At some early point in his long career, more than three decades of it spent at TIME, Robert Hughes became the most famous art critic in the English-speaking world. This happened because he was also the best--the most eloquent, the most sharp-eyed and incisive, the most truculent and certainly the most robust. He was 74 when he died on Aug. 6. As Auden put it after the death of Yeats: "Earth, receive an honoured guest."
Very simply, Hughes was better than anyone else of his generation in deciphering and explaining art's great paradox and its fundamental enchantment: that a mute object,...
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