Some of you know the story. It was briefly the rage in New York and London in 1998. But in my cultural backwater of Berkeley, where people were still plotting the revolution, I had never heard it. So when Robert the K, noted glass artist and critic, told me about a book he had just finished, I asked to borrow it. This book, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960 was by William Boyd, whose novels An Ice-Cream War and Brazzaville Beach, I had enjoyed. Originally released, in between a volume on British painting from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst and another about the New York City art scene from Andy Warhol to the present, by 21, a small, independent publishing house in London, it had been re-issued by Bloomsbury earlier this year. Robert had never heard of Tate (nor had I), and he had found the book “thin” and wondered why anyone would publish it. But he had found Boyd’s account of Tate’s life and career engaging.
The book was skimpy, less than 30 pages, once you subtracted the photographs; and half the photographs weren’t even of Tate or his work or family but of notables (Georges Braque, Franz Kline, Hans Hoffman, Frank O’Hara, Pable Picasso) with whom he had crossed paths. But Bloomsbury was a discerning house, and Gore Vidal provided a cover blurb, and John Richardson spiced the text with anecdotes, and (I later learned) David Bowie had hosted a launch party for it at Jeff Koons’s Manhattan studio, attended by several hundred people, including Julian Schnabel, Jay McInerny and John Asberry. So someone thought it could earn back its advance and costs.
And the story was certainly engaging. Little is known about Tate, Boyd wrote, who was most famous for the more than 200 drawings he had done based on Hart Crane’s “The Bridge,” but he had been fortunate to have access to the letters of Janet Felzer (1922-1977), a Manhattan gallery owner and Tate’s dealer, and the journals he was editing, of Logan Mountstuart (1906-1991), a “curious and forgotten” writer/critic prominent in the mid-20th century New York art world, both of whom had known Tate intimately. (Why, I wondered, was a novelist like Boyd editing someone’s journals? Money, I supposed.)
Tate, an orphan at the age of eight, had been adopted by the wealthy Long Island couple for whom his mother had worked as a maid. At boarding school, Tate demonstrated artistic talent, so his parents arranged for him to spend the summers of 1947-51 studying with Hans Hoffman in Provincetown. Felzer discovered his work soon after that and included him in a show with Adolf Gottlieb, Lee Krasner and Barnett Newman at her Hudson Street gallery, Aperto. Clement Greenberg noted Tate’s “promising, oddly disturbing drawings,” and all were sold – primarily, it turned out, to Tate’s father, who considered his son a genius. By his early 20s, Tate had a studio at 22nd and Lexington, was hanging at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, and become close friends with Kline. He drank heavily (Vidal, who met him at this time, referred to Tate as “a dignified drunk with nothing to say”), and he had affairs with Felzer, Peggy Guggenheim, who compared him favorably to Samuel Beckett, and, possibly, Frank O’Hara, who mentioned him in an uncollected poem. On a trip to Europe in 1959, Richardson introduced Tate to both Picasso, to whom Tate barely spoke, and Braque, who corrected his pronunciation of “Van Gogh.”
Upon his return, Tate’s behavior changed radically. (Boyd believes that the slightness of his work compared to these masters unnerved his already fragile psyche.) His drinking increased. In early January 1960, he bought back or borrowed to “restore” all his work that he could which was in private hands, cleaned out his father’s house and his studio – and burnt the lot. He began work on a final painting, “Orizaba/Return to Union Beach,” Orizaba being the name of the ship from which Crane jumped. Then, on January 12, four days short of his 32nd birthday, he leaped from the deck of the Staten Island ferry.
His body was never found.
SPOILER ALERT: If you plan to read this book, stop NOW!!!
It was such a compelling story I recommended the book to a High Art-oriented friend in New York City. She told me to look up Tate in Wikipedia.
He never existed. Neither did Felzer or Mountstuart. Boyd had created Tate’s art and written O’Hara’s poem. The photos of Tate and his family had been selected from a collection Boyd had amassed from antique shops, estate sales, and junk stores. Bowie, Richardson and Vidal had willingly participated in the hoax. So had David Lister, art news editor of The Independent, who had circulated at the launch party, collecting quotes from people who had met Tate or heard of him or seen his work or regretted his having died so young.
There was to have been a second launch party in London a week later. In the interim, Boyd was interviewed by the BBC and major newspapers. The Sunday Telegraph excerpted the book. Then Lister decided not to risk losing his scoop and exposed the story. Boyd had hoped to see how long before it would have unraveled on its own. He had, he said, not been trying to mock the pretensions and shallowness of the art world, as some suspected, but “had been toying with the idea of how things moved from fact to fiction and… wanted to prove something fictive could prove factual.” It had been, his supporters said, a grand piece of conceptual art.
Over the next 13 years, three TV documentaries were made about Tate. He acquired his own Facebook page. His story was translated into French and German and re-issued in Britain and the United States. An “authenticated” Tate original was put up for auction in London. “It just goes to show,” Boyd wrote in Harper’s Bazaar, “that everyone loves a hoax…. Something about people being hoodwinked… is endlessly alluring.”
I am not so sure.
Just ask James Frey and Laura Albert. When Frey’s memoir about his drug and alcohol addictions, A Million Little Pieces, turned out to have been embroidered with several tales which never happened, he was vilified. Oprah humiliated him on national television; Maureen Dowd, in the Times found it restorative of our national honor to have him held “accountable for lying”; and his publisher was sued by aggrieved readers.
And Albert who, writing as JT Leroy, penned a series of autobiographical novels and stories purportedly drawn from the author’s past as a sexually abused, drug abusing, teenage, male prostitute, ended up with a $450,000 jury verdict against her for fraud. (Now there was a piece of near-genius conceptual art! Albert carried on her hoax for six years. “Leroy” developed friendships with literary notables including Mary Gaitskill and Sharon Olds. “He,” actually the half-sister of Albert’s partner, even made public appearances and gave interviews. But after his exposure, not everyone showed their love.
So where’s the significant difference? Frey was writing fact that turned out to be partially fiction. Boyd was writing fact that turned out to be entirely fiction. (Isn’t that worse?) Albert was writing fiction that turned out to be fiction – by an author who was also fictitious. (Isn’t that better?) But only Boyd got paid to chuckle about his experience in Harper’s Bazaar.
The funny thing about hoaxes is that while they depend on secrecy, they can only have impact when they become known. Otherwise, to quote Gully Jimson, “It’s like farting ‘Annie Laurie’ through a keyhole. It’s clever but is it worth the effort.” Only the few co-conspirators pressed against the door can enjoy the performance. Once hoaxes are exposed though, the pundits can step in and assess what they reveal about the perpetrators, the deceived and the implications for society as a whole.
In fact, Boyd probably benefitted from his hoax being revealed so quickly. That way fewer people were taken in, scantier emotional attachment to Tate developed, and fewer feelings of betrayal resulted. It also helped Boyd’s reception that his hoax targeted the limited and sophisticated audience of the New York/London art world. It wasn’t designed for mass success or major rewards.
Frankly, Scarlett, the public didn’t give a damn about Nat Tate.
From September, 2011