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.”