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

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.

Tomkins was hired full time by The New Yorker in 1960 and his first nonfiction feature story, on the Kinetic art pioneer Jean Tinguely, appeared two years later.

"It is characteristic of Jean Tinguely, the Swiss motion sculptor, that the bizarre, down-at-heel, anti-functional machines that constitute his art, usually fail to work in the way they are expected to, and sometimes do not work at all," he wrote. "This is not always the fault of the machines."

His other subjects included Julia Child, Georgia O'Keeffe and the high-wire artist Philippe Petit. Tomkins' magazine work was the basis for numerous books, among them biographies of Duchamp and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and "Living Well is the Best Revenge," an edition of his 1971 New Yorker profile of expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy and their years in France in the 1920s. "Lives of the Artists," published in 2008, included chapters on Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman and Jasper Johns, whom Tomkins met with in 2006 after being turned down for 40 years.

"Recently I asked him again and this time he said that he was be willing to try, with the understanding that 'it might be a failure,'" Tomkins wrote. "I knew what he meant. Johns has never been an easy interview. Although he makes a serious effort to answer most questions about his work, attempts to probe into meaning or interpretation annoy him. He prefers to talk about how a work was made, not why, and his answers tend to be literal, succinct, and often opaque. This does not encourage personal revelations."

Tomkins, tall and blue-eyed with a polished bearing, lived for years on Manhattan's Upper East Side and was known as "Tad" to his many (and influential) friends. His papers, donated to the Museum of Modern Art in 2002, include correspondence with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Merce Cunningham, Romare Bearden and Richard Avedon. In 2011, he was an honoree at the annual Whitney Gala at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Tomkins was married four times and had four children, one of them with the author Susan Cheever. His fourth wife, Kazanjian, is an author and contributing editor at Vogue. Tomkins' first date with Kazanjian was in 1987, at Warhol's funeral.