Man of Action

He distrusted visual description—funny thing for an art critic to distrust—but let’s start with some, anyway. Thick hair, superhero jawline, impasto eyebrows, rugged mustache, six foot four (the better to glower down on civilization). In a 1964 portrait by his friend Saul Steinberg, he looks like Bert from Sesame Street, but as a younger man he’d been a great beauty. After his death in 1978, he appeared under the name Victor Wulpy in “What Kind of Day Did You Have?,