Calvin Tomkins, the arts journalist best known for his decades at the New Yorker as a staff writer, has died.
As well as reviews in the Art World column, his profiles included 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, Jasper Johns, Arthur Jafa and Ryan Trecartin.
Tomkins published over a dozen books, including The Bride and the Bachelors in 1965, which surveyed the life and work of Duchamp, Cunningham, John Cage, Jean Tinguely and Robert Rauschenberg; Living Well Is the Best Revenge, a 1971 account account of the lives of Gerald and Sara Murphy, two American expatriates amidst the 1920s French avant-garde; and most recently Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (2013).
In 2014 he told ArtReview, ‘I’ve always seen myself as a reporter on art. I think what’s been happening in art in this country and abroad for the last 50 years is so interesting and so varied and so connected with life in America that it’s perfectly legitimate to make an effort to report on it, to try to give a picture of the artist and the art as it’s been happening.’
Prior to joining the New Yorker in 1960, Tomkins are a general editor of Newsweek and a journalist at Radio Free Europe.
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