For as long as I’ve cared about art, and almost as long as I’ve cared about writing, Calvin Tomkins has represented a kind of unattainable ideal of narrative prose about the living art world. I came across ‘Off the Wall,’ his portrait of Rauschenberg, in college. Then I discovered that his art-writing life had begun by accident, as a young reporter, after he caught a random assignment one afternoon to interview Duchamp. Most of my favorite writers are the ones who come to their subjects unprofessionally, so to speak, and find themselves hopeless zealots. Tomkins’ empathetic, wry, effortless-seeming voice—which never speaks down to readers as it pulls them up gently to greater understanding of often-difficult work—is unquestionably that of ‘The New Yorker’ but also unmistakably his own, the kind Joyce once described as ‘silver-veined.’
