Remembering Calvin Tomkins, a Master of the Profile
Until the very end, our friend and colleague Calvin Tomkins looked at his life with a sense of wonder and bemusement. 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.”
Tad appreciated the great critics and art academics of his time, but he was not of their tribe. His approach was journalistic. His pieces thrived on proximity to the artist at hand. His technique was closer to Whitney Balliett’s work on jazz musicians for this magazine. Just as Balliett cast a wide net, taking in everything from Teddy Wilson’s swing to Ornette Coleman’s avant-garde harmolodics, Tad was boundlessly open to all traditions and experiments. He and wife, Dodie Kazanjian, his partner in absolutely everything, never stopped roaming the galleries and calling on artists in their studios. (In 1993, Tad and Dodie published “Alex,” a biography of the Russian-born sculptor and editorial director of Condé Nast Alexander Liberman.) Every few months or so, they would stop by the office, full of enthusiasm, to provide a short list of the new artists who topped their “Must Profile” list. Soon afterward, Tad’s editor, Cressida Leyshon, would announce that “the new Tomkins” had arrived, on time as always. Into his late nineties, he was as exacting on deadline with his work as a wire-service reporter with a White House bulletin.
Tad grew up in West Orange, New Jersey, in a well-to-do family. His father sold a plaster company to the Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation. There was a Utrillo on the wall, as well as a painting of some wolves that may or may not have been by Courbet. Before joining this magazine as a staff writer, Tad dabbled in humor and fiction and held posts at both Radio Free Europe and Newsweek. His first full-fledged Profile published here was of Jean Tinguely, a Swiss “motion sculptor” whose contraptions, Tad wrote, “usually fail to work in the way they are expected to, and sometimes they do not work at all.” He described one of Tinguely’s works on display at a museum in Amsterdam as a gas-powered “painting machine” that was meant to explode periodically and produce abstract drawings. Tinguely’s contraption, however, proved “unable to do any of this, because another artist, perhaps enraged at such theatrical egocentricity in a mere machine, had poured beer into its fuel tank.”
When Tad was ninety-nine and the work of traipsing off to far-flung destinations and carrying a long piece around in his head had finally become too trying, he and Dodie stayed mainly at their house in Rhode Island. Tad decided to keep a diary. “Old age is no joke, but it can feel like one,” he wrote. “You look everywhere for your glasses, until your wife points out that you’re wearing them.” From there, he went on to reflect on moments from his past, his children, his friends, various artists, Dodie, and the days he had left. After suffering a stroke, he wrote:
The diary was published in our pages just as Tad hit his hundredth birthday, on December 17th. He kept writing just about until the day he died. ♦