Calvin Tomkins, who wrote defining profiles of dozens of leading artists and brought their work to a broad public in clear prose that was insightful, generous and witty, died Friday. He was 100 years old, according to the magazine’s editor, David Remnick. new yorkerwhere Tomkins published many profiles. In his obituary for The New York Times, Remnick did not specify where Tomkins died. new yorkerwebsite.
For more than 60 years, Tomkins has immersed himself in the world of contemporary art, meeting his subjects for months and reporting stories for the art world. new yorkerHe joined the company’s staff in 1960. The works he collected constitute an unparalleled art history of his time – a time of dramatic aesthetic changes and the explosive growth of the art market.
Related articles
To identify Tomkins’ true contemporaries, one needs to go back five thousand years to Giorgio Vasari, the famous chronicler of artists in 16th-century Italy. Remnick compared the two in an introduction to a six-volume, 1,640-page compilation of the author’s work published in 2019, calling Tomkins “our patient, well-educated, and non-condescending friend.”
In the decades after World War II, as art took on one radical new form after another, Tomkins was always eager to understand it, striving to present the most esoteric artistic practices in an accessible way. “I came to believe, and still believe, that the profiles I have in mind are collaborations between author and subject,” he wrote in the introduction to the 2019 anthology.
Surprisingly, Tomkins stumbled upon his profession. while he was working in the foreign press department newsweek In 1959, an editor assigned him to interview the then relatively unknown Marcel Duchamp for his first monograph. The two met at the King Cole bar in midtown Manhattan. “I would ask him an innocuous, irrelevant or inaccurate question and he would turn it into something weird without correcting me,” Tomkins told me. Art Network News 2019. “As a result, I thought this was the funniest person I’d ever met.”
“This interview became a conversation, and one that has continued for 60 years with Duchamp and many other artists,” he wrote in the 2019 preface.
Calvin Tomkins was born on December 17, 1925, and grew up in the Llewellyn Park area of West Orange, New Jersey, a suburb of New York. His father was a businessman who sold a gypsum company to the United Chemical Company. There were some pieces of art in the home—one by Charles Burchfield, one by Raoul Dufy, and a painting of a wolf that the family believed was by Gustave Courbet. (Alas, that’s not the case.)
From childhood, he seemed destined to lead a literary life. “I was probably drawn to writing early on because I had a very severe stutter,” he told UrsulaHauser & Wirth Magazine 2020 interview. In his view, “The whole act of writing, without having to speak to express oneself, feels like some sort of victory over it, or a way around it.”
After graduating from Princeton University in 1948, where he took an art history course (on the Italian Renaissance), Tomkins served in the Navy for two years and wrote a novel, halftime (1951), published by Viking. In the mid-1950s he worked for Radio Free Europe and later newsweek 1957. When Tomkins was appointed new yorkerto which he has contributed some humorous shorts. He started out covering a variety of topics, but the world of contemporary art soon became his domain.
Tomkins’ first full-length work for the magazine was a 1962 portrait of Swiss kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely. Stories of other pioneers, such as composer John Cage, artist Robert Rauschenberg, and choreographer Merce Cunningham, followed as they emerged, charting the rise of Pop Art, Minimalism, Land Art, and more.
In Tomkins’ introduction, he explains how the artist thinks and operates, allowing the reader to develop an easy intimacy with the artist. “We were sitting in the kitchen of Hearst’s three-hundred-year-old farmhouse in Devon,” he wrote in a typical scene, “eating a delicious dinner cooked by Hearst (no one could spend ten minutes with Hearst without calling Damien).” He then referred to the superstar as Damian. (Everyone who knew Tomkins called him Ted.)
He is a master of concise and clear assertions, informed by his years of experience in the art industry. “People are often surprised that someone as ‘good’ as Cindy Sherman could become an important artist,” he said in introducing the Picture Generation legend. Tomkins’ description of art is indeed clear and concise. “He wasn’t trying to impress through his use of language,” artist John Baldessari told the outlet new york times 2011. “I love him because he’d rather talk about a house than a mansion.”
Few of the key artists of postwar America eschewed Tomkins, but when asked about the subject he would cite the likes of Eva Hesse (who died in 1970 aged 34) or Cy Twombly, the only ones who rejected him outright. Jasper Jones apparently acquiesced after turning him down several times, and even the elusive David Hammons eventually agreed to meet with Tomkins and his wife and frequent collaborator, writer Dodi Kazanjian, but asked not to be recorded. For much of Tomkins’ career, he focused on white male artists, reflecting the preferences of most museums and galleries at the time, but in later years he included a more diverse cast of figures.
For generations of artists, the revelation of Tomkins’s portrait was a landmark moment – a sign that they had secured a place in the canon of contemporary art. Tomkins was not an artist (unlike Vasari), but he seemed sensitive to the risks of their undertaking and excited by its possibilities. “The unlimited freedom claimed by modern artists is an unforgiving burden…and a seemingly insatiable art market, which often equates quality with sales, threatens to devalue the entire enterprise,” he writes in the preface to the 2019 series. “Yet, despite all this, and despite the difficulties, important work got done.”
Tomkins’ survivors include Kazanjian and his three former wives, Grace Lloyd Tomkins, Judy Tomkins and Susan Cheever, as well as three children, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. His latest article is a recollection of his century-old life, published in new yorker Last December. The Museum of Modern Art holds his papers, which include letters, codices, and materials related to his books, many of which collect or expand on his writings new yorker configuration file.
for Living well is the best revenge In Tomkins (1971), Tomkins tells the story of American expatriates Gerald and Sarah Murphy, important members of the French Modernist movement of the 1920s. Their friend F. Scott Fitzgerald used them as inspiration for the main characters in his 1934 novel The night is gentleTomkins loved it. By a strange coincidence—another remarkable serendipity—the reporter first met them after discovering they were his neighbors in Snedens Landing, New York.
talk with Ursula Decades later, Tomkins tried to explain why he was so fascinated by the Murphys. “One of the reasons they became so big is I feel like there were a lot of similarities between the New York art scene in the 1960s and what it was like in Paris in the 1920s, a very similar sense of excitement and broad openness and discovery,” he said. “I realized how lucky I was to live in that time and write about it.”
