A Letter From the Publisher

By John A. Meyers

"Critics need to remember what a struggle painting is." That sympathetic view comes from TIME's art critic, Robert Hughes, who this week offers a provocative assessment of contemporary U.S. art. Hughes is eminently qualified for his subject. He was the creator and host of the 1981 eight-part PBS series The Shock of the New: The Life and Death of Modern Art, and its forthcoming sequel, American Visions. In addition, he is a two-time winner of the prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism.

But Hughes also knows the craft firsthand. He began his professional life in his native Sydney, Australia, as a painter. It was the sale of his works that financed his early efforts at art criticism. In 1964 he moved to Port'Ercole, Italy, where, he says, "a permanent fixation on Italian painting from the birth of Masaccio to the death of the younger Tiepolo took over." The experience proved fatal to Hughes' artistic career. He renounced painting because, he says, "having been to Arezzo to see the Piero della Francesca frescoes of the Legend of the True Cross, I realized that I could never in conscience give my own work a decent review." After nine years of free-lance writing he came to TIME in 1970. Today, he says, "I think of this job as the best possible periscope through which to view modern Western art."

Hughes' routine is exacting and precise. He reserves his Mondays for museum shows. Tuesdays he goes to Manhattan's established uptown galleries. He saves Wednesdays for the new, more adventurous downtown shows, and the rest of the week is usually devoted to writing. He travels throughout the U.S. and to Europe two or three times a year. "I try to keep some balance between Manhattan and the rest of the world," he says.

% Hughes shuns the glitzy, social side of art, rarely attending gallery openings. Says he: "In this game it is better to be a hyena than a corgi. Critics who embed themselves too deeply in the art world run the risk of being sucked under." Few art dealers have forgotten a scalding satire of the SoHo gallery scene in New York City that Hughes wrote in the style of an Alexander Pope poem for the New York Review of Books last year.

Hughes refrains from buying art seriously. "I don't think critics should collect because then they tend to find themselves in a net of obligations to artists and dealers that may be to the detriment of their own work," he says. "Besides, it is very restful, after a hard day in museums, to come home and look at a nice blank wall."