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Whether writing about Jasper Johns or Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman or Richard Serra, Calvin Tomkins shows why it is both easier and more difficult to make art today. If art can be anything, where do you begin? For more than three decades Calvin Tomkins’s incisive profiles in The New Yorker have given readers the most satisfying reports on contemporary art and artists available in any language. In Lives of the Artists ten major artists are captured in Tomkins’s cool and ironic style to record the new directions art is taking during these days of limitless freedom. As formal technique and rigorous training continue to fall away, art has become an approach to living. As the author says, “the lives of contemporary artists are today so integral to what they make that the two cannot be considered in isolation.” Among the artists profiled are Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, the reigning heirs of deliberately outrageous art that feeds off the allegedly corrupting influences of capitalist glut and entertainment; Matthew Barney of the pregenital obsessions; Cindy Sherman, who manages multiple transformations as she disappears into her own work; and Julian Schnabel, who has forged a second career as award-winning film director. Tomkins shows that the making of art remains among the most demanding jobs on earth. Calvin Tomkins has written more than a dozen books, including the bestseller Living Well Is the Best Revenge, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the widely acclaimed biography Duchamp. He lives in New York City with his wife, Dodie Kazanjian. For more than three decades Calvin Tomkins's incisive profiles in The New Yorker have given readers the most satisfying reports on contemporary art and artists available in any language. In Lives of the Artists ten major artists are captured in Tomkins's cool and ironic style to record the new directions art is taking during these days of limitless freedom. As formal technique and rigorous training continue to fall away, art has become an approach to living. As the author says, "the lives of contemporary artists are today so integral to what they make that the two cannot be considered in isolation." Among the artists profiled are Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, the reigning heirs of deliberately outrageous art that feeds off the allegedly corrupting influences of capitalist glut and entertainment; Matthew Barney of the pregenital obsessions; Cindy Sherman, who manages multiple transformations as she disappears into her own work; and Julian Schnabel, who has forged a second career as award-winning film director. Whatever the choice, Tomkins shows that the making of art remains among the most demanding jobs on earth. "In Lives of the Artists, a collection of Calvin Tomkins's brilliantly illuminating profiles for The New Yorker, this latter-day Vasari puts his dry wit and keen eye to work in fashioning enduring portraits of ten contemporary-art stars, tracing the fruits of creative genius back to their strange roots."—Vogue "To match Tomkins in keeness of wit and sharpness of observation, one must go back to Lytton Strachey."—Louis Auchincloss "This is art history live."—Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions, The New Museum of Contemporary Art "In Lives of the Artists, a collection of Calvin Tomkins's brilliantly illuminating profiles for The New Yorker, this latter-day Vasari puts his dry wit and keen eye to work in fashioning enduring portraits of ten contemporary-art stars, tracing the fruits of creative genius back to their strange roots."—Vogue "Calvin Tomkins's essays on artists, collected in this new book, would at first seem to be for those who don't keep up with the New Yorker, where they've all appeared over the past ten years. There is also the question of whether there is an audience out there curious to know even more about Cindy Sherman, Richard Serra, Matthew Barney, John Currin, Julian Schabel, Damien Hirst, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, and other artists whose careers and personal lives have bee chronicled to the nth degree . . . While I'd enjoyed these profiles profiles when I read them in the New Yorker, I was reluctant to read them a second time. I shouldn't have been. It is useful and illuminating to have Tomkins's pieces compiled in one book and to be able to savor them over a few days. He is such a generous, down-to-earth writer, and so good at eliciting private thoughts from his subjects, that the book is hard to put down—even if you'd read these profiles before. Memories of too-quickly-skimmed magazine articles are often short and distorted, and the proximity of these pieces helps define Tomkins's style as guest, interviewer, and writer. And what is that style, exactly? Tomkins is genuinely interested in artists' lives—the title is not simply borrowed form Giorgio Vasari's 16th-century tome—and that makes him a genial interrogator. You sense, reading his profiles, that he personally wants to know what makes artists tick—in particular, what kind of early history propelled them into art making . . . Of all of Tomkins recent subjects, Johns is the most reluctant and also the most tantalizing to the author. With the paltry few insights into his oeuvre that the artist provides—even over visits by Tomkins to Johns's houses and studios in Connecticut and on the island of Saint Martin (where the slightly chilly Johns comes off as a thoughtful host)—Tomkins constructs a haunting portrait of a man whose transitory childhood clearly shaped the enigmatic character of his art."—Edith Newhall, ARTnews "In the great predatory swoop of Higher Gobbledygook onto the syntax of critical prose around the world, art critics, for more than two decades, were among those most decisively clutched in its beak and talons and spirited away to impenetrable oblivion. Which is why some of the greatest heroes among critics in the English language over the past half century were those art critics who stubbornly retained clarity in their work: among them the great Australian maverick Robert Hughes, British Marxist John Berger, American philosopher Arthur C. Danto and the New Yorker magazine's incomparable profile writer Calvin Tomkins. Now 82, Tomkins has collected in this remarkable—perhaps indispensable—book, his New Yorker artist profiles from the past decade. Here, he says, are the artists who made art when it could be 'whatever artists decided it was and there were no restrictions on the new methods and materials.' His 10 subjects here are: British art star Damien Hirst; photographer/role player/Hallwalls co-founder Cindy Sherman; controversial painter and acclaimed filmmaker Julian Schnabel; monumental sculptor Richard Serra; earth artist James Turrell 'whose medium is light'; multimedia master Matthew Barney; installation 'jokester, sensationalist, troublemaker, conceptual artist' Maurizio Cattelan; pop art patriarch Jasper Johns; kitschmeister and provocateur Jeff Koons and outrageous figure painter John Currin. Assume no irony from his Vasari-like title. These profiles are completely personal, conversationally clear to the point of sparkle and as engagingly companionable as any excursion into contemporary art anywhere."—Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News
"Tomkins, author of an outstanding biogra ...
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Calvin Tomkins first discovered the work of Robert Rauschenberg in the late 1950s, when he began to look seriously at contemporary art. While gazing at Rauschenberg's painting Double Feature, Tomkins felt compelled to make some kind of literal connection to the work, and it is in that sprit that "for the last forty years it's been [his] ambition to write about contemporary art not as a critic or a judge, but as a participant." Tomkins has spent many of those years writing about Robert Rauschenberg, whom he rapidly came to see as "one of the most inventive and influential artists of his generation." So it seemed natural to make Rauschenberg the focus of Off the Wall, which deals with the radical changes that have made advanced visual art such a powerful force in the world.
Off the Wall chronicles the astonishingly creative period of the 1950s and 1960s, a high point in American art. In his in his collaborations with Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and as a pivotal figure linking abstract expressionism and pop art, Rauschenberg was part of a revolution during which artists moved art off the walls of museums and galleries and into the center of the social scene. Rauschenberg's vitally important and productive career spans this revolution, reaching beyond it to the present day. Featuring the artists and the art world surrounding Rauschenberg--from Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning to Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol, together with dealers Betty Parsons, and Leo Castelli, and the patron Peggy Guggenheim--Tomkins's stylish and witty portrait of one of America’s most original and inspiring artists is fascinating, enlightening, and very entertaining.
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“Brilliantly illuminating . . . This latter-day Vasari puts his dry wit and keen eye to work in fashioning enduring portraits of ten contemporary-art stars, tracing the fruits of creative genius back to their strange roots.”—Vogue For more than four decades Calvin Tomkins’s incisive profiles in The New Yorker have given readers the most satisfying reports on contemporary art and artists available in any language. In Lives of the Artists ten major artists are captured in Tomkins’s cool and ironic style to record the new directions art is taking during these days of limitless freedom. With the decline of formal technique and rigorous training, art has become, among other things, an approach to living. As Tomkins says, “the lives of contemporary artists are today so integral to what they make that the two cannot be considered in isolation.” Among the artists profiled are Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, the reigning heirs of deliberately outrageous art; Matthew Barney of the pregenital obsessions; Cindy Sherman, who manages multiple transformations as she disappears into her own work; and Julian Schnabel, who has forged a second career as an award-winning film director. Whatever the choice, the making of art remains among the most demanding jobs on earth. ...
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Paul Strand: Sixty Years of Photographs, a long-unavailable Aperture classic, is one of the most comprehensive surveys of the power and force of a major photographic figure of our time. Before his death in 1976 at age eighty-five, Strand combed his photographic prints and his many books with an eye to the completion of this volume. Seen here is the summation of a lifework, from the first abstract photographs to the series of plant photographs taken in the last years of his life. Also included is a rarely examined series of films-brilliant, unprecedented documentaries that foreshadowed Italian neo-realism and the new cinema of the post-war years. The re-release of this volume, which features the famous biographical profile by Calvin Tomkins and excerpts from Strand's correspondence, interviews, and other documents, makes one of photography's major artists newly accessible. Essay by Calvin Tomkins. Paperback, 9.5 x 11.5 in./184 pgs...
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