For nearly seventy years, he captured the lives of modern artists for The New Yorker.
Until the very end, our friend and colleague Calvin Tomkins looked at his life with a sense of wonder and wry amusement. He died on Friday at the age of one hundred, just a few months younger than The New Yorker, his working home since 1958. Tad (he always went by Tad) was an irrepressibly energetic man with excellent hair, bright, curious eyes, and a shy, slivery smile—and yet, when friends and strangers remarked on how young he looked, he deflected, citing what he called “the three ages of man”: Youth, Maturity, and You Look Great.
Tad’s specialty was the Profile—in particular, Profiles of modern artists. For nearly seventy years, he filled this magazine with portraits of the creative imaginations who thrilled him the most, from Marcel Duchamp to, just recently, Tala Madani and Rashid Johnson. Sometimes he widened his beat and wrote about dance (Merce Cunningham), or music (John Cage), or the art of cooking (Julia Child).
Not long ago, Phaidon published “The Lives of Artists,” a six-volume collection containing eighty-two of his Profiles. Tomkins borrowed the title from a sixteenth-century publication by Giorgio Vasari, a painter and an architect who chronicled the lives of Cimabue, Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, Giotto, and many other predecessors and contemporaries. Tad’s subjects were the moderns. And the more you read his Profiles—from Duchamp to Kerry James Marshall, Jasper Johns to Cindy Sherman—the more you realize that his chutzpah in echoing Vasari’s title is well earned. There is always a sheen to his writing. The sentences cut a swift, clean trail across the page—a mackerel through the water. To read “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” his account of the marriage of Gerald and Sara Murphy, and their circle of friends which included Pablo Picasso, Cole Porter, and the Fitzgeralds, is to inhabit completely that privileged yet haunted milieu of the French Riviera a century ago. It is a perfect nonfiction companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night.”