Calvin Tomkins Books

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.

The Bride and the Bachelors, published here in a revised and expanded edition, is one of the essential art books of the last half-century. Its witty and readable accounts of the lives and work of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Jean Tinguely, Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham reveal the ways in which they influenced one another, and opened the way to new perspectives on the nature and purpose of art. The addition of Tomkins's more recent profile of Jasper Johns, as he reflects on his six-decade career, completes the cycle and provides fresh insights on the ever-shifting relationships between art and contemporary life. This edition also includes a new introduction by the author.