Successor to Sir Kenneth?

Press, 23 September 1980, Page 15

Successor to Sir Kenneth?

NZPA London The Australian art critic, Robert Hughes, fronts a television documentary series on the progress of modern art which is being hailed as the successor to Kenneth Clark’s renowned “Civilisation” series. Hughes’s eight-hour analysis of “The Shock of the New” — mainly twentieth century art — began on 8.8. C. television at the week-end in association with Time-Life Films, of New York, and RM Productions, of Munich. According to the “Guardian”- newspaper, Hughes is the ideal man for the job. “Hughes is one of the few popular art critics of recent years whose judgments are free of fashions able bias,” wrote Michael McNay. “He probably wouldn’t know a bandwaggon if he saw one, and — o rare Bob Hughes — he writes English that Shakespeare, Milton, MacAulay, and Dame Edna Everage would recognise as their mother tongue.” Hughes, the art critic for “Time” magazine, “has the Australian’s lack of . inhibition about his subject. As one of the 8.8. C. production team puts it, Hughes is prepared to talk dirty about art.”