New shocks from an old master

Robert Hughes' latest book is a portrait of Goya. JAMES HALL talks to him about the painter's anti-war humanism and taste for sensationalism

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Robert Hughes greets me at the door of his London hotel room, with tousled hair and weather-beaten face, leaning on the stick he has used since a near-fatal car accident in 1999. I am immediately reminded of the first drawing illustrated on page 22 of his latest book, Goya.

The drawing was made near the end of the Spanish artist's life, and shows an old man with a flowing beard, walking with the aid of two sticks.

Hughes' description sounds suspiciously like an ideal self-portrait: [Goya] "was a tough, tenacious old bird, and he had every right to make, towards the end, that inspiring drawing of an ancient, bearded man, like Father Time himself, hobbling along with the aid of two canes with the scrawled caption, 'I'm still learning'."

Hughes is the world's most famous - and infamous - art critic. Born in Sydney in 1938, he studied art and architecture before becoming a journalist. He worked in London in the mid-1960s, then moved to New York to become chief art critic of Time magazine in 1970, staying in the job for three decades.

A legacy of his time in London is that he made several TV series for the BBC. The best known was his high-octane history of modern art, turned into a best-selling book: The Shock of the New (1981).

Hughes is celebrated for being a moralising slayer of what he regards as inflated reputations, particularly during the art boom of the 1980s.

He castigated the New York art world for feting wunderkinder such as Schnabel and Koons rather than elder statesmen like Frank Auerbach (the only living artist about whom he has written a book), Lucian Freud, Kossoff, Kitaj and Hodgkin.

His status as a bruiser - the "Mohammed Ali of art criticism", says one profile - was underlined in the early days by a Harley-Davidson, and his conversation is liberally larded with the F-word.

He is a grand master of the witheringly witty put-down (David Hockney is "the Cole Porter of figurative painting"). This talent culminated in his Culture of Complaint (1993), a jeremiad against victim culture and political correctness. But his prose is not invariably muscular; one of his most luminous essays, in Nothing if not Critical, is on Watteau, whose pastoral idylls make Hughes think of "pollen and silk, not flesh".

What is perhaps most impressive has been Hughes' ability, at the same time as being a full-time critic, to produce a steady stream of major books on a wide range of subjects. The Fatal Shore (1987) - a harrowing history of the origins of Australia - is his most highly acclaimed work, though its warts-and-all analysis infuriated many Australians who dubbed him "The Fatal Bore".

Of books, Hughes says: "You write a book in order to find out about a subject you don't know about. As far as I'm concerned the idea of knowing everything about a subject and then writing a book is absolute hooey."

In other words, "I'm still learning."

In his study of Goya (Harvill Press/Random House, $65) as "the last Old Master and the first Modernist", Hughes twice recounts the episode when John Ruskin burned a set of Goya's satirical etchings, Los Caprichos, "in a fit of mad pyromania that bizarrely paralleled the human burnings of the Inquisition".

The fact that Hughes repeats this story suggests a certain fascination with the great Victorian sage, who is as famous for his denunciation of the young Turk Whistler as for championing the elder statesman Turner.

I wonder if Hughes finds anything to admire.

"It's certainly true that I have vastly admired Ruskin for his language, and his incredible perceptiveness in the face of nature and images of nature, rather than for his sometimes absolutely dotty moralising," he says.

"Ruskin more or less thought the simultaneous appearance of yellow and purple in a painting heralded the end of civilisation. I remember when I first went to New York and met a dealer whose speciality was American Colour Field painting - Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, etc - and he asked me who was my favourite art critic, and I said John Ruskin. He looked at me as though I was completely mad. He expected me to say Clement Greenberg, whose work is remarkably sterile.

"But my allegiances have become more to the character and quality of people's writing rather than whether you agree with their theoretical system. I haven't got a theoretical system."

What is it about Ruskin and his art critic admirers? Hughes reminds me a little of that other fine critic, Tim Hilton, who is Ruskin's biographer. Both Hughes and Hilton write eloquently about Old and Modern Masters, but seem to have a visceral dislike of most art produced since the 1960s, particularly by young artists, and a contempt for the contemporary art world. Both seem to be far more prepared to learn about the past than the present.

In Goya, Hughes' powers of research and synthesis are as impressive as ever, and he vividly charts the Byzantine political and cultural forces which shaped and buffeted the artist. Overall, his account of Goya is like a photo-montage that doesn't quite join up. Hughes the moralist is desperate to regard Goya as the first and only great anti-war artist, as a "passionate humanist" with "a range of sympathy rivalling Dickens or Tolstoy", whose art puts contemporary practitioners to shame.

But Hughes the hard-living man of the world seems to revel in the sensationalism of some of his images, and does not seem unduly concerned that Goya's "obsession with extreme feeling" was very much of its age - even fashionable. At one point Hughes observes with a certain amount of glee: "Headless Body In Topless Bar was the kind of headline he would have appreciated."

He seems unwilling to concede that this element might be a flaw in his hero, and that this predilection for sensationalism might bleed into his war images. Hughes merely remarks that "what may have seemed vulgar in his time ... now looks prophetic". There is, he says, "a strong journalistic side to Goya. He really enjoys the sight of titillation and ... sensational subject-matter". For which we must read tabloid journalism.

The book's psychology is central to a hallucination that Hughes experienced when he was in a coma for five weeks after his car crash, a head-on collision with another vehicle. Hughes recounts the hallucination in the opening chapter, aggressively entitled "Driving into Goya". It occurred in a place that was simultaneously a lunatic asylum and Seville airport.

Goya appeared with a gang of scornful friends and proceeded to taunt his would-be biographer: "Goya delighted in making me walk, or rather hobble or crawl, through the scanners, which emitted repeated squeals and buzzes of alarm. Then he and his friends would turn me around and make me go back, cackling with laughter at the efforts of this ingles asqueroso [disgusting Englishman] to do the impossible and free himself.

"It was impossible because they had attached a bizarre metal framework to my right leg, which prevented me from getting through a door or crawling through one of the tempting gaps in the outer walls of the prison-airport."

I suggest to Hughes that his unconscious was telling him Goya was a sadist rather than a humanist, but he dismisses this:

"There was no question of sadism. He was just being a shit. It wasn't sadistic by Australian standards. I've never had any feeling of dislike for Goya. An adoring affection is more like it."

Following this, I suggest the atrocity scenes in Goya's Disasters of War are as much indictments of the debased nature of the common people as of war.

On several occasions Hughes notes Goya's hatred for the populacho (masses), and it is perhaps symptomatic that all the scenes of torture and mutilation seem to occur without officers being present.

The engraving that was the basis for Goya's great painting, The Third of May, 1808, showed an officer in charge of the firing squad, but Goya omitted him on the canvas.

Hughes says: "There is a certain disgust for the populacho but it's not present in all the war images. I think he is genuinely anti-war, anti- the degradation caused by war, which is a function of human desire for cruelty, which is at least as deep-rooted as mankind's desire for sex.

"The Disasters is the first great series which is intended as an indictment not simply of this or that general, king or nation, but of war per se. The first person to point out the fundamental madness and irrationality of war was Goya."

- INDEPENDENT