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Quotes by Robert Hughes

A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.
– Robert Hughes
An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House and Garden. provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had.
– Robert Hughes
Distanced from the work by crowds and railings, they may listen on their Acoustiguides to the plummy vowels of the Met's director, Philippe de Montebello, discoursing like an undertaker on the merits of the deceased.
– Robert Hughes
Hair like black ice cream.
– Robert Hughes
It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.
– Robert Hughes
It was an obsolete pachyderm of tawny limestone.
– Robert Hughes
It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope.
– Robert Hughes
Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.
– Robert Hughes
Less is more, and Moore is a bore was what one heard from English art students.
– Robert Hughes
Matisses and Miro's hung transfixed like rabbits in the glare of spotlights.
– Robert Hughes
Most of the untranscribed and unpublished manuscripts in the book popped out of boxes at me when I wasn't looking for them; I picked them up out of the corner of my eye.
– Robert Hughes
Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art.
– Robert Hughes
One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs.
– Robert Hughes
Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.
– Robert Hughes
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
– Robert Hughes
The prisons are the monuments of Australia-the Paestums of an extraordinary time-an effort to exile en masse a whole class.
– Robert Hughes
The protein of our cultural imagination.
– Robert Hughes
The prototypes of strong sensation: blazing lights, red earth, blue sea, mauve twilight, the flake of gold buried in the black depths of the cypress; archaic tastes of wine and olive, ancients smells of dust, goat dung and thyme, immemorial sounds of cicada and rustic flute.
– Robert Hughes
Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world.
– Robert Hughes
Woven through these galleries are some of the most deliriously awful canvases of the 19th century high-finance porn of the ripest sort.
– Robert Hughes
The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.
– Robert Hughes