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Early in 2025, the staff writer Calvin Tomkins decided to chronicle turning a hundred in the same year as The New Yorker’s hundredth anniversary, in a piece titled “Becoming a Centenarian.” Tomkins first contributed to The New Yorker at the age of thirty-two, and he soon developed a specialty: writing about visual artists, and exploring the source of their originality. “I knew nothing about contemporary art. I had not intended to write about art or artists,” he said. “It just happened that way. It sort of took hold of me.” The first of these profiles was published in 1962, and they were eventually collected in the six-volume anthology “The Lives of Artists.” Just last year, nearing the age of ninety-nine, Tomkins wrote about Rashid Johnson, who was mounting a major survey at the Guggenheim Museum. David Remnick celebrates Tomkins’s life and career on the week of his hundredth birthday.
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