Book Review: Nat Tate An American Artist: 1928-1960, by William Boyd (1998)

Author William Boyd with his book Nat Tate An American Artist: 1928-1960, 1998.

David Bowie at the launch party for Nat Tate, April 1, 1998. Critic Matthew Collings is at the right, and Jeff Koons is lurking behind Bowie's right shoulder.

Portrait of K, by Nat Tate, 1958. The Sander-Lynde Institute, Philadelphia. (Don't go looking for this painting, because it's not real. Also, don't waste time in Philadelphia searching for the Sander-Lynde Institute, it's not real either.)

There are several reasons why you probably haven’t heard of Nat Tate, an Abstract Expressionist artist active in New York City art scene of the 1950’s. The first is that Tate destroyed nearly all of his own work shortly before his suicide in 1960. Another reason why you haven’t heard of Nat Tate is because he didn’t actually exist. 

Tate was the brainchild of author William Boyd, who had the idea to create the biography of a fake artist and try to pass him off as the real thing. Boyd was on the editorial board for the magazine Modern Painters, and his fellow board member David Bowie (yes, that David Bowie) told him that he should turn this idea into a book, as that would make the hoax more convincing. Boyd wrote a short monograph, detailing how he had seen one of Tate’s drawings in a gallery and been inspired to dig into his story. 

Inventing Tate, whose name is a portmanteau of two of the most well-known art museums in England, the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery, meant that Boyd had to invent other fictional characters to support his story. So Boyd created a wealthy patron who adopted Tate and financed his artwork, a gallery dealer who showed his drawings and paintings, and a British author, Logan Mountstuart. It’s through Mountstuart’s diary and letters that we see glimpses of Tate’s personality. Mountstuart became the subject of Boyd’s 2002 novel Any Human Heart. I wonder if Boyd had the idea for the novel about Mountstuart before the idea of Nat Tate, and then folded Tate into Mountstuart’s story, or if he created Mountstuart to support Tate’s story and then decided to expand Mountstuart’s story into a novel? 

When the book Nat Tate was published, it featured supporting blurbs from Bowie and Gore Vidal. A launch party was held in New York City on April 1, 1998. Bowie read excerpts from the book, and people in attendance claimed to recall Tate and his unfulfilled talent. Unfortunately, soon after that the hoax was revealed by a reporter. 

The story behind the Nat Tate hoax is more interesting than the book itself, which remains a fascinating curio. I can imagine if someone knew nothing of the backstory you could pick up the book and be convinced that Tate was a real artist. The book is full of photos—mostly of people other than Tate, of course. And the three works of Tate’s reproduced in the book look authentic enough to be real 1950’s Abstract Expressionist pieces. 

With the proliferation of the internet, it’s hard to imagine such a hoax being attempted now. Not to say that a hoax like this couldn’t happen, but someone would have to work very hard to create a convincing digital footprint for the fictitious person. 

Boyd kept Mountstuart’s diary entries about Tate in his novel Any Human Heart. As Mountstuart recounts a visit to Tate’s studio in 1959, an asterisk draws our attention to a footnote at the bottom of the page: “For a fuller account of Nat Tate’s life, see Nat Tate: An American Artist, by William Boyd.” (Any Human Heart, p.334) 

If nothing else, the Nat Tate book and hoax are continuing reminders of David Bowie’s everlasting coolness.