Calvin Tomkins, who wrote defining profiles of scores of leading artists, bringing their work to a broad public in crystalline prose that was insightful, generous, and witty, died on Friday. He was 100, according to David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, where Tomkins published numerous profiles. Remnick did not state where Tomkins died in the obituary he wrote for the New Yorker’s website.
For more than 60 years, Tomkins immersed himself in the contemporary art world, meeting with his subjects over many months to report stories for the New Yorker, whose staff he joined in 1960. The body of work that he assembled amounts to an unrivaled history of the art of his era—a time of seismic aesthetic changes and the explosive growth of the art market.
Identifying a true peer to Tomkins requires going back half a millennium, to Giorgio Vasari, the famed Italian chronicler of artists in the 16th century. Remnick compared the two in an introduction for a six-volume, 1,640-page compilation of the writer’s work that was published in 2019, and termed Tomkins “our patient, better-educated, non-patronizing friend.”
As art took one radical new form after another in the decades following World War II, Tomkins was always eager to make sense of it, striving to render even the most esoteric artistic practices in an accessible manner. “What I came to believe, and still believe, is that the kind of profile I had in mind was a collaboration between the writer and the subject,” he wrote in the preface to the 2019 anthology.
Astonishingly, Tomkins came to his specialty by chance. While he was working in the foreign news department for Newsweek in 1959, an editor assigned him to interview Marcel Duchamp—a comparatively obscure figure at the time—because the first monograph of his work was about to be published. The two met at the King Cole Bar in Midtown Manhattan. “I would ask him an innocuous, irrelevant, or inaccurate question, and he would, without correcting me, turn it into something strange,” Tomkins told Artnet News in 2019. “As a result, I felt this was the most interesting person I’d ever met.”
“The interview,” he wrote in his 2019 preface, “became a conversation, and that conversation has continued, with Duchamp and many other artists, for six decades.”
Calvin Tomkins was born on December 17, 1925, and grew up in the Llewellyn Park area of West Orange, New Jersey, a suburb of New York. His father was businessman who sold a plaster company to Allied Chemical. There were artworks at home—a Charles Burchfield, a Raoul Dufy, a painting of wolves that the family believed was a Gustave Courbet. (Alas, it was not.)
From his childhood, he seemed destined for a life in letters. “I was probably drawn to writing early on because I had a very serious stutter,” he told Ursula, Hauser & Wirth’s magazine, in a 2020 interview. As he saw it, “the whole act of writing, of not having to speak to express myself, felt like some sort of a victory over that or a way around it.”
After graduating from Princeton University in 1948, where he took a single class in art history (on the Italian Renaissance), Tomkins did two years in the Navy and wrote a novel, Intermission (1951), which was published by Viking. In the mid-1950s, he worked for Radio Free Europe, and then went to Newsweek in 1957. By the time Tomkins was tapped for the New Yorker, he had already been contributing short humor pieces to it. He started out covering a variety of topics, but the world of contemporary art soon became his beat.
Tomkins’s first long piece for the magazine was a 1962 profile of the Swiss kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely. Stories followed on other vanguard figures, like composer John Cage, artist Robert Rauschenberg, and choreographer Merce Cunningham—and they just kept coming, charting the rise of Pop art, Minimalism, Land art, and so much more.
In his profiles, Tomkins delivers the reader into an easy intimacy with an artist as he explicates how they think and operate. “We were sitting in the kitchen of Hirst’s three-hundred-year-old farmhouse, in Devon,” he writes in one characteristic scene, “finishing a very good dinner cooked by Hirst (whom nobody can be around for ten minutes without calling Damien).” He then proceeds to refer to the superstar as Damien. (Everyone who knew Tomkins called him Tad.)
He was a master of succinct, revealing assertions, informed by his years in the art industry. “People are often amazed that someone as ‘nice’ as Cindy Sherman could be a major artist,” his profile of the Pictures Generation legend begins. Tomkins’s descriptions of art are reliably lucid and plainspoken. “He’s not trying to impress with his use of language,” artist John Baldessari told the New York Times in 2011. “I love him because he would rather say house than edifice.”
Few of the pivotal artists of postwar America eluded Tomkins, but when asked about that topic, he would mention people like Eva Hesse (who died in 1970, just 34) or Cy Twombly, the only person to reject him completely. Jasper Johns apparently acquiesced after turning him down a couple times, and even the elusive David Hammons eventually agreed to meet with Tomkins, along with his wife and frequent collaborator, writer Dodie Kazanjian, but he asked not to be recorded. For much of his career, Tomkins focused on white, male artists, mirroring the preferences of most museums and galleries of the time, but in later years, he covered a more diverse array of figures.
For generations of artists, being profiled for Tomkins was a landmark moment—a sign that they had secured a place in the canon of contemporary art. Tomkins was not an artist (unlike Vasari), but he seemed to be acutely sensitive to the risks of their enterprise and thrilled by its possibilities. “The limitless freedom that modern artists have claimed is an unrelenting burden … and the seemingly insatiable art market, which too often equates quality with sales, threatens to debase the whole enterprise,” he wrote in the preface for his 2019 collection. “And yet, and yet—against all odds, important work gets made.”
Tomkins’s survivors include Kazanjian and his three previous wives, Grace Lloyd Tomkins, Judy Tomkins, and Susan Cheever, as well as three children, five grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. His most recent article, an essay recalling his century-long life, ran in the New Yorker this past December. The Museum of Modern Art holds his papers, which include correspondence, transcripts, and materials related to his books, many of which collected, or expanded on, his New Yorker profiles.
For Living Well Is the Best Revenge (1971), Tomkins told the story of Gerald and Sara Murphy, the American expatriates who were essential members of the modernist movement in 1920s France. Their friend F. Scott Fitzgerald had used them as the inspiration for the main characters in his 1934 novel Tender Is the Night, which Tomkins loved. In a bizarre coincidence—another remarkable bit of chance—the journalist first got to know them after he discovered that they were his neighbors in Snedens Landing, New York.
Talking with Ursula decades later, Tomkins tried to explain why he had been so captivated by the Murphys. One reason “they came to loom so large was my feeling that the New York art world in the ’60s had a lot of parallels with what was going on in Paris in the ’20s, very much the same kind of excitement and broad openness and sense of discovery,” he said. “And I realized how lucky I felt to be living then and writing about it.”
