“Georgia O’Keeffe, who is 86, spends almost no time thinking about the past,” the critic Calvin Tomkins wrote in a 1974 Profile of the artist in The New Yorker. Tomkins, who went by Tad, died last month, at age 100. He made his début in the magazine in 1958, and this past December published his final piece, a diary of his centennial year. In a tribute, our editor, David Remnick, praised Tomkins’s exceptional gift for writing Profiles—which, over more than six decades, illuminated the lives of a dazzling array of artists and other notable figures, among them Marcel Duchamp, Julia Child, John McEnroe, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, and Thelma Golden. Revisit his Profile of O’Keeffe: www.newyorker.com/magazine/1974/03/04/the-...