lot, but I have no university degrees. The--great things were predicted for me when I--when I went to university, but the idea was, you see, that I was going to be a lawyer, like everybody el--like every other male in the--in the family. And so it was thought beneficial that I should do an arts-law course combination. You know, BA, followed by law, so that I wouldn't be a complete little barbarian.

And I--I'd--I'd just got out of this Jesuit boarding school in which I had been immured boiling with infantile testosterone for something like five years and, of course, pop, out you come and you don't think of anything but girls and pubs and, you know, university journalism. And I succeeded in failing first year outs, which was a--a course that a reasonably intelligent amoeba--even in Australia, an amoeba could have passed.

And the--the--so panic and confusion. And they--they--`Wha--what are we going to do with the delinquent young Robert?' And so at this point I rather defiantly said, `Oh, I want to go away to Paris. I want to smoke Goldwells and wear a beret and paint and look at naked women.' And they--well, like hell I--they were going to let me do that, so, you know, I ended up as a sort of compromised study in architecture.

But I never completed that degree in architecture, you see, because I--I got within a year of it, but then somebody--well, actually, it was Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books, who was out in Australia. He got me to--he was interested in Australian art and collected it a bit and he--he saw that there was no book on the subject--you know, there was no general book on the subject. And so anyway, I--he commissioned me to write one and, goddamn it, that thing's still in print. It came out in 1966.

Mr. HUGHES:: Oh, my God.

Mr. HUGHES:: Yes, that's right.

Mr. HUGHES:: These rather exaggerated encomiums. Look, I have to tell you--I mean, I'm v--deeply grateful both to Boynton and to Peter and to--and to others for saying these complimentary things, but it has to be pointed out that being--I mean, being the world's most famous art critic, if that's what I am, is rather like being the world's most famous beekeeper. I mean, it doesn't guarantee a hell of a lot and it is largely because I write for Time, of course. I mean, you know, the--the--the--Peter Plagens writes for Newsweek and you have an automatic built-in circulation there.

But the--the--listen, I'd be a hypocrite if I said I didn't enjoy that kind of stuff, but it has to take it with a good--you know, with a grain of salt. I mean, if you go around, you know, thumping on the doors of restaurants that are hard to get into and saying, `I want a table for six right now, I'm the world's most famous art critic,' you become some intolerable beast.

Mr. HUGHES:: Oh, my God. Well, that's ve--again, that's very nice of him and I--the--the--you know, and I--I--I mean, what am I supposed to say, `Yes, I am an English-speaking Alexis de Tocqueville,' or, `No, I am not an English'--I mean, I'm--it's--it's tremendously flattering that there should be anybody intelligent out there who would think so. But I do not believe that this book has the same fundamental value as de Tocqueville's travels in America. I hope it has some value, though.

Mr. HUGHES:: That is a work by Ed Keenhotz called "The Portable War Memorial." Keenhotz, now alas dead, was a tremendously strong, vernacular, political artist who--the--the--you know, took all of the dark side of American life as his field. And it's a--yes, it's an anti-war satire and, you know, on the left you can see the--the version of the Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima with an Uncle Sam--Montgomery flag's Uncle Sam behind them.

But, you know, on the blackboard, which you can't read on this reproduction, there are the names of something like 300 countries which had ceased to exist because of war during the last 100 years. There are--three--300 states. And then, you know, there's the y--your average Joe American couple, you know, the Pentagon business going on as usual, having a--having a hot dog with this killer of a real dog beside them. And, you know, what it's about is war as business as usual.

Mr. HUGHES:: That is really horrific. It is called the--I--I think it's called "The State Institution" or some name like that. Keenhotz worked for awhile as an attendant in a California madhouse and he was horrified by the way that the patients were treated. We're talking about 1960 now. And so here are these two dreadful, emaciated figures whose heads--you can't see this in the repro--have been replaced by goldfish bowls in which these live fish are swimming erratically. They're on a double cot, as you can see, and one is dreaming the misery of the other, you know. There's no escape from this circle. There's this neon thought balloon around the figure on the--in the top bunk. It's a picture of an eternal night--I mean, it's an image of an eternal nightmare and it's constructed, of course. It's not a painting, you know.

Mr. HUGHES:: Well, yes, because the further you get into American history, the more unusual the art becomes.

Mr. HUGHES:: Modernism and the--the--you know, just more--you know, an opening up of different modes of technique and--and above all, I would say, you know, the--the entry of--of a more experimental and critical frame of mind among American artists. I mean, really, the--you know, the--the--the--the idea that art should have functions other than official ones, really, only came to America at about the same time as it did to the rest of the world. That is to say, you know, sort of after the 20th century began.

Mr. HUGHES:: Oh, whateve--but people still love it. Norman Rockwell, yeah, absolutely, the Christmas turkey. I mean, you--Thanksgiving turkey--What am I saying? I put that in there for obvious reasons. You know, Rockwell had an enormous effect upon the American imagination. He had this great consoling, you know, binding kind of effect. Nobody knows what his paintings look like in the sense that nobody has ever seen, practically speaking, a Norman Rockwell in the original. They were all designed for reproduction. But he--he was one of the most powerful disseminators of a certain kind of American dream--his imagination was quite authentic--that there's ever been in this country.

I take him--I mean, I don't--y--you know, I don't think he's Rembrandt, I don't think he's Jackson Pollock, but I--you know, the--the tendency to write off Rockwell, I think, is--particularly if you're looking at American society through its art, which is what this book tries to do, you know, you can't write him off.

Mr. HUGHES:: Oh, that's a wonderful thing.

Mr. HUGHES:: Yeah. That is--that is St. Gordons statue. It's his commemorative figure, which has no name, no title. It was a funerary commission in which Adams commemorated his wife, Clover, who committed suicide by...

Mr. HUGHES:: Henry Adams.

Mr. HUGHES:: And he got St. Gordons, who was, by a country mile, the best American sculptor of the 19th century to do it. I mean, I think there have been two unquestionably great--well, I mean, there have been a lot of very good ones, but two unquestionably great American sculptors and one is in the 19th century and that's St. Gordons and the other one is in the 20th century and that's David Smith. And St. Gordons was a tre--a tremendously interesting figure.

Mr. HUGHES:: Well, I--I've got to alter my commitment to write a book on Goya. If that sounds a bit unenthusiastic, it's not meant to be. It's just it's going to take me a long time to do it. So I think what I'm going to do--I'm not going to do any more television for a while. I've been asked to do a series about Australia for the year 2000, but I don't think I'm going to do it. It's too bloody disruptive. You have no home life left. You have no private life left.

And--I don't know. I think perhaps as a result of the depression, the shrinkage, the treatment and all of the rest of it and a lot of introspection that went on, I might actually delve back a bit. I think I might write a memoir about growing up Catholic in Australia. The--except that, you know, it would be quite unlike most memoirs of--of childhood that are--that are written these days in that nothing nasty will happen in the woodshed. There will be no predatory uncle groping me behind the--the--the sacristy. None of that happened. I was a fairly happy kid.

Mr. HUGHES:: That's right. Well, to tell you the truth, I don't--you know, I--I--I should rather feel a plague on both your parties at the moment. If--see, I--I have a intense dislike of Clinton--his image manipulation, his hypocrisy, his--you--you know, the--you know, that awful sort of brand of pseudotherapeutics that he's always dragging out and waving in the air like a dishrag.

But on the other hand, you know, the--I mean, I'd vote for the party of--of Abe Lincoln, but I would not vote for the party of Newt Gingrich or Dick Armey or any of these guys. So in a way, I m--I mean, I guess, probably, I would tip towards the Democrats, but the--the--but only--only with reluctance.

Mr. HUGHES:: I don't know, but I hope I'm around to see it. The--see, this--you know, I'm not a--an absolute declinist. I di--the--the--you know, I mean, I think--I think we're going through a bit of a rough patch at the be--you know, sl--sl--slack water, so to speak, at the moment. And there aren't any strong cultural tides running, you know, at least in the domain of the visual arts.

I mean, one thing is for sure. It's going to k--you know, people are going to keep on making art in America. They're going to keep on making images that explain themselves to the--to--to--to--to one another and to themselves. You know, there is always going to be that desire in America because it's imp--it--it just seems to be implanted in, you know, humankind. But what form it will take, I really don't know.

Mr. HUGHES:: Because it tells you a bit of a story. It tells you two of the themes of the--one of the major themes of the book, which is landsc--you know, the effect of landscape upon American imagination, you know, this heroic idea of landscape, there it is, this great valley out in Albuquerque with lightning striking at the poles that have been put up by the artist Walter De Maria. So it's both old and new. Yeah, there it is. The--it seemed better than running a--you know, a detail of a 19th century landscape. It tells that part of the story very concisely. And also, I think it's a rather marvelous work of art, that thing of De Maria's. And it's dramatic and it stands--and it stands out well in the stores.

Mr. HUGHES:: Thank you very much.