- Hardcover: 71 pages
- Publisher: 21 Publishing Ltd; First Edition edition (3 April 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1901785017
- ISBN-13: 978-1901785012
- Product Dimensions: 21 x 15.4 x 1.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 458,867 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928-1960
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Product Description
Review
'January 8th, it seems, is not only my birthday but also the fateful day when the painter Nat Tate contrived to round up and burn almost his entire output. Four days later he jumped to his death from the Staten Island Ferry, thereby completing the ragged circle of his life's events. William Boyd's description of Tate's working procedure is so vivid that it convinces me that the small oil I picked on Prince Street, New York, in the late '60s, must indeed be one of the lost Third Panel Triptychs. The great sadness of this quiet and moving monograph is that the artist's most profound dread-that God will make you an artist but only a mediocre artist- did not in retrospect apply to Nat Tate' David Bowie 'A moving account of an artist too well understood by his time' Gore Vidal
--This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
Product Description
Artist Nathwell Tate was born in 1928 in Union Beach, New Jersey. On January 8 1960 he contrived to round up and burn almost his entire output of Abstract Expressionism. Four days later he killed himself. This book offers an account of Tate's life and work.
--This text refers to an alternate
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is faux-documentary art faction, a beautifully told little monograph of the Abstract Expressionistic New York scene in the 1950s,by William Boyd.Boyd inserts fictional characters,viz:- Logan Mounstuart and Nat Tate amongst the real movers and shakers of the art and literary worlds.The pieces by Mounstuart would go on to be inserted in the Journal of Logan Monstuart, known as `Any Human Heart',a picaresque novel of the 20th century.The biography of the fictional artist Nat Tate,of the early loss of his father from drowning,of his adoption by the art dealer, Peter Barkasian and his wife,and their fostering of his talent,their payment of a regular stipend.Tate's beauty, his bisexuality.His work is an homage to the poet magus,HartCrane,whose works,The Bridge and White Building,Tate is magnetically drawn to and he depicts in his works.
Crane's suicide jump from a ship,is the bass note template for Tate's end.On the way we are regaled with Kline, O'Hara,de Kooning,Hoffman,Felzer and take in Picasso and Braque.We see the famous Cedar Tavern,drinking hang-out of all would-be artists, practising painters,and art lovers.Cleverly interspersed with photographs of all the real and imaginary protagonists,posing Tate and Mounstuart Zelig-like amongst the proceedings.Reportedly Tate burns 90% of his reclaimed works before disappearing.With beautifully composed typography and layout and the Freudian search for the drowned father a perfect marriage.That this period of art gave rise to such myths and legends,has now given rise to this.Boyd's love of art has evinced this very sincere appreciation,even hoax.
Crane's suicide jump from a ship,is the bass note template for Tate's end.On the way we are regaled with Kline, O'Hara,de Kooning,Hoffman,Felzer and take in Picasso and Braque.We see the famous Cedar Tavern,drinking hang-out of all would-be artists, practising painters,and art lovers.Cleverly interspersed with photographs of all the real and imaginary protagonists,posing Tate and Mounstuart Zelig-like amongst the proceedings.Reportedly Tate burns 90% of his reclaimed works before disappearing.With beautifully composed typography and layout and the Freudian search for the drowned father a perfect marriage.That this period of art gave rise to such myths and legends,has now given rise to this.Boyd's love of art has evinced this very sincere appreciation,even hoax.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
William Boyd loves writing. His recent book, Bamboo, is a very stimulating account of matters that have interested him through his fascinating life. It is NON-FICTION but every bit as readable as his novels and short stories. The book is large yet the chapters are refeshingly short.
Nat Tate, a modernist artist, is yet another departure from his writing 'norm' - a beautiful little book with enormous appeal. It creates for the reader a character who is fictitious but by skillful narrative and real photographs, leads one into a REAL WORLD of the 1950s American Art scene which includes this particular artist, his background, his contacts, acheivements and sad end. Nat Tate is a spoof and the photos are borrowed from anonymous old postcards etc, unbeknown to the reader. But at the time the book was written and launched a party was given in New York where some of the guests said, (or beleived?) that they had met and known Nat Tate. It was a set-up as an experiment. Are novels beleivable? Of course they are. They can be more real than life itself! Nat Tate is a great little book.
It just highlights for me the skill and creativity of the author who revels in the written word and never disappoints.
Nat Tate, a modernist artist, is yet another departure from his writing 'norm' - a beautiful little book with enormous appeal. It creates for the reader a character who is fictitious but by skillful narrative and real photographs, leads one into a REAL WORLD of the 1950s American Art scene which includes this particular artist, his background, his contacts, acheivements and sad end. Nat Tate is a spoof and the photos are borrowed from anonymous old postcards etc, unbeknown to the reader. But at the time the book was written and launched a party was given in New York where some of the guests said, (or beleived?) that they had met and known Nat Tate. It was a set-up as an experiment. Are novels beleivable? Of course they are. They can be more real than life itself! Nat Tate is a great little book.
It just highlights for me the skill and creativity of the author who revels in the written word and never disappoints.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
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
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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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Nat Tate on Kindle
Badly let down by appalling typesetting on the Kindle. Why are so many words wrongly hyphenated? I have just turned to a page at random and seen "remem-bered"! Read more
Published 23 days ago by ed
Pleased to get hold of this
I had been trying to order for a while so really pleased to find it available and at a good price.
Published 23 months ago
Nat Tate never existed
Nat Tate is actually a fictitious character, invented by the author for this fictional biography. An interesting read for that reason alone - more interesting could be an analysis... Read more
Published on 19 July 2001
Another masterpiece,more literary but unmistakeable Boyd
A break from William Boyds usual rollercoaster not knowing whats going to happen next style,yet still a brilliant piece of work. Read more
Published on 5 Feb 2001
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