The Schwarzenegger of Art Critics

It is either cruelly ironic, or entirely appropriate, that Robert Hughes, the great art critic, should have died on Aug. 6, of all days—Andy Warhol’s birthday. Hughes was most famous for the vigor of his vitriol, aimed mostly at enemies on art’s cutting edge, and Warhol was maybe his worthiest opponent. In 1979, when Warhol had a major show of his portraits at the Whitney Museum in New York, Hughes wrote that admirers of the artist, whom he once described as having a “pocked bun of a face,” were “given to claiming that Warhol has ‘revived’ the social portrait as a form. It would be nearer the truth to say that he zipped it into a Halston, painted its eyelids and propped it up in the back of a limo, where it moves but cannot speak.”