Calvin Tomkins (1925–2026)

Was a time in my life I didn't "get" art. I wasn't particularly talented as a kid, couldn't draw pictures or do anything clever with paper mache. Being forced to sit through an "art appreciation" class in college, where we looked at slide after slide while the professor dryly intoned . . . something. I don't know. I wasn't listening.

At any rate, for most of my life, being able to tell the difference between abstract expressionism and expressionism and impressionism came about as naturally to show more me as being able to tell the difference between sedimentary and igneous and metamorphic rocks (I wasn't a particularly talented geologist either.)

And then, I read this book.

I'm telling you, no matter how bad your art education was, or how much you think you "don't care" about art or just don't get it, this book will change all that. If you're anything like me, this book will change your life. It did mine.

I think what makes the book so readable is that it uses as its starting point the very approachable artist Robert Rauschenberg. You've seen works by Rauschenberg, whether you know it or not. In later years, he did Time Magazine's Deng Xiaoping "Man of the Year" cover, as well as Time's one-year 9/11 anniversary cover. You might also have seen collages with JFK and astronauts in them. That was Rauscheberg too.

But before that, he turned his bed into a work of art. He turned a chicken into a work of art. He turned a sheep with a tire around it into a work of art, along the way inventing a new art form called "combines."

That's what makes both Rauschenberg and this book approachable, because you learn while reading it that anything can be art. Anything at all. Indeed, for an entire year, Rauschenberg (who got his start designing displays in store windows) used nothing in his art that he couldn't find discarded within a block of his house (explaining the sheep with the tire around it, by the way.)

Because Rauschenberg arrived in New York just as newer, younger artists like him (and Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenberg, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, et al) were just beginning to make their mark, turning the art world upon its head, we become present at a time of seismic shift.

But Tomkins also goes backward in time, truly making us understand what foreign-sounding (and highfalutin) terms such as "expressionism" and "impressionism" mean, in readable and understandable prose. Believe me when I say that after reading it, you too will be able to tell the difference.

At any rate, I could go on and on about this book, so I'll just stop here and say if you have ever been intimidated by "art" and just don't "get it" -- but think you might want to -- this is the book for you. As previously noted, if you're anything like me, it just might change your life.

Now, if only there were a book that made geology just as approachable . . . show less

While this book might be an accurate account of what was happening in the New York art world of the '80s, the "Post- to Neo-" part is misleading--most of the essays deal with figures from earlier eras, including Noguchi, Picasso, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Leo Castelli; maybe three articles deal with young artists that emerged that decade. It's a little like calling a book Punk and New Wave and having it deal mostly with the Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin. That show more said, Tomkins is a good writer: smart, thorough, and amusing. show less

What is it about Sara and Gerald Murphy? Was it their personalities that made them so attractive? Or was it just the era they were living in at the time? This was back in the day when people gave houses as wedding gifts and didn’t worry about the red tape and mountains of paperwork that went with it. Maybe it was the people they associated with that made their light glow a little brighter. For Sara and Gerald Murphy could call Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, show more Igor Stravinsky, John Dos Passos, and, of course, F. Scott Fitzgerald as their friends. Maybe it was their talents. Gerald, encouraged and inspired by Picasso among others, spent nine years as an artist, creating breathtaking paintings. Sadly, he only produced ten works of art and many are either missing or have been destroyed. Together, Sara and Gerald knew how to throw an intimate, yet memorable party. They had personality and flair. Although this is a tiny book, Tomkins gives a succinct portrait of the captivating couple. show less

This is a short biography of the lives of Gerald and Sara Murphy, wealthy Americans who chose to spend the 1920s and early 1930s living in France. They became friends with Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso and Fernand Leger among others. “Archibald MacLeish, another old and very close friend, remarked that from the beginning of the Murphys’ life in Europe, ‘person after person--English, French, American, everybody--met them and came away saying that these people show more really are masters in the art of living.’”

Although in many ways the Murphys lived a charmed life in the 1920s, things changed in the 30s. The love of painting that Gerald had discovered (and was very good at) was abandoned when he had to return to New York to take over the family business (Mark Cross, a leather goods store), and both of their sons succumbed to illnesses before they reached adulthood. The book contains almost 50 pages of photographs and the one I’ll remember is of the outlines of their new yacht that Gerald drew to scale in white lime on the lawn outside their son’s hospital window. It summed up for me the combination of fortune and misfortune in their lives.

This book seemed like a New Yorker magazine profile and it turned out that’s exactly how it started out. Calvin Tompkins was a staff writer at The New Yorker and their art critic for years as well as a friend of the Murphys. One of the best parts of the book is his discussion of Gerald’s paintings which were done in a “style that lay midway between realism and abstraction.” Gerald “once told a friend that he was never entirely happy until he began painting, and that he was never really happy again after he stopped.”

This is a well told, bittersweet story of some interesting people that is going into my “Good Quick Reads” collection. Recommended. show less