It’s tempting, when assessing a career as long and as distinguished as that of Calvin Tomkins, to reach for the superlatives. He was, after all, one of the greatest chroniclers of modern art.
But what distinguished the writer, who has died aged 100, (photograph above by Sara Barrett) was not so much the grandeur of his writing, but its steadiness. Writing for The New Yorker from 1958 up until his death last weekend, Tomkins, or Tad as he was affectionately known, had observed the rise and fall of many different movements, many different art markets, many different art stars and many different critical standpoints and fashions. In his observance and relaying of each he wrote with consistency and integrity.
In The Lives of Artists, his collection of writings, published over six volumes by Phaidon in 2019, that integrity is on full display. The essays–on subjects as far ranging as Cindy Sherman, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Mark Bradford, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jean Tinguely, Vija Celmins and Damien Hirst–do not shout for your attention yet they always reward it.
Phaidon’s Vice President Deb Aaronson, who published the collection with Tomkins, said: “Tad saw and wrote about art and artists with a clarity and elegance that was entirely unique, unacademic, and filled with humanity.”
The profiles in The Lives of Artists, remind us that art is made by individuals navigating the same uncertainties and ambitions that shape any life. Tomkins’s great skill was to make those lives visible to mere mortals, without reducing them in any way.
Born in 1925, his writing didn’t just document the rise of postwar art it all but became the pedestal upon which it was viewed. Where other writers delighted in the provocative chaos of emerging artists, Tomkins saw them as thinking, contradictory human beings.
Over many years that instinct would come to define his work. Reading the essays in The Lives of Artists is like being invited into a series of work spaces and brightly-lit studios, each inhabited by a seemingly familiar, yet newly revealed artist.
“I try to let the artist speak,” he once told an interviewer. And, true to tell, much of the revelatory experience in reading him was due to the fact that Tomkins listened–a simple credo yet one that demands a discipline most interrogators fail at in their eagerness to manipulate a subject. In an era drowned in desperate hot takes, his writing feels almost radical in its restraint.
Equally radical in his time was Tomkins's gift for the telling detail: a studio habit, a stray remark, a moment of hesitation that revealed more than a follow up question ever would.
These details were unfurled, slowly-but-surely, until a telling portrait of the artist, and a clear window into his or her practice, emerged. Over his many decades of high quality output Calvin Tomkins truly took the long view. RIP Tad.
Take a closer look at The Lives of Artists.
