Calvin Tomkins

Calvin Tomkins (born December 17, 1925) is an American author and art critic for The New Yorker magazine.

Life and career

Tomkins was born in Orange, New Jersey on December 17, 1925. After graduating from Berkshire School, he attended Princeton University and received an undergraduate degree in 1948. He then became a journalist and worked for Radio Free Europe from 1953 to 1957 and for Newsweek from 1957 to 1961.

His first published contribution to The New Yorker was a fictional piece that appeared in 1958. In 1960 he joined the magazine as a staff writer. His earliest writing for the magazine consisted largely of short humor pieces. His first piece of nonfiction writing for the magazine was a profile of Jean Tinguely that appeared in 1962. In the 1960s and 1970s he became a chronicler of the New York City art scene, reporting on the development of genres and movements such as pop art, earth art, minimalism, video art, happenings, and installation art. From 1980 to 1986, he was the magazine's official art critic and his art reviews appeared in the magazine almost every week. From 1980 to 1988 he wrote the New Yorker's "Art World" column. As a New Yorker writer, he interviewed and wrote numerous profiles of major 20th-century figures from the art world and other fields, including Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Philip Johnson, Julia Child, Georgia O'Keeffe, Leo Castelli, Frank Stella, Carmel Snow, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Frank Gehry, Damien Hirst, Julie Mehretu, Richard Serra, Matthew Barney, David Hammons, and Jasper Johns.

Tomkins has been married four times. His first wife was Grace Lloyd Tomkins, with whom he had three children. His second and third marriages were to Judy Tomkins and Susan Cheever (with whom he had one child). His fourth and current wife is fellow writer Dodie Kazanjian, who is both a Vogue magazine contributing editor and director of Gallery Met at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

Bibliography

Books

• Tomkins, Calvin (1951). Intermission : a novel. New York: Viking Press.
• — (1965). The bride & the bachelors : the heretical courtship in modern art. New York: Viking Press.
• — (1965). The Lewis and Clark Trail. New York: Harper & Row.
• — (1966). The world of Marcel Duchamp, 1887–. Time-Life Library of Art. New York: Time-Life Books.
• — (1968). Ahead of the game : four versions of avant-garde. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
• — (1969). Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey. New York: Dutton.
• — (1970). Merchants and masterpieces : the story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: E. P. Dutton.
• — (1971). Living Well Is the Best Revenge: The Life of Gerald and Sara Murphy. New York: Viking Press. (Modern Library edition published in 1998). An enlarged version of a 1962 New Yorker profile of Gerald and Sara Murphy; tells of the lives of American expatriates in France in the years between World War I and World War II.
• — (1974). The Other Hampton. New York: Viking-Grossman. (with co-author Judy Tomkins)
• — (1976). The Scene: Reports on Post-Modern Art. New York: Viking Press. ISBN 0-670-62035-1
• — (1980). Off the Wall : A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg.
• — (1987). Roy Lichtenstein: Mural with Blue Brushstroke. New York: Abrams. (with co-author Bob Adelman)
• — (1988). Post- to Neo-: The Art World of the 1980s. New York: Henry Holt. A republication of articles published in The New Yorker between 1980 and 1986.
• — (1989). Merchants and masterpieces : the story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Revised and updated ed.). New York: Henry Holt.
• — (1996). Duchamp: A Biography. Henry Holt.
• — (1993). Alex: The Life of Alexander Liberman. New York: Knopf. (with co-author Dodie Kazanjian)
• — (2008). Lives of the Artists. Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 0-8050-8872-5
• — (2013). Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews. Badlands Unlimited. ISBN 978-193644039-9
• — (2019). The Lives of Artists. New York: Phaidon. ISBN 9780714879369

Essays and reporting

• Tomkins, Calvin (March 25, 2013). "Anarchy unleashed : a curator brings punk to the Met". The Art World. The New Yorker. 89 (6): 60–69. Profiles Andrew Bolton.
• — (April 22, 2013). "Granted". Talk of the Town. The Artistic Life. The New Yorker. 89 (10): 36. Jasper Johns and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
• — (July 1, 2013). "Ed Ruscha's L.A. : an artist in the right place". Profiles. The New Yorker. 89 (19): 48–57.
• — (March 24, 2014). "Experimental people : the exuberant world of a video-art visionary". Profiles. The New Yorker. 90 (5): 38–46. Profiles Ryan Trecartin.
• — (January 25, 2016). "The Met and the now : America's preëminent museum finally embraces contemporary art". Onward and Upward with the Arts. The New Yorker. 91 (45): 32–36.
• — (February 1, 2016). "Kitchen sink". The Talk of the Town. Dept. of Hoopla. The New Yorker. 91 (46): 20.
• — (December 21, 2020). "Radical alienation : Arthur Jafa left an art world he found too white. Years later, he made a triumphant return". Profiles. The New Yorker. 96 (41): 50–59.

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