One of the most prolific and perceptive art critics of the past 60 years died recently. Others will pick up his mantle, no doubt, but his passing from the scene is truly a loss. His name was Calvin Tomkins.
He was born in Orange, New Jersey in December 1925. After high school, he went to Princeton, from which he graduated in 1948. Shortly, he found himself working as a journalist for an American state broadcaster known as Radio Free Europe. After that, he started writing for Newsweek. He became a staff writer for the New Yorker in 1960. He started there by writing fiction, and his first non-fiction piece was a profile of a Swiss artist in 1962.
Tomkins wrote extensively and revealingly about all the new and often controversial art forms to emerge in the 1970s. Throughout that decade and those that followed, he wrote a regular art world column in the magazine, along with reviews of museum exhibits and gallery shows. But his specialty became the artist profile—short biographies that sought to capture an artist and let the reader into his or her mind to help understand the art that was being produced. “Being a reporter and not a critic,” he once said, “I tend to feel that what artists say or think – and certainly what they do – is a good deal more interesting than what contemporary art critics write about them.”He wrote pieces on artists ranging from Georgia O’Keeffe to Jasper Johns;
Editor David Remnick remembered his New Yorker colleague as someone who “appreciated the great critics and art academics of his time, but he was not of their tribe. His approach was journalistic. His pieces thrived on proximity to the artist at hand.”
I want you to hear me say this: Every great critic is a historian. The reason for that is because the heart of criticism is to put the work of the present into conversation with the work of the past:to understand what an artist is doing today in light of how it’s different from, similar to, or transcendent of the past. And to do that, perhaps needless to say, one has to know history
Tomkins recently quipped that the three ages of man are Youth, Maturity, and You Look Great. Old age is no joke, he said, but it can feel like one. Calvin Tomkins died on March 20 in Rhode Island. He was 100 years old.
