Author Description

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.