“Bridge No. 114,” by Nat Tate.
Tomorrow, Sotheby’s will auction off one of the abstract expressionist Nat Tate’s famous “Bridge” paintings. It is a rare offering—one of only eighteen surviving Tate canvases—and is expected to fetch anywhere from three thousand to five thousand pounds, though as Frances Christie, the director of modern and postwar British art at Sotheby’s, told the BBC, “the sky’s the limit.”
If you are not familiar with Tate, you might consider picking up a copy of the British novelist William Boyd’s 1998 biography, “Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928—1960,” which has recently been re-released by Bloomsbury. In just sixty-six pages, Boyd unspools the brief and tragic life of the artist, from his inauspicious birth and his adoption by the timber scion Peter Barkasian to his rise in the New York art scene in the nineteen-forties to his death by suicide, at the age of thirty-one.
[#image: /photos/590953dec14b3c606c104320]If you are familiar with Tate, however, you know that the above is hooey (save for the book and the painting—they really exist and the auction will actually take place). Nat Tate (derived, it is said, from London’s two big museums, the National Gallery and the Tate) is the invention of Boyd, who twelve years ago attempted to convince the literary and artistic establishment of New York that Tate was a forgotten painter of the New York school. His aim in writing the fake biography, and in painting the pieces attributed to Tate, he told interviewers at the time, was to “play quite consciously with the ideas of reality and fiction. This is pushing the envelope, and taking it possibly as far as you can go. It is conscious and deliberate, almost a manipulation of our verification process.” He hoped that there would be initial belief, followed by “a mounting crescendo of skepticism,” leading to a challenge, and, eventually, to a confession.
But the project barely got off the ground: the story broke almost as soon as the book was released, sparking a minor scandal. Why? Because the biography itself was the least of Boyd’s efforts to verify Nat Tate. He had the book excerpted in the serious art journal Modern Painters; he got Gore Vidal to blurb it; and he invoked the magic that is David Bowie. Bowie published “Nat Tate” through the book-publishing arm of Modern Painters, where he was a board member, and threw the New York launch party, on the night before April Fool’s Day.
It was the party that both put “Nat Tate” on the map and led to its swift unmasking. Held at the SoHo loft of “the porn artist Jeff Koons,” the party was attended by a dizzying assortment of New York celebrities: Koons and Bowie and Iman; Frank Stella, Julian Schnabel, John Ashbery, Jay McInerney, Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster, Michael Collins; Bill Buford, then the fiction editor of The New Yorker; and several prominent art critics. None had read the book, which was not yet available in the U.S. But they were treated to a reading by Bowie, who chose a passage in which Tate throws himself off the Staten Island Ferry into the icy waters of New York Harbor.
The gossip item—endlessly repeated in the tabloids—holds that the partygoers were much moved by the story, and were overheard pronouncing on the magnificent Tate and his tragic early death. David Lister, who broke the story the following week in the Independent, recounted a conversation he’d had at the party:
Lister’s tale was picked up by the wider media, which fashioned the event an act of international aggression: “Bowie Stunt Embarrasses NYC,” one headline read. And: “Britons give U.S. cousins lesson in art of deception,” “The Sting; How a great British hoaxer fooled the art elite of Manhattan,” “British Pair Hoodwink Leading US Art Critics,” “British joke falls flat in New York.” The immediate effect of all this negative coverage was that Boyd began apologizing and explaining: the hoax was not intended to make anyone look the fool, he said, but was a serious “investigation of authenticity.”
What’s amusing to this New Yorker about the Nat Tate affair, twelve years on, is that no one in New York seems to have cared very much. “The question everyone here is asking is: What hoax?” a reporter stationed in New York wrote. And they still don’t care: the Sotheby’s auction and the re-release of the biography have been covered ad nauseam in British papers, but not at all over here. This isn’t only because Boyd “belongs” to Britain, where the legend of Nat Tate has never died, inspiring not one but three television documentaries. It’s because when you are a part of, or aspire to be a part of, a certain set in New York, you expect to be obsessed over, and whether that obsession takes the form of adulation or disdain is unimportant. If the worst thing that ever happens to you is that you pretend to know an artist you’ve never heard of at a party held at Jeff Koons’s loft hosted by David Bowie, attended by supermodels, and covered by members of the international press—this is in keeping with the order of things.
In the end, it’s this indifference on the part of the tastemakers that makes Boyd’s project a worthy one, pointing as it does to their ability to treat as real whatever they choose, and to deny the reality of other things simply by redirecting their gaze. Bill Buford put it best in an article in the Guardian that ran a week and a half after the party: “The point may simply have been Bowie.”
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