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Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928-1960
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Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928-1960
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Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928-1960
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Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928-1960

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

3/5

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About this ebook

When William Boyd published his biography of New York modern artist Nat Tate, a huge reception of critics and artists arrived for the launch party, hosted by David Bowie, to toast the late artist's life. Little did they know that the painter Nat Tate, a depressive genius who burned almost all his output before his suicide, never existed. The book was a hoax, and the art world had fallen for it.

Nat Tate is a work of art unto itself-an investigation of the blurry line between the invented and the authentic, and a thoughtful tour through the spirited and occasionally ludicrous American art scene of the 1950s.

William Boyd is the author of nine novels, including A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year Award.

Praise for Nat Tate:

"William Boyd's description of Tate's working procedure is so vivid that it convinces me that the small oil I picked up 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

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 3, 2011
ISBN9781608197262
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Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928-1960
Author

William Boyd

William Boyd is also the author of A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys War Prize and short-listed for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year; Ordinary Thunderstorms; and Waiting for Sunrise, among other books. He lives in London.

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Reviews for Nat Tate

Rating: 3.12930724137931 out of 5 stars
3/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    In a departure from the novels for which he came to fame, William Boyd devotes this book to a brief life of Nat Tate, a largely unrecognised and sadly short-lived American artist, best known for his series of paintings and drawings of bridges. Boyd recounts Tate’s all-too-short life and the book is illustrated with a selection of Tate’s better works. Boyd’s account is sympathetic and engaging, and liable to draw in new admirers of Tate’s works, many of whom might find themselves wondering why they had not encountered his art before. Hints to the reason for that might be found in Boyd’s account, one of the most prominent sources for which is the journal of British man of letters, Logan Mountstuart. Mountstuart himself is, of course, the subject of what many consider to be Boyd’s masterpiece, Any Human Heart (although I now wonder if he has now surpassed even that novel with his latest book, Love is Blind). The truth is that Nat Tate is as fictional as Logan Mountstuart. With support from David Bowie and Gore Vidal, Boyd launched the life and works of Nat Tate as part of a prank against the New York art world, many of whose members initially claimed to rem ember the subject from years before.The tone of the brief life is brilliantly captured, and certainly feels entirely credible. Some of the artworks cited as being by Tate were actually by Boyd himself, with the others being drawn from the photograph collections of some of Boyd’s friends who were in on the act.All very amusing and entertaining. I rather wish that Tate had been real.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I am not familiar enough with the art scene to really understand much of this book. The premise was interesting enough, I suppose, but I struggled to finish this thin book. I could not have hung on for much longer.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The description of the book tells how it was a hoax, a biography of a fictional artist to poke a bit of fun at the art world. I think to truly understand the humor in the situation, you need to be familiar with the art world, or at least have a passing acquaintance. Otherwise, the joke just kind of goes over a reader's head. It was much shorter than I was expecting, more of a background snapshot than a biography. That didn't bother me overmuch, as the reader is "in" on the joke. The pictures were of poor quality- and I know that since they weren't "real" I couldn't expect the best, but I could hardly tell what was supposed to be in the pictures. It also could have been that I was reading the ARC version of the book, and the photos and such would look better in the paid version. Over all, it was an interesting diversion, with enough entertainment value to make it worth the time.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I do not believe I was aware that this biography was a "hoax" at the time I chose this. But I was aware by the time I read it - and that had a significant impact on the readability.Had this been a true biography, it would have been mediochre at best. Very thin (66 pages with lots of photographs) it seemed to offer excruciatingly pointless details in some areas and scant reference to other areas which should have provided more "meat" in an artist biography. But again, had this been real, I would have passed that off as insufficient research of an artist who died at the age of 32.But it isn't real. It was designed as some bizarre, tongue in cheek plot to point out the hypocrisy of the art world where at the launch party for the book (before the hoax was known) the author could mock the society for actually claiming to have met (and own art by) someone who didn't exist. I do not appreciate humor at the expense of others, so reading the "bio" I couldn't help but imagine what the author was hoping to accomplish as he was writing it. Readable but pointless.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Perhaps if I were a part of the New York art scene I might appreciate this book. Since I'm not, however, I found it boring and pretentious on its own--even as it satirizes a pretentious world. I will say that I was impressed with the art work and photographs in this book, and I wonder how I would have reacted to this book if I had read it without knowing it was a hoax.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I feel that if I were more familiar with the art scene in the 1950s New York, I would have enjoyed this book quite a bit more. As it is, I didn't dislike it - I do, after all, enjoy fiction that claims to be non-fiction, particularly when it plays with format and expectations, which Nat Tate does. But I'm simply not all that familiar with the lives and times of artists in the 1950s, particularly in the New York scene, and so much of the goings on didn't mean much to me, especially since I suspect that they're winks and nods to those who are well-versed in that period.My English majory side did come out as I read, even if the art history one was left in the dark (and yet, I work in a contemporary art museum...): I found myself amused at the way Boyd sends up the whole biography genre with this biography that is entirely invented, yet very much exactly like so many other biographies. I suppose that's postmodernism - the questioning of truth and reality and how to trust that what you are reading did, in fact, actually happen the way it says it did. The copious amounts of photograph and art "evidence" to the life of Tate did a lot for my meta-enjoyment of the book (so to speak).As the copy I received is an ARC, I suspect that the final version will be a coffee-table type book, in order to do justice to the many photographs and artwork on almost every page. But I don't think it will have an introduction or appendix explaining the hoax or Boyd's purpose in perpetrating it. An essay that points out the satire or even just Boyd's playing with the biography format would do a lot towards making the book more accessible to a wider demographic. As it is, it's likely to be only of interest to people who are already familiar with Boyd's work, or else are interested and knowledgeable about the art world of the 1950s and know of the hoax.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I thought the fact that this book was a hoax is cool it was kind of boring though but it was short so thats good
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I don't get the point of this book. Much has been made of the fact that it was presented as a hoax, but as pointed out in Wikipedia, "The literary editor of The Independent, who was at the New York launch, said that no one he spoke to claimed to know Tate well, but no one claimed not to have heard of him." For a hoax, that's not exactly successful. What did it prove? It didn't reveal anything about the art world in particular. I worked in the field for years, and had I attended a show for an artist I didn't know and been asked if I knew his work, I would have thought it rude to say I had never heard of him. What if Boyd had done this in another field - architecture, politics, even literature - wouldn't the results have been the same?Some of the historical points in the book also don't gel. For example, the only Abstract Expressionist who claimed to have met figures like Picasso and Braque (as Boyd says Tate did) was Hans Hoffman, and that was because he was decades older than the other artists in the movement.As for the book's literary merits, they're pretty meager - Boyd succeeds in getting the tone of a real biography, which does not make for interesting reading when the subject is fictional.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This very short biography of a fictitious American artist was published as a hoax on the art world in the late 90's. William Boyd obviously had a great deal of fun putting in all together along with photos of strangers and pieces of fake art. It is written in a rather dry voice; perhaps recognisable to those who read a lot of artist bios or art magazines. Everything is there: lonely orphan, endulging stepfather, famous interested art dealer, possible homosexual encounters with the famous, destruction of most of the artists work and, of course, suicide. Read as a form or performance art, it's pretty fun and complex. Glad I got it for free as an Early Reviewer. I wouldn't actually pay money for it unless I was part of the joke.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book review: I'm hard pressed to consider "Nat Tate" a book: it's scant 67 pages including illustrations and photos is the kind of fiction I might read (with pleasure) in the New Yorker. However, given that it came represented as a book, I will review it as such. I greatly enjoyed the subtle humor of the book and Logan Mountstuart appearing as a principal character added to the fun: "Any Human Heart" featuring Mountstuart, is one of my favorite all time books. It has been well documented that this novel was a successful "literary prank." The author was very subtle and clever in his development of this "document." I do recommend it as a "fun read", but not as a $15.00 investment.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    The idea of pulling a literary and art world hoax in one fell swoop obviously appealed to William Boyd, and anyone who didn't recognize one of the characters in this "biography" was in reality a character from another of Boyd's novels might certainly have fallen for it.That said, I can't help feeling that the real joke is on the book-buying public who might fork over real $$ to read a slim monograph that might intrigue art world insiders for its sly commentary on the New York art scene and its parody of the usual slavish monographs provided to attendees of one-man shows at trendy galleries in Chelsea.But the vast majority of readers at whom this is aimed will be those who are familiar with Boyd through his novels, like the recent "Ordinary Thunderstorms", and who won't be au fait enough with the art world to get the insider-y "nudge, nudge; wink, wink" moments. And a handful of pages of parody just aren't worth the price of admission on that level. I can't help wonder what Mr. Boyd was thinking... It's clever, certainly, but it's the kind to clever that comes at the expense of someone else. When Doris Lessing wanted to prove that publishers and reviewers were biased in favor of well-known authors, she submitted a real full-length novel; readers weren't ripped off. A cool idea -- to get insiders to fall for your joke -- becomes less cool when the general reader is asked to pay a cover price of $22 for about 30 pages' worth of parody prose.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This clever little book was written in the late 1990s and claimed to be a biography of an obscure American artist who worked in the 1940s and 1950s. At the launch party on April fool's day in 1998, no one wanted to admit that they'd never heard of Nat Tate although, according to the book, he destroyed most of his art right before his dramatic suicide. What's clever about the book is not really its temporary success as a hoax but its use of all the troubled artist cliches from the period. Who would be surprised to read about an artist who never really fit in, had complicated personal relationships, drank too much, and experienced brief commercial success while experimenting with increasingly abstract forms? It's worth the half-hour it takes to read. My advance copy was on low-quality paper with poorly reproduced art but I'd expect the actual book to have good production values (aside, of course, from the intentionally blurred photos of Nat Tate himself).
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    William Boyd's hoax biography of a 1950's era American artist apparently fooled a few people when it originally came out who were led to believe that the artist was an actual real person who had destroyed almost his entire catalog of work shortly before committing suicide in the same way as his idol--the American poet Hart Crane. Beyond having some fun with the more pretentious in the art world Boyd's book creates a biography around this faux personality in much the same way as Roberto Bolano drew up fictional right wingers in his Nazi literature in the Americas. To be honest I liked it but also liked the fact that he keeps it all short and manageable--67 pages with a lot of photographs included.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Very quick read, only 67 pages long finished it in about 30 minutes. The book is about Nat Tate an artist of the modernist slant. In his short life he found fame in the 1950's New York art scene. Probably his greatest accomplishment is when he got back from France he sought out all of his works so as to destroy them so he could start over. While in France he rubbed elbows with Picasso, and Georges Braque. He barely spoke to Picasso, but was more impressed with Braque, that is where he got his inspiration to start over when he got back to New York. His early life with his mother was a train wreck, only after her employer adopted him did he see any kind of, for lack of a better term, normalcy. Interesting read, if you enjoy biographies about depressed 1950's artist, then this book is for you.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Complete with cover flap comments from David Bowie and Gore Vidal attesting to its subject’s importance this is an account of forgotten US artist Nathwell ‘Nat’ Tate, whose final artistic act was to burn as many of his works as he had managed to lay hands on (“perhaps a dozen survive”) before committing suicide by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry. The usual biographical conditions apply, obscure origins, father unknown, mother died young, adoption by her rich employer (emphatically not Tate’s father but an avid admirer and buyer of his work,) an influential teacher at Art School, chance viewing of his work by the founder of a gallery, socialising with other artists, the development of his style - aslant to that of his contemporaries and details of which Boyd provides - descent into alcohol, meetings with Picasso and Braque, disillusionment. The text is interspersed with photographs of three of the surviving paintings and various important stages of Tate’s life, four of which depict Tate but in only one is the adult artist the sole subject. Boyd gives us a convincing, if short, portrait of an artist and his life. Yet the story of Tate is of course entirely fictitious. Not fictional, such biographies imagining the circumstances and lives of real people abound, but fictitious. Tate never existed. He is a total invention by Boyd.On the book’s publication in 1998 the cover picture, containing as it does a cropped version of that black and white photograph of the adult “Tate” obviously photoshopped over a coloured one of New York, might have provided a clue to those not in on the joke but anyone at all familiar with Boyd’s work coming to it post hoc would be immediately aware of its confected nature on its first mention of Logan Mountstuart, protagonist of the author’s 2002 novel Any Human Heart. Boyd would also employ photographs to an equally verisimilituding end within the text of his 2016 novel Sweet Caress.A hint of Boyd’s purpose in writing this book (apart from sending up the hagiographic artistic biography of the forgotten genius) may be gleaned from the passage where there are speculations on possible reasons for “Tate”’s destruction of his work and his suicide. “Tate was one of those rare artists who did not need, and did not seek, the transformation of his painting into a valuable commodity to be bought and sold on the whim of a market and its marketeers. He had seen the future and it stank.”
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I must confess I didn’t even know this book was a hoax when I pulled it down from the shelf at the local library. (I’d just finished two of Boyd’s works — Any Human Heart and Fascination — and I was looking for something else, short enough to read and digest in an afternoon.)

    Nat Tate is essentially exposition. It’s a simple monograph about a relatively simple guy: an American artist who happened to kill himself at the unhurried age of 32. Problem is, he never existed—no, not even long enough to kill himself. Consequently, we can’t feel any pity. Not for Nat Tate; not about his early and abrupt exit.

    We can, however, be amused at the New York art scene in its heyday.

    It’s a pleasure to see a Brit explode (and yes, exploit) an American myth—namely, that money and acclaim somehow determine the true value of art. And the artists of that day? Apparently buying right into the concept with feet, heart and liver.

    But quite apart from the conceit of this monograph, what do I like best about Boyd’s prose? He teaches me new—or rather long-neglected—words. In this little treatise, for instance: “scumble”; “brimful”; “irruption”; “gnomic”; and “tetchy.” In Fascination? “rebarbative” — a word he used twice in that collection and once in this monograph.

    I’ve always believed that writers are “the guardians of the language.” Up until I’d read William Boyd, however, I’d frankly begun to question the sanity of my insistence on this point. When I’d once pointed out to a fellow writer that William Fucking Faulkner had used “implied” not once, but twice (when he really meant to write “inferred”) in Light in August, I thought my fellow writer might just show me down from his Brooklyn rooftop garden lickety-split, yet without benefit of wings or a soft landing spot.

    I like Boyd’s style. More to the point, I trust him with the language. We may not agree on many of the tactics of story-telling, but I trust his general strategy. Why? Because his mechanics are sound. And one shouldn’t even think about writing a story until one has mastered the basic mechanics.

    And where does one begin? By reading, for starters, the likes of William Boyd. “You are what you eat, and you write what you read,” I always say.

    RRB
    5/13/13
    Brooklyn, NY
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Huh?? I don’t get the joke here. I understand that William Boyd, along with David Bowie (I guess) pulled a huge hoax in the nineties by inventing Nat Tate and presenting him as an artist who committed suicide in the early sixties after burning most of the art he’d produced. I understand that their purpose was to ridicule the pretentious art crowd in NYC in the fifties by making them believe Nat Tate was a hopeless alcoholic whose depression pushed him over the edge before his body of work could have been expected to memorialize him. What I didn’t understand was what I, or any other ordinary reader could possibly get out of this book.I have read a couple of Boyd’s previous novels and enjoyed them so when this title appeared as an ER offer, I selected it. I didn’t realize it was perpetrating a hoax. I’m not sure when that realization hit me but I’ll say one thing: I’m really glad I didn’t spend $25 to buy the hardback copy of this book which, at 67 half full pages with lots of photos, barely qualifies as a short story. And I didn’t really “get” many of the inside jokes that only those familiar with the NYC art scene of the 50s would get. So this book didn’t work for me and I’m really disappointed with an author whose work I normally enjoy. Not recommended (as if the one and a half stars didn’t make that clear).
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Published in 1998, Boyd has written a very short biography of American abstract expressionist, Nat Tate, who committed suicide in 1960 after destroying most of his work.. He describes the artist’s meetings with all the leading painters of the day, including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Picasso, and Bracque, and leaders of the art world. Boyd includes quotes from Gore Vidal, John Richardson, and David Bowie. But all was quickly revealed as a hoax.Reading it today, even if I hadn’t known it was a hoax, the use of the memoirs of Logan Mountstuart was a tipoff. This was apparently the first appearance of the hero of Boyd’s later novel, Any Human Heart.Boyd has done an amazing job of creating a young artist, troubled background, drinking problem, and all. He does a good job of describing how Tate worked and a description of his paintings. The paintings in the books were apparently done by Boyd himself.I believe this must have been one of the better hoaxes in the art world. But I’m always puzzled by hoaxes of this kind. I know sometimes the perpetrator just wants to see if he can get away with it. But I don’t think that was Boyd’s motivation. I wonder if he wanted to demonstrate to the art community how quick they are to jump on a bandwagon and go along with the prevailing opinion. If that was the case, he certainly succeeded.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928 to 1960To my great delight, Bloomsbury decided to reissue the short biography of Nat Tate originally published in England in 1998. For fans of William Boyd, it has been difficult to find an affordable copy of this 66 page history of an unknown American artist who supposedly was active during the 1950s. Readers of William Boyd’s novels will know that he is very clever writer and nowhere is his cleverness better displayed than in this literary hoax. Boyd’s biography of Tate includes reproductions of his artwork, along with photographs of Tate and his contemporaries. Boyd created a completely believable character in this biography and had his literary and artistic chums collude with him in passing Nat Tate off as an undiscovered artist from the 1950s New York City art scene. On April 1, 1998, David Bowie, in cahoots with Boyd, hosted a large reception of critics and artists for the launch party of the Nat Tate biography. With blurbs from Bowie and Gore Vidal, the book was taken seriously. In the April 2011 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Boyd explained that an English journalist who was in on the hoax interviewed various people at the launch. Some of them claimed to have heard of Tate, a few remembered his work and many were sad that he cut short his career by committing suicide. Boyd gave interviews to BBC Radio and major newspapers. Unfortunately, the English journalist felt he could no longer sit on the story and revealed the hoax. Boyd’s book caused quite a stir and made the first page of the London Independent, as well as the front page of the New York Times Arts section. Boyd expressed amazement that 13 years after the hoax first appeared interest still thrives about Nat Tate, noting that three documentaries have been made about the event. This year the book was translated into French and German. In the recent TV dramatization of Boyd’s wonderful novel, Any Human Heart, Tate appears as a character. How did Boyd bring about the hoax? He created a character who was an orphan adopted by a rich family. The character, who lives on the North Folk of Long Island, leads a very reclusive life. Boyd selected old unidentified photos to show Tate as a boy and as a man. He also included real photographs of actual writers and painters such as Frank O’Hara and William de Kooning. Most of Boyd’s information about Tate comes from the journals of Logan Mountstuart, another imaginary character who reappears in Any Human Heart. Boyd has a strong interest in the art scene in New York at the middle of the last century. Nat Tate serves as a tribute to this fascinating period.