Robert Hughes, Eloquent and Combative Art Critic, Dies at 74 - New York Times (blog)

11:40 p.m. | Updated

An obituary for Robert Hughes, by The Times's Randy Kennedy, is available here.

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

He died after a long illness, according to his wife, Doris Downes.

With a Hemingwayesque build and the distinctively rounded vowels of his native Australia, Mr. Hughes became as familiar a presence on television as he was in print, in columns over three decades for Time magazine. There, he served as chief art critic and often as a traditionalist scourge during an era when art movements fractured into unrecognizability. "The Shock of the New," his eight-part documentary about the development of modernism from the impressionists through Warhol, was seen by more than 25 million viewers when it ran originally on BBC. The book that Mr. Hughes spun off from it was described as a "stunning critical performance" by Louis Menand of The New Yorker.

"Fatal Shore," his epic 1987 history of Australia – which he left in the mid-1960s and where his reputation seemed to fluctuate wildly between hero and traitor – became an international best seller. And Mr. Hughes continued to write ambitiously and prolifically, on beloved subjects like Goya, Lucian Freud, Barcelona – and himself – even after a near-fatal car crash in Australia in 1999 left him with numerous health problems. "Things I Didn't Know," a memoir, was published in 2006 and "Rome," his highly personal history of the city he called "an enormous concretion of human glory and human error," was published last year.

In the memoir, Mr. Hughes was as expressive about his brush with death as he always was about the art he loved. "At one point I saw Death," he wrote. "He was sitting at a desk, like a banker. He made no gesture, but he opened his mouth and I looked right down his throat, which distended to become a tunnel: the bocca d'inferno of old Christian art."