Calvin Tomkins, "whose elegant and searching profiles for the New Yorker created an enduring portrait gallery of the prime movers in modern art from the 1960s onward," died March 20, the New York Times reported. He was 100. By his own admission, Tomkins "knew nothing about modern art when, as an editor at Newsweek, he was sent in 1959 to interview Marcel Duchamp, the French-born conceptual artist who offered up 'ready-made' objects as artistic creations. The ensuing conversation, in which Duchamp discoursed wittily about the complex relationships between art and ideas, turned out to be an eye-opener."
"I began thinking about modern art for the first time," he told an interviewer for the National Gallery of Art in 1997. "So he's really responsible for my whole interest in this subject." Tomkins joined the New Yorker staff in 1960, writing profiles that were first collected in The Bride and the Bachelors: The Heretical Courtship in Modern Art (1965).
"As chronicler of the avant-garde for the New Yorker, Calvin Tomkins has specialized in rendering the esoteric doings of artists comprehensible to a reader whose initial reaction to the art might be suspicion or hostility," art historian Mary Ann Tighe wrote in the Washington Post in 1980. "His quiet, meticulously detailed prose is the voice of reason calmly explaining the work of madmen."
Tomkins told the Art Review in 2014: "You know, John Cage said that at any one time one of the arts is doing the talking and the others are listening. At the time he said it, he felt it was music that was doing the talking and the others were listening. I think that since the early 1960s it's art that's been doing the talking."
Time-Life hired him to write The World of Marcel Duchamp, part of a series of books on major artists. He returned to the subject in Duchamp: A Biography (1996) and Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (2013).
In a 2011 profile for the Times, critic Deborah Solomon observed that "Tomkins's writing style, as it happens, shares much with Duchamp's aesthetic. It is witty, literary and civilized. It does not betray the strain or turmoil inevitably involved in its creation. But, unlike Duchamp's, Mr. Tomkins's work is prized for its clarity and accessibility. His profiles read as if they were coated with a nonstick surface created to repel academic theory and moldy clumps of artspeak."
His many books include Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1970); The Scene: Reports on Post-Modern Art (1976); Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time (1980); Post- to Neo-: The Art World of the 1980s (1988); Merce at 75 (1995); and Lives of the Artists (2008). He also co-authored Alex: The Life of Alexander Liberman (1993) with his wife, the Vogue writer Dodie Kazanjian.
One of his most admired books was Living Well Is the Best Revenge (1971), "a slender, flavorful biography of the glamorous aesthetes Gerald and Sara Murphy, the models for Dick and Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel Tender Is the Night," the Times noted.
In a tribute to Tomkins, the New Yorker wrote: "When Tad was 99 and the work of traipsing off to far-flung destinations and carrying a long piece around in his head had finally become too trying, he and Dodie stayed mainly at their house in Rhode Island. Tad decided to keep a diary. 'Old age is no joke, but it can feel like one,' he wrote. 'You look everywhere for your glasses, until your wife points out that you're wearing them.' From there, he went on to reflect on moments from his past, his children, his friends, various artists, Dodie, and the days he had left. After suffering a stroke, he wrote:
The medical consensus seems to be that I will get a lot better, but it will take time, and (wouldn't you know) I'll have to do most of the work--new exercises ahoy. Meanwhile, my centennial is at the door. This will be the last entry for a while.
"The diary was published in our pages just as Tad hit his hundredth birthday, on December 17th. He kept writing just about until the day he died."
A Seat at the Table Books in Elk Grove, Calif., was burglarized over the weekend, KCRA3 reported. Early Sunday morning, two men broke into a lock box that contained an extra key meant for vendors, entered the store, and took the cash drawer and a computer monitor. They also damaged the store's back office and receiving desk.
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