Calvin Tomkins

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

Life and career

Tomkins was born in Orange, New Jersey. After graduating from Berkshire School, he attended Princeton University and received an undergraduate degree in 1948.^[1] He then became a journalist and worked for Radio Free Europe from 1953 to 1957 and for Newsweek from 1957 to 1961.^[2]

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.^[2][3] 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.^[2] 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.^[2] 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.^[2][3] 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, Richard Serra, Matthew Barney, and Jasper Johns.^[3]

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.^[2][4]

Bibliography

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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.
• The The Lewis and Clark Trail, (New York: Harper & Row, 1965)
• The World of Marcel Duchamp (Time, Inc.: New York, 1966; part of the Time-Life Library of Art series; ISBN 0-8050-5789-7)
• — (1968). Ahead of the game: four versions of avant-garde. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
  • Prev. published as The bride and the bachelors.
• Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey (New York: Dutton, 1969)
• Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1970). Published in celebration of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial.^[5]
• Living Well Is the Best Revenge: The Life of Gerald and Sara Murphy (New York: Viking Press, 1971; 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.
• With co-author Judy Tomkins, The Other Hampton (New York: Viking-Grossman, 1974)
• The Scene: Reports on Post-Modern Art (Viking Press, 1976) ISBN 0-670-62035-1
• Off the Wall : A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (1980)
• With co-author Bob Adelman, Roy Lichtenstein: Mural with Blue Brushstroke (New York: Abrams, 1987)
• Post- to Neo-: The Art World of the 1980s (New York, Henry Holt, 1988); republication of articles published in The New Yorker between 1980 and 1986.
• Duchamp: A Biography (Henry Holt, 1996)
• Dodie Kazanjian and Calvin Tomkins, Alex: The Life of Alexander Liberman (New York: Knopf, 1993).
• Lives of the Artists (2008) Henry Holt and Company, ISBN 0-8050-8872-5
• Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (2013) Badlands Unlimited, ISBN 978-193644039-9

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. Retrieved 2015-09-08. 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.
• — (March 24, 2014). "Experimental people : the exuberant world of a video-art visionary". Profiles. The New Yorker 90 (5): 38–46. Retrieved 2015-02-24. Profiles Ryan Trecartin.

References

1. "Famous Alumni". Boarding School Review. Retrieved 2012-04-14.
2. Jonathan Lill (2007), Calvin Tomkins Papers in The Museum of Modern Art Archives, The Museum of Modern Art
3. Calvin Tomkins, The New Yorker website, accessed November 12, 2010
4. Lives of the Artists by Calvin Tomkins; reviewed by Robert Atkins, Art in America, accessed November 12, 2010
5. Finding aid for the George Trescher records related to The Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial, 1949, 1960-1971 (bulk 1967-1970). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved 8 August 2014.