Calvin Tomkins: The World of Marcel Duchamp, 1887–1968 (1966/1972)

The book draws on interviews and materials gathered for Tomkins’ 1965 profile of Duchamp in The New Yorker. Fully illustrated, with color and black and white reproductions and photographs.

By Calvin Tomkins and the Editors of Time-Life Books
Publisher Time-Life Books, New York, 1966
Revised 1972
192 pages

PDF (56 MB, no OCR)

See also chapter on Duchamp in Tomkins’ The Bride and the Bachelors (1965/76) and his collected interviews with Duchamp ([1964] 2013).

Maria Gough: The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (2005)

“The Artist as Producer reshapes our understanding of the fundamental contribution of the Russian avant-garde to the development of modernism. Focusing on the single most important hotbed of Constructivist activity in the early 1920s—the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) in Moscow—Maria Gough offers a powerful reinterpretation of the work of the first group of artists to call themselves Constructivists. Her lively narrative ranges from famous figures such as Aleksandr Rodchenko to others who are much less well known, such as Karl Ioganson, a key member of the state-funded INKhUK whose work paved the way for an eventual dematerialization of the integral art object.

Through the mining of untapped archives and collections in Russia and Latvia and a close reading of key Constructivist works, Gough highlights fundamental differences among the Moscow group in their handling of the experimental new sculptural form—the spatial construction—and of their subsequent shift to industrial production. The Artist as Producer upends the standard view that the Moscow group’s formalism and abstraction were incompatible with the sociopolitical imperatives of the new Communist state. It challenges the common equation of Constructivism with functionalism and utilitarianism by delineating a contrary tendency toward non-determinism and an alternate orientation to process rather than product. Finally, the book counters the popular perception that Constructivism failed in its ambition to enter production by presenting the first-ever case study of how a Constructivist could, and in fact did, operate within an industrial environment. The Artist as Producer offers provocative new perspectives on three critical issues—formalism, functionalism, and failure—that are of central importance to our understanding not only of the Soviet phenomenon but also of the European vanguards more generally.”

Publisher University of California Press, 2005
ISBN 9780520226180
xi+257 pages

Reviews: Paul Wood (Art Journal, 2006), Charlotte Douglas (Modernism/modernity, 2006), Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier (Russian Review, 2006), Patricia Railing (Slavic Review, 2007), Douglas Greenfield (Slavic and East European Journal, 2007), Roann Barris (SECAC Review, 2007).

Publisher

PDF (21 MB, no OCR)

Calvin Tomkins: The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde (1965/1976)

A classic work of art criticism. The chapters on Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Jean Tinguely, Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham by an author also known for his work for Radio Free Europe, Newsweek, and The New Yorker.

First published by Viking Press, 1965
Viking Compass Edition with a new Introduction and expanded text published 1968
This edition by Penguin, 1976
ISBN 0140043136
306 pages

PDF (36 MB, no OCR)