Calvin Tomkins, who narrated the rise of contemporary art, dies at 100

During a six-decade career at the New Yorker, Mr. Tomkins profiled scores of artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Calvin Tomkins, whose New Yorker profiles of contemporary artists in the 1960s and ’70s revealed the avant-garde painters, sculptors and installationists being ignored by classical critics and elevated them from gritty, obscure galleries in downtown New York City into the broader American culture, died March 20 at his home in Middletown, Rhode Island. He was 100.

The cause was complications of a stroke, said Jahan Rifai, a spokesperson for the New Yorker.

During his six decades at the magazine, Mr. Tomkins wrote more than 400 articles of immense range, including long pieces on TV chef Julia Child, composer John Cage and the real-life Jazz Age couple — Gerald and Sara Murphy — who inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel “Tender Is the Night.”