Lives of the Artists

by Calvin Tomkins

Book Overview

"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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805088725
• ISBN13: 9780805088724
• Release Date: October 2008
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
• Length: 254 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Tomkins is an artist all his own

I love this writer. He has a bit of everything, intelligent, but not pretentious. Insightful and just enough juice. He has a sense of the times and ART. I LOVED Living Well is the Best Revenge, How can you not love that Title. I use it all the time to get through difficult times. This is a tremendous read, RICH and extremely resourceful. The subjects are all intelligent, successful human beings, a great study and the work is brilliantly portrayed, VIVID. Tomkins is an extremely visual writer. Brilliant. This is also an important piece of work for the Arts. Its a testament to the times of the artwork and the lives of the artists. Great Work.

Great Writing about Contemporary Artists

It's hard to understand a lot of the contemporary art in museums and galleries. You can't just look at it and say "I like it", instead you have to learn about the concept behind it. You have to read the "owner's manual" to really get at what the art is about. The hard part is finding explanations about the art that make sense. Much of what is written is pretentious and painful to read. I've given up trying to read "artist statements". The solution is to find the people who know how to write about art; people like Peter Schjeldahl, David Hickey and Calvin Tomkins. For my birthday this year I was given Calvin Tomkin's new book "Lives of the Artists" and I highly recommend it. He writes: "Formalist art critics used to say that that the life of the artist was irrelevant to an understanding of his or her work. This may be so for certain critics, but ever since 1550, when Giorgio Vasari published the first edition of his "Lives of the Most Eminent Architects, Painters, and Sculptors of Italy" (the title I shamefully swipe here), biography has informed our understanding of art. In my experience, the lives of contemporary artists are so integral to what they make that the two cannot be considered in isolation." Each chapter in the book is devoted to a major living artist: Damien Hirst Cindy Sherman Julian Schnabel Richard Serra James Turrell Matthew Barney Maurizio Cattelan Jasper Johns Jeff Koons John Currin To get the flavor of his writing, consider the opening paragraph: "Making art is both harder and easier than it used to be. The radical changes in art and society that were set in motion during the early years of the twentieth century gave rise to a new kind of artist, whose first obligation was to invent or discover a new self. Tradition, skill, rigorous training, formal knowledge: All the old requirements fill away or became optional. Art, it seemed, could be whatever artists decided it was, and there were no restrictions on the new methods and materials - from video to verbal constructs to raw nature and urban detritus - that they could use. The limitless freedom of the modern artist has been an unending burden. If art can be anything, where do you begin?" Calvin Tomkins wrote another book that I liked even better: Duchamp: A Biography. Duchamp is central to the birth of much of what is contemporary art today.

Engaging Stories of Modern Artists

I loved this book! I actually thought it was going to be short biographies of Old Master artists, so I was surprised to find essays about the contemporary art world. The artists portrayed here are all modern (and living) conceptual and/or abstract artists. The current "hot" artists like Damien Hirst are here, as well as the older members of the modern art movement, like Jasper Johns. I don't follow the modern art scene that closely, so this was all refreshing and new for me. I was familiar with some of the names in the book, but not with all of the artwork described. Tomkins clearly loves art and appreciates artists, and is able to write in a clear, lucid manner about the artworks themselves. None of that crazy "artspeak" jargon that I've read in some of the modern art magazines. He followed the artists around to get his material, and clearly spent quite a bit of time with all of them. After reading each chapter, I felt compelled to look for art by those particular artists, and he really piqued my interest in them. I had heard of and seen artwork by a couple of the artists in the book, but hadn't been impressed by it previously, but the way that Tomkins explains the art and lets the artist explain the motives behind their work, it made me want to look at the art again with a new perspective. If you are unfamiliar with the modern art world or are interested in learning about contemporary art, this book would be a perfect introduction to a few of the top names out there today. It's in-depth and beautifuly written.

Art Insights

Calvin Tomkins, a quite talented writer, who loves Marcel Duchamp, strings previously published magazine articles on several contemporary artists into an interesting book. I found the words devoted to Jasper Johns the best, but this may be because the other subjects of Mr. Tomkins' book mostly create art that eludes my personal appreciation. If you are interested in the buying side related to similar art (including works by some of these same artists), please consider purchasing Giuseppe Panza's "Memories of a Collector."

A portrait of the motives and minds of some great artists

In an instant gratification society where 15 minutes seems to be a long time and an hour devoted to one subject is almost a career, Tomkins explains how 10 of today's artists became great. In brief -- it takes decades of devotion to a central alluring ideal. No artist sets out to do an instant $100,000 or $ 1 million work of art; instead, they create to explain the world as they see it. When they succeed, we lesser mortals call them great and pay them their due. James Turrell is an example; he's worked since 1974 to turn an extinct volcano just west of Arizaona's Painted Desert into an innovative celestial observatory. Most people have heard of Stonehenge; his Roden Crater is the first innovative celestial artwork in 4,000 years. Four thousand years from now, people will view his art and, if imagination is still riotous and ridiculous, they'll create legends of how it was built by Merlin and the Druids, or by Navajo medicine men and Coyotes. Terell may be a Trickster for a far distant future. To start, he built and lived in a tiny log cabin for 19 months to study the crater's light and landscape. Sculpting the landscape is an ancient North American craft, as shown by the Moundbuilders. Watson Brake, in northeast Louisiana, was built 2,500 years before the great Egyptian pyramids, about 3,500 years before Stonehenge. Egyptians built pyramids, as did the Maya and Aztec. Europeans built henges. In North America, the landscape is an inspiration from the Hudson River School to the Group of Seven to the Sedona buttes in the background of Krazy Kat cartoons and to Monument Valley where John Ford filmed his most notable westerns. Terrell continues a proud legacy. The genius is not in the landscape; Tomkins explains how artists such as Terrell see something that slips invisibly past the vision of us mere mortals. He does a beautiful job of piecing together the artistry, dedication, skill and labour required to draw out a new vision from old familiar surroundings. Art has an interesting evolution. For the Pharaohs, it was a sign of permanence. A painting of people baking bread meant the occupant of a tomb would have bread for eternity. Gradually, art evolved into picturesque and decorative. Today's art explains things we cannot otherwise understand, such as Terell and his look into the universe. Tomkins makes it real for the average reader who cannot otherwise take part in such creativity, deftly explaining 10 significant modern artists. All in all, a superb book about a usually unfathomable subject.