Sidney Nolan described him as a dingo and declared that painting had prospered despite his piss-anting, Judah Waten reckoned he was a bad bastard and that as a painter he was a phony among phonies, Bernard Smith disliked his gratuitous rudeness, Alan McCulloch called him an “intellectual beatnik”, George Lansell noted his capacity for consistent provocation and dismissed him as a Lilliputian Kenneth Clark, while one commentator describes his constant criticism of the painter Tom Gleghorn as “relentlessly snide”. Another wrote that “Hughes is never one to mince words when he can mince a fellow artist in the same dish”.…