News

Robert Hughes. epic account on the birth of Australia, The Fatal Shore, will be turned into a dramatised six-hour television series next year.

ScreenCorp.s James M. Vernon has taken an option on the rights and has attached Scottish historian and TV presenter Neil Oliver to host the series.

Vernon told If the production will be faithful to Hughes. book but set in the modern day, with CGI-created re-enactments of the epic events during the country.s settlement by England.

The screenplay is being written by Drew Lees, with Vernon as story editor. Vernon had been working on the project with Hughes until the author.s death last August.

The docudrama will be an Australian-uk co-production and Vernon will seek to pre-sell it to broadcasters in both countries with the expectation that it will also be attractive to North American networks. Vernon envisions hiring high-profile directors from Australia and UK but none is signed yet.

Robert Hughes—one of the most passionate art critics of his generation, as well as the author of The Fatal Shore, a bestselling epic history of the founding of his native Australia—died Monday, on his 74th birthday, following a long illness. Hughes, who wrote about his early years in the 2008 memoir Things I Didn’t Know, published a groundbreaking book, The Art Of Australia, while still in his twenties. After several years spent as a journalist in London, he moved to New York in 1970 to work as Time magazine’s art critic, a position he would hold ...

Longtime Time magazine art critic and historian Robert Hughes, whose The Shock Of The New eight-part documentary exploring modernism from the Impressionists through Warhol was seen by more than 25 million viewers when it aired on the BBC and subsequently on PBS, died today at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. Hughes was 74 and died after a long illness, the New York Times reported. The bluntly articulate Hughes was popular and well-known enough that in 1978 ABC News tried him out as anchor of its new magazine show 20/20 but reviews of his debut were so bad that he was promptly replaced by Hugh Downs.

Norman Rockwell, America’s most beloved illustrator, purveyor of sentimental, small-town kitsch, preserver of American pieties, is undergoing something of a renaissance. Though Robert Hughes said in his 1978 Time obituary that “Rockwell's reputation was not made by museums and could not have been,” it is museums, starting with an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC in 1999, that are fuelling his reassessment. A superb draftsman and a canny anecdotalist, Rockwell’s work definitely repays serious attention, but I’m not sure his reputation will be greatly altered by his newest exhibition, at the Smithsonian, of works from the private collections of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, two of the world’s most prominent Rockwell collectors. Spielberg and Lucas are obvious kindred spirits, sharing both Rockwell’s virtues as well as his limitations. Had this been an exhibition of Rockwell works from the collections of, say, Jean-Luc Godard and George Romero,...