Calvin Tomkins

In 1964, Calvin Tomkins spent a number of afternoons interviewing Marcel Duchamp in his apartment on West 10th Street in New York City. The Afternoon Interviews reveals him to be a man and an artist whose playful principles toward living freed him to make art that was as unpredictable, complex, and surprising as life itself. The book includes never before published portraits of Duchamp recently discovered in the Philadelphia Museum of Art archive and an introductory interview with Tomkins reflecting on Duchamp as an artist, guide and friend. Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews reintroduces the reader key ideas of his artistic world in a lively and candid way and renews him as a vital model for a new generation of artists living and working today.

The Afternoon Interviews

Marcel Duchamp

Lives of the artists

This book chronicles the creative period of the 1950s and 1960s, a high point in American art. In his collaborations with Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and as a pivotal figure linking abstract expressionism and pop art, Robert 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. The book features 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.

A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg

Off the Wall

A New York Times Notable Book of 1996 Booklist Editor's Choice, 1996 The celebrated, full-scale life of the century's most influential artist. One of the giants of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp changed the course of modern art. Visual arts, music, dance, performance--nothing was ever the same again because he had shifted art's focus from the retinal to the mental. Duchamp sidestepped the banal and sentimental to find the relationship between symbol and object and to unearth the concepts underlying art itself. The author's intimacy with the subject and glorious prose style, wit, and deep sense of irony--"the only antidote to despair"--make him the perfect writer to bring this stunning life story to intelligent readers everywhere.

A Biography

Duchamp

Paul Strand: Sixty Years of Photographs by Calvin Tomkins

Featuring a new introduction by the author, a portrait of Gerald and Sara Murphy, members of the circle of famous artists and writers in the Roaring Twenties, includes the sixty-seven photographs of the first edition.

Living Well is the Best Revenge

Five Masters of the Avant-Garde

The Bride and the Bachelors

Tomkins's collection of his firsthand observations of the art world as he reported them for The New Yorker includes a piece on the importance of corporate collecting and offers a look behind the scenes at the gallery of Leo Castelli.

The Art World of the 1980s

Post- to Neo-

An explanation of the avant garde via 5 great artists.

Five Masters of the Avant Garde

Beautifully written and newly revised to include the museum's most controversial era, this sparkling social history reveals the ideas and financial power behind the Metropolitan's dramatic 12-year history. Photos.

The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Merchants and Masterpieces

The World of Marcel Duchamp 1887-1968

This biography of the influential artist Marcel Duchamp by New Yorker writer and art critic Calvin Tomkins has been out of print for many years. Featuring full-colour illustrations, this new edition commemorates the 100th anniversary of Duchamp's first Readymade, 'Bicycle Wheel', a version of which is in MoMA's collection.

Four Versions of Avant-garde

Ahead of the Game

Piero Dorazio

da Rauschenberg a Warhol, da Flavin a Judd : 20 artisti a New York negli anni Sessanta

Omaggio a Leo Castelli

Roy Lichtenstein

The record of a special collaboration between a great artist and a talented, resourceful photographer. In words and pictures, it tells how contemporary master Roy Lichtenstein created a 5-story-high mural for the lobby of The Equitable Life Assurance Soc. building in New York. Photographer Bob Adelman closely observes the entire artistic process, from Lichtenstein's initial work in the studio through his weeks of painting on the site to the unveiling in early 1986. Highlights of the many conversations Lichtenstein and Adelman had are included. The noted author and art critic Calvin Tomkins adds an essay on Lichtenstein.

Mural with Blue Brushstroke

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

Books

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