Remembering Calvin Tomkins, a Master of the Profile

Until the precise end, our person and workfellow Calvin Tomkins looked astatine his beingness with a consciousness of wonderment and bemusement. He died connected Friday astatine the property of 1 hundred, conscionable a fewer months younger than The New Yorker, his moving location since 1958. Tad (he ever went by Tad) was an irrepressibly energetic antheral with fantabulous hair, bright, funny eyes, and a shy, slivery smile—and yet, erstwhile friends and strangers remarked connected however young helium looked, helium deflected, citing what helium called “the 3 ages of man”: Youth, Maturity, and You Look Great.

Tad’s specialty was the Profile—in particular, Profiles of modern artists. For astir seventy years, helium filled this mag with portraits of the originative imaginations who thrilled him the most, from Marcel Duchamp to, conscionable recently, Tala Madani and Rashid Johnson. Sometimes helium widened his bushed and wrote astir creation (Merce Cunningham), oregon euphony (John Cage), oregon the creation of cooking (Julia Child).

Not agelong ago, Phaidon published “The Lives of Artists,” a six-volume postulation containing eighty-two of his Profiles. Tomkins borrowed the rubric from a sixteenth-century work by Giorgio Vasari, a creator and an designer who chronicled the lives of Cimabue, Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, Giotto, and galore different predecessors and contemporaries. Tad’s subjects were the moderns. And the much you work his Profiles—from Duchamp to Kerry James Marshall, Jasper Johns to Cindy Sherman—the much you recognize that his chutzpah successful echoing Vasari’s rubric is well-earned. There is ever a sheen to his writing. The sentences chopped a swift, cleanable way crossed the page—a mackerel done the water. To work “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” his relationship of the matrimony of Gerald and Sara Murphy, and their ellipse of friends which included Pablo Picasso, Cole Porter, and the Fitzgeralds, is to inhabit wholly that privileged yet haunted milieu of the French Riviera a period ago. It is simply a cleanable nonfiction companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night.”

Tad appreciated the large critics and creation academics of his time, but helium was not of their tribe. His attack was journalistic. His pieces thrived connected proximity to the creator astatine hand. His method was person to Whitney Balliett’s enactment connected jazz musicians for this magazine. Just arsenic Balliett formed a wide net, taking successful everything from Teddy Wilson’s plaything to Ornette Coleman’s avant-garde harmolodics, Tad was boundlessly unfastened to each traditions and experiments. He and wife, Dodie Kazanjian, his spouse successful perfectly everything, ne'er stopped roaming the galleries and calling connected artists successful their studios. (In 1993, Tad and Dodie published “Alex,” a biography of the Russian-born sculptor and editorial manager of Condé Nast Alexander Liberman.) Every fewer months oregon so, they would halt by the office, afloat of enthusiasm, to supply a abbreviated database of the caller artists who topped their “Must Profile” list. Soon afterward, Tad’s editor, Cressida Leyshon, would denote that “the caller Tomkins” had arrived, connected clip arsenic always. Into his precocious nineties, helium was arsenic exacting connected deadline with his enactment arsenic a wire-service newsman with a White House bulletin.

Tad grew up successful West Orange, New Jersey, successful a well-to-do family. His begetter sold a plaster institution to the Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation. There was a Utrillo connected the wall, arsenic good arsenic a coating of immoderate wolves that whitethorn oregon whitethorn not person been by Courbet. Before joining this mag arsenic a unit writer, Tad dabbled successful wit and fabrication and held posts astatine some Radio Free Europe and Newsweek. His archetypal full-fledged Profile published present was of Jean Tinguely, a Swiss “motion sculptor” whose contraptions, Tad wrote, “usually neglect to enactment successful the mode they are expected to, and sometimes they bash not enactment astatine all.” He described 1 of Tinguely’s works connected show astatine a depository successful Amsterdam arsenic a gas-powered “painting machine” that was meant to detonate periodically and nutrient abstract drawings. Tinguely’s contraption, however, proved “unable to bash immoderate of this, due to the fact that different artist, possibly enraged astatine specified theatrical egocentricity successful a specified machine, had poured brew into its substance tank.”