Calvin Tomkins (1925 - ) is an author and art critic for The New Yorker magazine. The New Yorker is an American magazine that publishes reportage, criticism, essays, cartoons, poetry and fiction. ...
Bibliography
Ahead of the game: four versions of avant-garde
The Bride and the Bachelors : Five Masters of the Avant-Garde
Duchamp : A Biography Owl Books ISBN 0-8050-5789-7
Eric Hoffer; an American odyssey
Intermission
Off the Wall : A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg
The Lewis and Clark Trail
Living well is the best revenge
Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Post- to neo- : the art world of the 1980's
Roy Lichtenstein : mural with blue brushstroke
Scene : reports on post-modern art Viking Press ISBN 0-670-62035-1
During the 1970's, CalvinTomkins covered the tumultuous American art scene for the New Yorker, using the magazine's long-form pages to orbit around a controversial group of artists.
Tomkins picks out the visionaries that guided individual movements in the 70's, rather than diluting his focus with too many artists.
For instance, Tomkins dedicates an essay to Henry Geldzahler, the director of the contemporary art section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Marcel Duchamp's life is sometimes described as his greatest work of art, but not until now, with the publication of Calvin Tomkins's monumental biography, has the interplay of life and art been fully revealed.
Duchamp made no effort to promote himself or his work, and when fame overtook him, not once but twice, at two widely spaced intervals, he greeted it with ironic amusement.
He had wanted to put art at the service of the mind, and, as Tomkins makes clear, it was this ambition - fueled by his use of language, chance, optics, film, and other metavisual techniques, and above all by his famous readymades - that quietly undermined and eventually transformed five hundred years of Western art.
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