Robert Hughes Quotes

The World's Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid and o...

Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public

Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain...

It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a mu...

When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate...

For the machine meant the conquest of horizontal space. It also meant a sense of that space which fe...

What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence...

Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the ...

What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that se...

Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art.

In one sense, (Duchamp's) “The Large Glass” is a glimpse into Hell; a peculiarly modernist Hell of r...

Machines were the ideal metaphor for the central pornographic fantasy of the nineteenth century, rap...

Nevertheless, what was made in the hope of transforming the world need not be rejected because it fa...

In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World...

It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vie...

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us i...

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as...

that great condenser of moral chaos, The City.

Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.