Keeping tabs on authors in LINKcat (Calvin Tomkins)

 

South Central Library System LINKcat online catalog

New York Times, 3/20/2026

William Grimes reports:

Mr. Tomkins, by his own admission, 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,” Mr. Tomkins told an interviewer for the National Gallery of Art in 1997. “So he’s really responsible for my whole interest in this subject.” 

Mr. Tomkins started visiting galleries and picking up on the seismic changes in the art world as a new avant-garde emerged from the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism. After joining the staff of The New Yorker in 1960, he wrote a profile of Jean Tinguely and his self-destroying sculptures. He followed with studies of Duchamp, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. The profiles of this disruptive band were later gathered in book form in “The Bride and the Bachelors: The Heretical Courtship in Modern Art” (1965). Advertisement

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