Critics, according to some of their own critics, should not fraternize with the subjects of their criticism. TIME Senior Writer Robert Hughes does not agree. "The point is to learn more than you knew before," he says, "and I've never met an artist who didn't shed some light on his or her own work." So, in preparing for his appraisal of Artist Robert Rauschenberg--who is not only the subject but also the designer of this week's cover, a collage commissioned by TIME--Hughes spent a week in Captiva, Fla., as a member of Rauschenberg's household. He later accompanied the artist to Washington, D.C., for the installation at the Smithsonian Institution of a huge retrospective of the Pop art patriarch's work.

"Rauschenberg is immensely outgoing," says Hughes, "just as his art is. His mind works in angular ways, full of ricochets and inventions." Hughes quickly discovered that structured interviews were not the best way to explore Rauschenberg's multifaceted personality and past. The artist supplied his own approach. He took out catalogues containing his extensive collections of art memorabilia and souvenirs; as he turned the pages, he talked. "The art of the '70s," Hughes notes, "is eclectic: video, earthworks, landscape and straight painting are all part of it. Rauschenberg has done an extraordinary number of things with his life and his art. He is the great model of the multiplicity of this era."

Multiplicity is also a word that describes Hughes. A onetime architecture student and political cartoonist in his native Sydney, Australia, Hughes covered an art exhibit for a local paper one day in 1958 after the regular critic had been fired. Since then, Hughes has been an art critic in Italy, Britain and, after joining TIME in 1970, the U.S. He has written two books --one on Australian art and one on images of paradise and perdition in Western art. He also has written several art documentaries for Australian television and for the BBC, most recently a pair of 75-minute programs on 17th century Painters Caravaggio and Rubens. Hughes' current projects include a book about Australia's early days as an English penal colony, and also a nine-part television series on 20th century art intended to pick up where Kenneth Clark's Civilisation left off. "It's nice when people agree with what you've written about art," says Hughes, who also knows what it is like to have readers disagree with him. "But nicest of all is when what you write triggers people to think things through in their own terms. For me, criticism is really just the invitation to the waltz." Readers can waltz with Hughes by turning to Art.

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