Art critic Robert Hughes dies in New York

7 Aug 2012, 5:39 pm   -   Source: AAP
Noted Australian historian and art critic Robert Hughes has died in New York, aged 74. (AAP)

Noted Australian historian and art critic Robert Hughes has died in New York, aged 74. (AAP)

Australia's most famous art critic, Robert Hughes, is being mourned by political and cultural leaders following his death in New York.

Political and cultural leaders are mourning the death of Robert Hughes, Australia's most famous art critic and historian.

Hughes, 74, died in New York - his hometown for more than 40 years - on Tuesday morning (AEST) after a long illness.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard said Hughes was one of Australia's "finest voices" and National Gallery of Australia director Ron Radford said he would miss his eloquent, thought-provoking commentary on Australian art.

Hughes, born in Sydney to a prominent legal family and educated formally at St Ignatius College and Sydney University and informally in the boozy, free-thinking Sydney Push, went overseas in 1964 and never came back permanently, although he was a frequent visitor and kept his Australian citizenship.

He'd already written The Art of Australia, a review of Australian painting from settlement to the 1960s, which is still considered important.

After periods in Italy and London, he went to New York as art critic for Time magazine, a position he held for about 40 years. His trademark quality was to write with an elegant and sometimes waspish clarity that was accessible to non-experts.

His books on art include Heaven and Hell in Western Art, The Shock of the New and American Visions.

He also wrote The Fatal Shore, his controversial 1987 study of Australia's settlement.

Ms Gillard and Arts Minister Simon Crean said in a statement that Australia had not only lost a frank critic and writer, but also an esteemed historian who made significant contributions to Australia's colonial history.

"Few people who ever lived can have been so completely cosmopolitan and completely Australian as Robert Hughes," they said.

"Through his writing and public role he defined the artistic taste of a generation of educated Australians."

Mr Radford said Hughes was a significant contributor to the development of the national art collection in the 1970s.

He said Hughes' support of the gallery's outstanding abstract expressionism collection was instrumental in its gaining the internationally acclaimed Ken Tyler print collection, which included works by Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol.

Feminist academic Eva Cox, a fellow member of The Push, said Hughes was passionate, enthusiastic, creative and into everything, and his loss would be felt beyond the art world.

"I think he was one of those lively beings who was capable of thinking outside the status quo," she said.

Art patron John Kaldor said Hughes, both physically and in his writing, was larger than life.

"He was a great raconteur and he loved a good argument," Mr Kaldor said.

Hughes' niece Lucy Turnbull said he was a "fabulous and fantastic" uncle.

"He was as dazzling a performer in the kitchen as he was at the typewriter," Ms Turnbull said.

"He was a real man's man ... he was a very keen fisherman and shooter as well as being an erudite and very learned communicator and so knowledgeable in the arts.

Her husband, federal Liberal frontbencher Malcolm Turnbull, tweeted: "Robert Hughes, critic, historian, fisherman, has died today in New York City. Farewell my dear old mate. Rest in Peace."

Hughes died with his third wife, American artist Doris Downes Hughes, at his side. His only child, Danton, killed himself in 2002.

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