Nel 1964, Calvin Tomkins trascorse alcuni pomeriggi a intervistare Marcel Duchamp nel suo appartamento nel Greenwich Village. Casuale e perspicace, Duchamp si rivela un uomo e un artista i cui principi ludici verso la vita lo hanno liberato per fare un'arte imprevedibile, complessa e sorprendente come la vita stessa. Queste interviste non sono mai state editate né rese pubbliche fino alla pubblicazione per Badlands Unlimited nel 2013. The Afternoon Interviews, comprende un'intervista introduttiva a Tomkins realizzata da Paul Chan che riflette su Duchamp come artista, guida e amico, reintroduce il lettore nelle idee chiave del suo mondo artistico e all'importanza della sua figura per un decennio fertile quanto gli anni Sessanta. 'Io non credo nell'arte. Credo nell'artista.'(Marcel Duchamp, 1964). Il libro termina con una postfazione di Marco Senaldi.

A catalog documenting an exhibition of Marcel Duchamp’s editioned readymades at Gagosian Gallery, New York, replicating his American debut at Cordier & Ekstrom in the same building in 1965 and including new essays. Marcel Duchamp’s first readymade, a standard bicycle wheel attached to a wooden stool, came about “as a pleasure, something to have in my room the way you have a fire, or a pencil sharpener, except that there was no usefulness.” Over the ensuing decades many of his readymades were lost or destroyed, but in 1964 Duchamp, working with acclaimed gallerist Arturo Schwarz, supplanted the original readymades with fourteen precisely executed editioned multiples, a process which culminated in an exhibition in New York in 1965.
Adina Kamien-Kazhdan chronicles this process in a new essay that provides significant insight into Duchamp and Schwarz’s relationship, as well as detailing the creation of the editions. Calvin Tomkins’ new profile of Duchamp prefaces this beautiful book and is a welcome addition, serving as the perfect introduction to the black-and-white installation shots from the 1965 show and the full-page color photographs of each readymade.

This fascinating book explores the interwoven lives, radical art, and shared experimental spirit of Marcel Duchamp and four of America's most important postwar artists: composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and visual artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. The publication traces the relationships among all five of these artists by mapping their intersections and examining the depth of their artistic exchanges.

At the heart of the publication is an anthology of key texts from selected interviews, magazine articles, and book excerpts, by scholars, critics, and the artists themselves, that together narrate the younger generation's first connections to Duchamp and his work, which would profoundly redefine his legacy as well as the entire field of contemporary art. A new text by Calvin Tomkins provides an insightful first-person account of his encounters with these artists at a key moment in the 1960s. The book also includes the first extensive chronology that recounts the lives, art, and common projects of this influential group of artists.

“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 to their strange roots.”—Vogue

For more than four 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. With the decline of formal technique and rigorous training, art has become, among other things, an approach to living. As Tomkins 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; 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 an award-winning film director. Whatever the choice, the making of art remains among the most demanding jobs on earth.

Artista fra i più innovativi e influenti della sua generazione, Robert Rauschenberg è figura chiave nei cambiamenti radicali che animano l'arte visiva americana dalla fine degli anni cinquanta. Rauschenberg compie i suoi primi passi nel mondo dell'arte sfidando con audacia ogni presupposto. Dal primo soggiorno-studio a Parigi all'esperienza formativa di Black Mountain College fino al Leone d'oro alla Biennale di Venezia del 1964 che lo consacra come artista riconosciuto a livello internazionale, il suo percorso esce dai tracciati convenzionali e si colloca nel campo di una sperimentazione che infrange ogni regola, trasformando lo spazio bidimensionale del dipinto in un ricettacolo di materiali eterogenei. Ritagli di giornale, pezzi di stoffa, fotografie, objets trouvés, nulla è escluso dai combine paintings, creazioni ibride a metà strada fra pittura e scultura, che coniugano l'amore per l'oggetto di rifiuto, ereditato dal collage dadaista, con la pennellata astratto-informale. Calvin Tomkins ci offre uno spaccato della rivoluzione che ha visto l'arte uscire da musei e gallerie per proiettarsi al centro dello scenario sociale; ce ne presenta i protagonisti: Pollock e de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella e Andy Warhol; documenta l'ascesa che ha portato ai vertici dell'arte e del successo l'artista che più di ogni altro, in questo contesto, ha mirato a un'arte cumulativa.