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.