Robert Hughes is both one of the best, and best known, contemporary art critics writing in English. His most famous work, The Shock of the New, was a television series and accompanying book which passionately and eloquently analyses 'modern art' in a way which is extremely clear but not remotely simplistic. His collected reviews from Time magazine, for which he has written for 20 years, were brought together in Nothing if not Critical, a devastating attack on fashionable 'poststructuralism/modernism' gibberish which dominated the New York art world in the 1980s.
His latest book, American Visions, is, like his earlier work, based on or as he prefers to put it grew out of the television series of the same name. For once it is a book which lives up to its title or more particularly its subtitle, 'The Epic History of Art in America'. It is an epic journey, not just through the art of America, but through its social and political history. Hughes is not a critic who is afraid to put art into its context.
The book is divided into nine chapters which span the whole range of events, movements and personalities over three centuries since the first European colonists arrived. He makes no attempt to go into the art of the native Americans who were already there but he does talk about the influence of native craftsmen and the indigenous cultures on the first attempts to establish 'civilisation' in the New World a civilisation which brutally and efficiently destroyed its predecessor. The art produced in this period, whether in the areas conquered by the Spanish or by the English colonists, was rudimentary and derivative but even at this primitive stage it was something new and created a synthesis which did not exist in the Old World. Hughes draws a direct line between the austere and imposing churches of the Pueblo Indians and the semi-
surrealist paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe. He has an inclusive vision of what constitutes art and writes in fascinating detail about everything from Indian Catholic iconography to the domestic furniture of the Puritans. The book traces the development of American art from these humble beginnings to the establishment of what Hughes calls 'The Republic of Virtue' after the American Revolution of 1776. This period saw the attempt to forge a new self conscious American culture which was trying, as Hughes puts it, to 'graft pagan antiquity onto puritan newness, to use what was old in a new way'. This was American neo-classicism, and he quotes Thomas Jefferson: 'We can no longer talk of nothing new under the sun, for this whole chapter in the history of man is new'.
Hughes brilliantly captures the energy and optimism of this period without glossing over the conflicts and hard realities of that society, most notably the fact that the splendours and luxury of the rulers of the Republic of Virtue were built on the savage exploitation of slave labour.
Neo-classical history painting which sought to place the republic in the ancient Greco-Roman tradition began to lose its significance as the republic grew older. American artists began to look towards the interior of the country, what we have come to know as the Wild West, and artists responded to a public curiosity about the splendours of the American landscape. Frederick E Church's painting of Niagara Falls is perhaps the most famous example of this style.
It was also in the 19th century that American artists made serious attempts at representing one kind of American who had 'always presented problems'. Hughes shows how images of Indians changed from Arcadian innocents to noble savage to satanic monster according to the state of play in relations between them and the white population.
When the Indian threat had retreated, a new approach to their representation emerged, a semi-scientific recording of the contents of America its lakes, its mountains, its fauna, flora and its Indians.
Hughes deals in fascinating detail with every aspect of the story of American art and in doing so he uncovers American social history. He describes the horror of the first industrial scale war, the American Civil War, how photography recorded that cataclysm and its effects on the national psyche, and how that in turn affected the art which was created during the period. It is easy to overlook exactly how traumatic that experience was. At the time America was prepared to face the unpleasant truth, which has over time softened into a rosy picture of the Noble South. Hughes illustrates the point by quoting from the American poet Walt Whitman's collection of wartime poems, Drum-Taps, written in 1865 following his service in a Washington hospital tending wounded soldiers:
'From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand, I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and the blood, Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv'd neck and side-falling head, His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he does not look on the bloody stump, And has not yet look'd on it.'The chapter on 'The American Renaissance' deals with the period of stability and growth which followed the Civil War, the opulent self confidence engendered by the triumph of the industrial North over the slave owning South. This period saw the extravagant society portraits of John Singer Sargent and the American Impressionism of Mary Cassat as well as the building of luxurious holiday 'cottages' in Newport, Rhode Island, by the new super-rich.
Hughes approaches this period from a quite different perspective in the chapter 'The Gritty Cities'. This was an era of extraordinary growth. The term 'skyscraper' was coined for the first time, and American architecture produced those unique hybrids of neo-classical columns and pediments built in a towering immensity only made possible by the new technology of steel girders which, curiously enough, had their origins in the mass produced timber framed housing which the seemingly inexhaustible forests provided.
This was also the period of mass immigration, when millions of poor came from all over Europe in search of a better life. In fact what most of them found was poverty, exploitation and slum dwellings. However, they brought with them hope and a willingness to fight for better conditions. This was a time of great class struggles and radical ideas and publications flourished. Many artists were attracted to these ideas and turned to attempts to represent the world they saw around them. This approach came to be known as the 'Ashcan School' and one of its best known exponents was John Sloan. The idea was not to show misery and degradation, but rather to show that ordinary people were capable of being dignified and even happy in appalling conditions. As Sloan said in one of his diary notes in 1906: 'Doorways of tenement houses, grimy and greasy door frames looking as though huge hogs covered with filth had worn away the paint and replaced it with matted dirt in going in and coming out. Healthy faced children, solid-legged, rich full colour to their hair. Happiness rather than misery in the whole life. Fifth Avenue faces are unhappy in comparison.'
The chapter dealing with early modernism introduces the first artists of the avant garde, artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Joseph Stella and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Hughes follows the development of this current through the boom years and then the bust years of the Great Depression. He describes the lonely realism of Edward Hopper and the revolutionary exuberance of Diego Rivera in his huge murals commissioned and then destroyed by the capitalist Rockefeller because of the offensive presence of Vladimir Lenin in one corner perhaps one of the greatest acts of bourgeois vandalism in the history of American art.
The most entertaining chapter is the last, 'The Age of Anxiety', which traces the search for a role for artists in the modern world which, under the paralysing influence of postmodernism, denies any meaning to anything, where art exists only for its own self promotion. The most horrible example of this is Jeff Koons, an artist 'obviously on the make'.
Hughes describes in gratifying detail the absurd heights to which prices climbed in the art markets of the 1980s, and in even more gratifying detail the subsequent and inevitable collapse of what he calls 'artworld'. He is not optimistic and is clear about the crisis which art faces in the contemporary world. He does, however, recognise that there are important and serious artists at work today. The book is lavishly illustrated with beautifully printed images and is a fascinating way of learning, not just about the history of American art, but also of American history from an independent and critical angle.
American Visions by Robert Hughes (Harvill £35). Available from Bookmarks