It is an oddity of Robert Hughes’s posthumous reputation that, although this art critic received many tributes when he died in 2012, and although they have now been repeated in the context of his latest book, they come more from literary and cultural critics than from those art critics who were, in a sense, his peers.

In part this was because Hughes's excellence could not be contained in the relatively narrow, not to say paltry, confines of his stated profession. Seeking a broader and more ambitious context in which to display his abundant gifts, he became a respected historian of his native Australia, a polemicist against political correctness, a memorialist, and much besides. But the profession with which he began and ended, and by which he most defined himself, was that of a critic of painting and sculpture.

As for his fellow art critics, it is not so much that they held him in low regard as that they ignored him completely, as though he inhabited a different universe from theirs. Furthermore, there was a weird tautology to their indifference. I remember trying to explain his excellence to a fellow critic who was far more keyed into the contemporary art world than Hughes ever wished to be. If he was so good, she asked, why had she never read his articles, and why had she never heard anyone refer to them? Twenty years out, the towering obtuseness of that query has always reminded me of Pauline Kael's consternation at Richard Nixon's reelection, since she claimed not to know a single person who had voted for him. The consequence of the art world's indifference to Hughes, in any case, is that no one, either inside the art world or outside of it, has satisfactorily explained just what made him a wondrous critic of the visual arts. Let us begin.

The Spectacle of Skill is an anthology of previously published works that includes a generous sampling from his well-received history of modern art, The Shock of the New, as well as his books on Rome and Barcelona, The Fatal Shore (a history of his native Australia), a biography of Goya, and much else. As welcome as these excerpts are, the most valuable addition of all is the heretofore unpublished second volume of his memoirs, which—to judge from their general level of polish—were nearly fit to print when he died at 74. And yet it is regrettable that nothing was included from his earliest works, The Art of Australia and Heaven and Hell in Western Art, both published in Australia in the 1960s and now very difficult to come by.

But if Hughes's book-length works have been widely and deservedly praised, his real greatness—and that superannuated word is nothing less than his desserts—is best displayed in those thousand-word essays that he published in Time over four decades, beginning in the early 1970s. All the examples here come from his collection Nothing If Not Critical, first published in 1990, and they contain elegant assessments of Whistler, Eakins, Pollock, and Warhol, among others.

The most manifest virtue of these essays is their language, marked by an uncommon command of vocabulary and (in our day) a far rarer mastery of syntax, allied to a thoroughly antiquated respect for the rules of grammar. Open this anthology anywhere and you will be hard put to find a sentence that is not as memorable for its very phrasing as it is for its thought. John Singer Sargent "was the last of what had passed, not the first of what was to come; but he still looks impressive, and one realizes his sense of decorum went deeper than the mere desire to curate the vanity of the rich." Likewise, when Jackson Pollock "found he could throw lines of paint in the air, the laws of energy and fluid motion made up for the awkwardness of his fist, and from then on, there was no grace that he could not claim."

In these two opinions, the justness of Hughes's appraisal, and the breadth of his response, are as admirable as the distinction of his language. In this connection it is worth observing that most art critics never possess, or promptly lose, the power to surprise their readers. If there was ever a time when they really looked at art, it probably happened before they turned 30—and that was it for them. In one of Hughes's reviews, by contrast, anything can happen. One has the sense that he looked at the world with undiminished intensity throughout his life and that he felt compelled, sometimes almost in spite of himself, to vouch for any excellence he saw, wherever he found it. In the case of Pollock, Hughes saw the concealed, almost rococo, refinement that underpinned the artist's frantic protestations of force. And although Hughes cultivated a distinctly macho persona—back in the seventies he was conspicuous in the art world for his biker outfits and his motorcycle—he was too perceptive not to see, and too honest not to acknowledge, even the mannered excellence of society portraitists like Sargent and Whistler.

It is slightly regrettable that the selection of reviews included here is limited to artists from 1880 to 1980. As such, it gives too narrow a sense of Hughes's dazzling range. In an art world overwhelmingly fixated on modern and contemporary art, Hughes was one of the few critics in America who wrote with authority on the Old Masters and, to a lesser but still admirable extent, on medieval and ancient art.

Even though no one (to my knowledge) ever disputed Hughes's literary gifts, it has been fashionable to disparage his response to art itself. Clement Greenberg famously said of him that, although he could write, he had "a bad eye." This is wrong to the point of calumny. Indeed, Robert Hughes had perhaps the best eye of any critic of his age. Rare was the excellence that he could not see. If he erred on occasion, it was in somewhat exaggerating—at least by my lights—the worth of certain Britannic contemporaries like Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, and Howard Hodgkin. But every critic has his lapses, many have nothing else, and most steer clear of them simply by thoughtlessly assenting to the pieties handed down to them from on high.

It has also been said that Hughes, unlike Greenberg and others of that older generation, never discovered important new artists, never publicized important new schools. But the truth is that, by the time Hughes arrived on the scene in the 1970s, there were few new schools to discover—and now there are, effectively, none. More to the point, the very model of the art critic as promoter of new art had become, as it remains, risibly beside the point. Only by providing unpaid publicity to artists can a critic now hope to participate in an art world fueled more by the prestige of dealers and collectors than by the intelligence, or culture, or literary skills of critics. It was only the inspired achievement of Robert Hughes that lent the illusion of vitality to a dying profession that he so spectacularly transcended.

James Gardner's latest book is Buenos Aires: The Biography of a City.