Nat Tate [Hardcover]

William Boyd demonstrates his versatility with this wonderful satire on modern biographies of arty types. Nat Tate is a fictional artist drawn by Boyd to possess every possible cliche-ridden characteristic, and whose life never deviated from that expected of him by the gullible art consuming public.In fact, so cleverly is the book presented that where I bought it in the Sydney (Australia) Art Gallery, there is a sign that directs purchasers to see the sales clerk before buying it- presumably to let you into the secret that the book's a joke, before you embarrass yourself before friends! The shallowness and predictability of the artist's (guess what) short life will bring a chuckle to the reader on every silly page. William Boyd's reputation as a great modern comic writer is firmly reinforced by "Nat Tate".

If you purchase this new hardback edition of William Boyd's invented artist biography, initially published in 1998 as a lark, a spoof intended to entrap and embarrass the cognoscenti, what do you actually get?

Not so much.

"Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928-1960" first appeared as a magazine article, and now, here in book form, the text itself manages to occupy a mere 38 pages. More than half of those pages display only a few lines each. On those meager pages the remaining space is filled with fuzzy photographs or smudgy art reproductions. The total word count is less than 8,000, and the average reader can get through it in about half an hour. Is this the book's saving grace?

Yes.

Boyd relays the life story of Nat Tate with no joy and little finesse. It struck me as a shallow exercise, a paint-by-numbers effort. Of course Nat had a pinched childhood. Of course his nascent talent is discovered by a discerning few. Of course he brushes up against an idiosyncratic mentor (Hans Hofmann, at his summer school in Provincetown). Of course he hobnobs with the art pack at the Cedar Tavern; drinks too much; suffers and dies young, a suicide. What disappointed me is that in telling this tale Boyd displays little interest in granting the reader any relief from the dull proceedings. No illuminating some new aspect of the New York art scene of the 1950's. No psychological insights beyond clichés. No fine descriptions of places and incidents.

With the exception of a quick cutaway moment when he presents a funny parody of a Frank O'Hara poem (it spotlights the abstract expressionist circle, and its opening line asks, "What if we hadn't had such great names?"), Boyd's prose is uninspired, serviceable at best. Something of equivalent quality could have been concocted by any of several thousand other writers. Some might argue Boyd was compelled to write flatly in order to disguise his tongue-in-cheek designs. I'm not convinced: after all, by the time Boyd was conceiving Nat Tate, biographers had long since given themselves permission to use novelistic techniques to energize non-fiction. Biography is not inherently dull.

What the purchaser of "Nat Tate" is left with is a souvenir of a practical joke, a remnant of a hoax that once caught some people unawares. What is the appeal of such a thing? Is anyone today interested in reading Konrad Kujau's fake diaries of Adolph Hitler? Does this false artifact have any continuing hold over contemporary imagination and thinking? Isn't it telling that virtually all reviews of the book discuss it as an art world event, and say little if anything about it as a reading experience?

Buy this book if you want an object to talk about, a conversation piece.

In this newly reprinted book from 1998, William Boyd details the life and work of Nat Tate, an artist whose work became highly sought-after in the 1950s. One of the Abstract Expressionists in New York City, Tate could usually be found at his New York studio, at galleries, in conversation with Gore Vidal, Frank O'Hara, or Peggy Guggenheim, or drinking with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and others at the Cedar Tavern. In 1959 he visited Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who became his idol. Every one of his paintings sold almost immediately, most of them before the gallery openings even occurred. Then, unexpectedly, in January, 1960, at age thirty-one, he gathered as many of his works as he could find and incinerated them. At noon, four days later, he had coffee with Frank O'Hara and Todd Heuber, and at five o'clock that day, midway between the Statue of Liberty and the Jersey shore, he jumped off the back of the Staten Island Ferry and committed suicide.

This small book memorializing Nat Tate is William Boyd's homage to this forgotten artist. With the look and feel of a fine art monograph, this tiny book boasts heavy semi-gloss paper, wide margins, understated design, a great deal of white space, and many photographs of Nat Tate from childhood to his death, along with his friends, family, and associates. At a party to celebrate the publication of this memorial to Tate on April 1, 1998, several hundred artists, dealers, writers, and the glitterati of the New York gathered to hear publisher David Bowie read passages from the book. Another party was scheduled for the book's London release a week later. Then word leaked out: Nat Tate never existed. The book was a fiction created by Boyd, David Bowie, Gore Vidal, Picasso's biographer John Richardson, and David Lister, a journalist from the Independent in London. Lister could not wait to post his scoop, and the whole plan unraveled.

As Boyd explains in an article he wrote for Harper's Bazaar in April, 2011, "It wasn't planned this way. Nat Tate was created out of a desire to experiment--to see if something entirely fictitious could experience a life in the world as something wholly credible, real, and true." The plan fizzled, but, ironically, the "life" of Nat Tate has never really ended. Three TV documentaries have aired about Tate since 1998, and Boyd's "biography" has now been translated into French and German and j=has now been reprinted in the US and UK. Amazingly, an authenticated drawing by "Nat Tate" is now scheduled to be auctioned in London in the next few weeks.

As I was reading this book, knowing in advance that Nat Tate never existed, I found myself really wishing he had existed. I wanted him to achieve the posthumous success he never enjoyed in his lifetime. I could think of many wonderful artists, people I know and love, whose work is every bit as good as that of much more famous artists, but who have never made the publicity connection, or the connection to the right New York gallery, or who were not able to "play the game" of the famous and successful. It is for those people that I wanted Nat Tate to be remembered. Perhaps he will have another life with this short reprint. Mary Whipple

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