Lives Of The Artists

The Lives of the Artists is just that, a series of short biographical essays and all the artists are living. Tomkins is insightful for two reasons. He has known many of these artists for a number of years and so is permitted a level of access that only friendship can bring. When those small moments are laid before him he records them in intimate detail, reserving judgment. The other side is that the smartest comments are made in incidental conversations that Tomkins has with other people about the artists. Recorded in the essays just as faithfully as the exchanges he has with the artists themselves. He portrays a world where he is both its observer and epicenter.

Whether writing about Jasper Johns or Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman or Richard Serra, Calvin Tomkins shows why it is both easier and more difficult to make art today. If art can be anything, where do you begin?

For more than three decades Calvin Tomkins’s incisive profiles in The New Yorker have given readers the most satisfying reports on contemporary art and artists available in any language. In Lives of the Artists ten major artists are captured in Tomkins’s cool and ironic style to record the new directions art is taking during these days of limitless freedom. As formal technique and rigorous training continue to fall away, art has become an approach to living. As the author says, “the lives of contemporary artists are today so integral to what they make that the two cannot be considered in isolation.”

Among the artists profiled are Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, the reigning heirs of deliberately outrageous art that feeds off the allegedly corrupting influences of capitalist glut and entertainment; Matthew Barney of the pregenital obsessions; Cindy Sherman, who manages multiple transformations as she disappears into her own work; and Julian Schnabel, who has forged a second career as award-winning film director. Tomkins shows that the making of art remains among the most demanding jobs on earth.

Calvin Tomkins has written more than a dozen books, including The Bride and the Bachelors, the bestseller Living Well Is the Best Revenge, and the critically acclaimed biography, Duchamp. He lives in New York City with his wife, Dodie Kazanjian.

"This is art history live."—Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions, The New Museum of Contemporary Art

"To match Tomkins in art of the brief life for keenness of wit and sharpness of observation, one must go back to Lytton Strachey."—Louis Auchincloss

"Tomkins’s access is astonishing . . . A deft biographer, he gives a lesson in his craft: how to balance present with past, the specific with the general, personality with context, features with flaws—all in the space of 20 pages. Tomkins is a ruthless observer. . . . He is also a generous critic of the cult of artistic personality. . . . Books [from] the New Yorker have become a small industry, but not all are as intimate as this one."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Damien Hirst
Cindy Sherman
Julian Schnabel
Richard Serra
James Turrell
Matthew Barney
Maurizio Cattelan

Jasper Johns
Jeff Koons
John Currin
Acknowledgments
Index

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Distributor: MPS
Publication Date: 10-28-2008
Pages: 272
Measurements: 8.660in X 5.750in X 0.930in