This article was originally published on my Typepad blog on January 27, 2010
No book in a long while has made me think as deeply about art as has Calvin Tomkins' excellent biography of Marcel Duchamp. Long before the end, it becomes apparent that it was Duchamp, not Picasso, who was the great artistic influence of the 20th century. Duchamp's constant refusal to see art as "retinal" and his insistence that any object made by anyone could be a work of art, made him a leading figure of movements as diverse as Surrealism and Pop. He had personal acquaintance with every important artist of the century and was a subversive influence on them all.
Calvin Tomkins is simply a great writer. I had not realized until I had finished Duchamp that it was Tomkins who had written Living Well Is the Best Revenge, a wonderful short biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy. One of Tomkins's greatest strengths is to bring to life not only the subjects of his biographies but also those, famous or not, with whom they interacted. In Duchamp, Tomkins has found a biographer's greatest challenge -- a subject of such wide ranging intellect that the biographer must himself possess great intelligence and imagination in order to grasp the implications of the ideas which he's outlining.
A biographer also has to have an above average sense of humor to bring out the humanity in Duchamp. My favorite part is when the elder Duchamp attends a lecture about himself that accuses him of incestuous feelings toward his sister. The lecture is given by Arturo Schwarz, a scholar obsessed with reading occult meanings into Duchamp's work. Afterwards, Duchamp meets Schwarz and simply says, "I couldn't hear a word, but I enjoyed it very much."
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