Calvin Tomkins, longtime writer for The New Yorker, dies at 100

An author and longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, Calvin Tomkins has died at 100

NEW YORK -- Calvin Tomkins, an author and longtime staff writer for The New Yorker known for his witty and expansive profiles of Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp and dozens of other visual artists, died Friday at 100.

Tomkins was just a few months younger than the magazine where he spent decades, as editor David Remnick noted in a tribute. Tomkins' wife, Dodie Kazanjian, told The New York Times the cause was complications of a stroke. The newspaper reported that he died at home in Middletown, Rhode Island.

For more than 50 years, Tomkins completed dispatches from the transformative art scene of the 1960s and beyond, whether individuals such as Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg or such movements as pop art, conceptual art and minimalism. Tomkins was witness to the art world losing its old insularity and museum shows becoming celebrity gatherings and status symbols.

“It was more advantageous (and a lot more fun) to be on board of the Museum of Modern Art or the New Whitney Museum ... than it was to be on the boards of a dozen hospital or private schools,” he wrote in “Off the Wall,” a Rauschenberg biography that drew upon Tomkins’ New Yorker correspondence. “Openings of major exhibitions at the museums and the leading galleries were social events of the first magnitude, supercharged displays of the latest in far-out dress and behavior patterns, media events covered by television and the paparazzi.”

A native of Orange, New Jersey, and graduate of Princeton University, Tomkins started out as a fiction writer whose novel about marriage and family “Intermission” came out in 1951. By mid-decade, he was submitting to pieces to The New Yorker and working as a journalist for Radio Free Europe and Newsweek, where an assignment to write about Duchamp fascinated him and inspired him to write about other artists even though he had no formal background.