You work for an art magazine and in a meeting one day, someone says why don't we have some fiction as all of the writing is non-fiction and the response from Boyd is 'let's invent an artist'. Yes it's fiction but it's in non-fiction form and so will be no different. We have moved here from an unreliable narrator to an unreliable author and that is far more uncomfortable. Anyway, this novella is an imagined biography of an imagined artist which fooled the art world, even down to the point of selling one of the paintings from this artist which had been drawn by Boyd. The art world is full of frauds, this is just one in the written form.

If I hadn't read about the artifice of this book, I would have believed that this artist existed because Boyd has captured the style of writing just so. His inclusion of sources such as journals from other artists as well as his lover's journal but most of all the photographs, provide the authenticity to the book. Boyd says at the end these are photos that he collected from markets. He did insert a character from one of his previous short stories, Logan Mountstuart, but this wasn't picked up on, dare I say because most of us haven't read it. Nor did anyone pick up on the name of the painter and so it became a hoax that would not die. I think what really convinced people that this artist existed was the way that artists of the time were woven into the story. So integral to the ending is Georges Braque, Picasso is in there as well as others from that era. Perhaps it is FOMO when others believed Tate was a real person. Who wants to be considered ignorant about such an important artist and this is what the book plays into in the world of art.

There have been plenty of other books that are imagined biographies or even autobiographies, Biography of X by Catherine Lacey or The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields but what differs with them is that we know they are fictional as we enter them so there is no hoodwinking. So what was the point of Nat Tate?

Well, firstly I suspect, the author's wonder/ego about whether he can pull it off. The answer is yes but Boyd does go on to say that he felt like Frankenstein because as in all of these things, he lost control of the hoax and that is when, I think, hoaxes become dangerous. The ending was ingenious and a perfect way to answer the question of why there is no art left from this person. The second purpose of this book might have been to shine a light on the world of art: how myths and stories around artists are created and how we all buy into them because we want these creatives to be different, to be better, more interesting and, therefore, how easily the world of art can be duped.

I question the motivations for writing a book like this but in truth the boundaries have blurred considerably between fiction and non-fiction nowadays in books and in real life and so this is one more in the library that resides at the lies end of the truth and lies continuum. What is true is that it is very well written. ( )

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. ( )

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.” ( )

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
( )

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. ( )