Bill Leak talks with Magda Keaney about his portrait of Robert Hughes

• tell us about how you came to paint a portrait of Hughes so soon after his car accident
  
  
• So this was before the car accident?
  
  
• 'a black period of his life'
  
  
• 'He really is a tenacious bastard, and he's bloody tough'
  
  
• Larger than life
  
  
• What was Hughes response?
  
  
• Related works in the collection

Robert Hughes -
Nothing if not critical 2001
by Bill Leak (b. 1956)
oil on canvas
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2002

Robert Hughes AO (b. 1938) is the senior art critic for Time magazine. Born in Sydney, Hughes was educated at Riverview and Sydney University, although he did not complete a degree. Like many of the figures who floated around the Sydney ‘Push’ in the late 1950s, he began his career contributing poems, cartoons, criticism and articles to Honi Soit, the Observer, and Nation. He began working for Time in 1970, the year his The Art of Australia was published, and has lived in the US ever since. His books include The Shock of the New (also a TV series) (1980), The Fatal Shore (1987), Nothing if Not Critical (1990), American Visions (also a TV series) (1997) and the autobiographical A Jerk on One End (1999) whose title refers to his love of fishing. He is currently working on a book about the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya.

Bill Leak started work on this portrait in 1999, as Hughes began filming his television series on Australia Beyond the Fatal Shore. Hughes had filmed only two scenes when he suffered a near-fatal car accident on the coast of WA. The series was cobbled together during his agonising convalescence, and Hughes had little control over the final cut, but its negative reception led to his remark that for all he cared, they could ‘tow Australia out to sea and sink it’. The accident led to a protracted legal process; three years later, there was still talk of extraditing Hughes from the USA to face charges. His second marriage broke down, and his only son died. The effect of these experiences on his friend led Leak to abandon his earlier, more detailed portrait for this one, inspired by the terrifying late work of Goya, conveying Hughes’s furious pain, despair and determination in the years after 1999.