Diary Australia – 11 August 2012

Bob Hughes who died this week in New York was a companion of my youth. We worked together some 50 years ago on the fortnightly Observer on which he made his name as an art critic. He cheerfully dismissed the established artists of the day from Dobell (‘superficial’) or Tucker (‘cynical’) to Boyd (‘mawkish’) or Dickerson (‘in a rut’). He liked to boast that Dickerson had decked him in a pub and that Tucker was looking for him with a gun. When launching Patricia Anderson’s Robert Hughes: The Australian Years a couple of years ago I described him as ‘one of those volcanic phenomena that erupt from time to time in Sydney and who, whatever they do in life, carry with them the stigmata of their Sydney formation.’ I stand by that. But he was more than a volcanic personality. He was also one of the most influential art critics in the world who brought to New York the irreverence of his Australian years.