The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-garde

by Calvin Tomkins

The Bride and the Bachelors, published here in a revised and expanded edition, is one of the essential art books of the last half-century. Its witty and readable accounts of the lives and work of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Jean Tinguely, Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham reveal the ways in which they influenced one another, and opened the way to new perspectives on the nature and purpose of art. The addition of Tomkins's more recent profile of Jasper Johns, as he reflects on his six-decade career, completes the cycle and provides fresh insights on the ever-shifting relationships between art and contemporary life. This edition also includes a new introduction by the author.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Art History, Biography

336 pages, Paperback

First published May 3, 1965

About the author

Calvin Tomkins has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1960. He wrote his first fiction piece for the magazine in 1958, and his first fact piece in 1962. His many Profile subjects have included Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Philip Johnson, Julia Child, Georgia O’Keeffe, Leo Castelli, Frank Stella, Carmel Snow, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Frank Gehry, Damien Hirst, Richard Serra, Matthew Barney, and Jasper Johns. He wrote the Art World column from 1980 to 1988. Before joining The New Yorker, he was a general editor of Newsweek, a post he held from 1957 through 1959. In 1955, he joined Newsweek as an associate editor. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including “The Bride and the Bachelors,” “Merchants and Masterpieces,” “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” “Off the Wall,” “Duchamp: A Biography,” and “Lives of the Artists.” A revised edition of his Duchamp biography came out in 2014.

Reviews

[Kevin Parks · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun read.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an enjoyable read; a light, but still informative look at the lives and works of 5 important modern artists. These were originally published as New Yorker pieces in the 1960s, and they are well-written and informative, but with a nice sampling of anecdotes and no heavy helpings of theory or criticism.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Duchamp piece and I can see why many people are so fascinated with him. He was a brilliant conceptual artist - the first conceptual artist? - and an enigmatic figure of great depth and power. Before Dada, before surrealism, there was Duchamp and there can be no doubt that his figure casts a shadow over them. He was totally ahead of the game, a thinker and true originator. Despite his small output and his less than superlative plastic skills, he could very well have been the most important artist of the 20th century. And he was an interesting man too - he was no Warholesque partygoer, but a serious, insular individual who did not seek out acclaim and believed in the intellectual purity and playfulness of art while looking down on its romantic idealization.

I also enjoyed the piece on John Cage, who in many ways can be seen as a parallel figure to Duchamp in the musical game. This is another intriguing intellectual hero who went his own way and made his own rules. There are number of good stories here, such as Cage's appearance on an Italian quiz show during which he performed one of his proto-happenings and eventually won the grand prize due to his encyclopedic knowledge of mushrooms. Like Nabokov, this man's mind functioned well in the worlds of science and art. He was a progenitor of performance art when in 1952, along with Rauschenberg, Cunningham, David Tudor, and others, he performed a multi-media piece at at legendary Black Mountain College. The article maintains that his creations were not warmly received in the loftier regions of classical music, but that may have changed by now.

I was surprised to find myself unfamiliar with the works of Swiss mechanical movement sculptor Jean Tinguely, given that this is the kind of thing I like. Also ahead of his time, he was building strange, humorously destructive machines back in the 1960s. He was probably indebted to Duchamp, who first expanded the vocabulary of art to include the possibility of machines. Overall though, the article is a little weaker than the others and fails to provide as good a general overview of the man and his work.

I skipped the Cunningham piece because I don't read about dance, but I did find the Rauschenberg piece to also be enjoyable. I would like to see the book Tompkins wrote about this artist (perhaps it was an outgrowth of this article). Rauschenberg is perhaps my favorite modern artist. I have always admired his audacious creativity, his humor, his brilliant use of textures and colors, his willingness to cheerfully explore a range of possibilities. But until I read this, I really knew nothing about the man and his ideas. Interestingly, I still don't feel like I know that much other than that this is a likeable man and a pioneering artist. His background is quite interesting, the Gulf Coast-reared son of a utility worker, he did not even see an art exhibit until he was in the navy. Despite a less than spectacular start, his exuberance won him attention and he became one of the top modern artists in the world.

[Mahrya · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book contains five biographical chapters on the art and lives of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Jean Tinguely, Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham. So far, I've read Duchamp and part of Cage, and I'm starting to realize that these artists construct their lives in the same way that they construct their art, by following absurd and singular internal logic. Duchamp makes elaborate turntable gadgets and spends years painting on mirrors. Then he gives up art abruptly to play chess and cheat at roulette, all the while living in a bare room with a pipe and a chair. Cage, in college, despises his assigned readings and begins to write compositions in the style of Gertrude Stein. He eventually flees for Europe, studies music and when he returns, converts a piano into an intricate percussion instrument to accompany a ballet. (I haven’t gotten there yet, but I think experiments with early electronic music are coming.) Having just spent a weekend watching the tired biopics of Frida Kahlo and Johnny Cash, I must say that this book does a refreshing job of going right for the art, what contributes to the art and what the art says. So far, I’m enjoying it much.

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot has changed in 50 years, as THE BRIDE AND THE BACHELORS shows. Not that this was the point when Calvin Tomkins was writing in the 1960s. He published these five profiles of avant-garde masters — Duchamp, Tinguely, Cage, Rauschenberg and Cunningham — who all left modernism behind for something weirder. Their off-road journeys remain strange and inspiring even after all these years. But it’s the ideas that drove them that I kept coming back to, not as much the use of chance or erasing the line between life and art, as their shared desire to remove themselves from their art. It was radical: rejecting control or even self-expression as artists in order to create art. The pendulum has swung mightily in the opposite direction today, with personalities so wedded to the work it distorts in endlessly adoring reflection. When Tomkins wrote these pieces the artists were all alive and still productive, most barely able to scrape together a living, but continuing to step into the unknown, holding on fearlessly to process. I like some of their art, and I like some of the art being done today, it’s just that I’m tiring of sentences that begin with I.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice snapshot of the work and times of five vanguard artist. Each chapter could be read in any order or by themselves as a short bio of each person. Yet when read it’s entirety, the book has a nice way of weaving the artists together and situating them in their time period. Some repeating themes can be found influencing all five of the artists such as movement and the deconstruction of expectations of their particular practices. Experimentation and collaboration was also a main theme between all of them (although perhaps less with Duchamp who remained an anomaly).
The writing is perhaps a bit dated in its language, but that doesn’t distract from the value of it as a source of biographical knowledge on five of the most influential artists of the twentieth century.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A seminal book. The most inspiring text about art that I have ever read.

[Chris Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good - but light - overviews of the five artists.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Calvin Tomkins' book The Bride and the Bachelors takes its name from Marcel Duchamp's collage on glass The Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, a work that was apparently well-known in 1965 when this book was first published. The book is very much a document of its time, in all the right ways: it captures the spirit of the avant garde movement, in the visual and performing arts, without getting bogged down in trivial gossip or personalities. The five artists profiled--Duchamp, sculptor Jean Tinguely, composer John Cage, artist Robert Rauschenberg, and choreographer Merce Cunningham--all did have outsized personalities, but here Tomkins focuses on what is important to their work. For example, he does reveal Duchamp's obsession with chess, to demonstrate the artist's versatility and logical mind, and he explores Cage's mycological interests as an insight into his openness to the world. "I became aware that if I approached mushrooms in the spirit of my chance operations I would die shortly.... So I decided that I would not approach them in this way," Tomkins quotes Cage. The most entertaining chapter is, without a doubt, the one on Tinguely, as the author describes his Rube Goldberg-like experiments with sculptures designed to destroy themselves. With the art market as overheated as it has been for the last 25 years or so, it is hard to imagine artists so committed to the working out of their ideas that the making becomes an end in itself.

[Douglas Gorney · Rating 5 out of 5]

While Cage, Rauschenberg, Tinguely et al might not be cutting-edge circa 2014, their influence on contemporary art is unavoidable. Writing as and when he did, Tomkins was able to convey a sense of the wonderful newness of their moment, the earnest sense of possibility as yet unfrieghted by all of the deadening *import* successive generations of art critics have piled on.

Witty, lapidary prose in the best New Yorker style. For me a top-five book, fiction or non-fiction.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Calvin Tomkins is HIGHLY recommended for any of his books on Art and/ or Art Criticism. This book is a concise distillation of 5 very important 20th century artists. These artists--strange, obsessed, mysteriously driven often support each other though they may not share similar backgrounds or mediums. I, for one among a handful, find their efforts enriching and inspiring.

[Nat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read about how Yves Tinguely's art is much cooler than Duchamp. For example, while Duchamp made the "Large Glass", Tinguely made an art machine that painted an enormous roll of paper hooked up to a stationary bicycle that shot the painted paper out into the audience as Tinguely pedaled.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book made me love Marcel Duchamp.

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't actually read the entire book, just the parts on Duchamp, Tinguely, and Rauschenberg. Ting-a-ling.

[Tc]

Great book and should be read by everyone who wants to understand 5 important 20th century figures

[Ginger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Duchamp, Tinguely, Cage, Rauschenberg, Cunningham. Book focuses on the artists' lives rather than solely on their artwork. Concise yet seemingly thorough.

[Lesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The gold star standard for profiles on artists of this era. Fantastic.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you plan on being an artist and you don't read this book then you have dropped at least fifty points on the art-o-meter.
READ IT, YOU ARTIST!

[Elatia · Rating 4 out of 5]

...art.

[Onsetsu Evan Cordes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great great overview of all five artists represented.

[Andreas Brændhaugen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just the right amount of density for a book about art history. Tomkins brought me deeper inside the artist's brain than any other historian I've read.

[Jaclyn Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seminal work of art criticism. Must-read for anyone studying art for school or personal interest.

[Ben Shear · Rating 4 out of 5]

only read duchamp & cage sections, but well written and "opened" up the way i think about art.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is a little dated, but the profiles are excellent. The overlapping careers of these artists gives a true sense of what modernism was in the middle of the twentieth century.

[Ambreen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've never been this inspired. I learned how to "read" art from this book.

[Earl Baugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. Great way to learn about Modern Art.