Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928-1960

by William Boyd

  For Susan

  Contents

  Nat Tate

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  I still don’t know what made me climb the stairs to Alice Singer’s 57th Street gallery. It was June 1997, New York City. The show was titled, ‘Crowding the Air – American Drawing 1900–1990’, and it seemed impossibly ambitious for her smallish space. Furthermore, the notices of it which I had read in the Times and the New Yorker disdainfully prefigured one’s natural prejudices. It was late afternoon, I was hot and I was tired and I wandered past dozens of unremarkable drawings and sketches – a Feininger, a Warhol shoe, a Twombly doodle caught my eye – before I was held and shocked by something I had never expected to see. It was a drawing, 12" × 8", in ink, mixed media and collage: Bridge no. 122. I did not need to read the printed label beside it to know it was by Nat Tate.

  It was undated, but I knew it must have been executed in the early 1950s, part of his once legendary, now almost entirely forgotten series of drawings inspired by Hart Crane’s great poem, The Bridge. All the drawings in this series – and it was reputed to run eventually to over 200 – were of similar format: at the top was the boldly stylised representation of a bridge, sometimes a tangle of girders, sometimes a simple arc, and on the bottom two thirds or half of the page was accumulated a sort of clutter or litter – slashing ink strokes, or furious cross-hatching, occasional half-representational figures, sometimes obscenely graffito-like, sometimes finely and carefully drawn, or lettering, or pasted letters, illustrations torn from magazines, skilfully juxtaposed collages in a style reminiscent of Kurt Schwitters. ‘I like bridges,’ Nat Tate once told an acquaintance, ‘so strong, so simple – but imagine what flows in the river underneath.’

  Nat Tate, Bridge no. 122

  The acquaintance to whom these words had been confided was the British writer and critic Logan Mountstuart (1906–1991 – whose journals I am currently editing1). Mountstuart is a curious and forgotten figure in the annals of twentieth-century literary life. ‘A man of letters’ is probably the only description which does justice to his strange career – by turns acclaimed or wholly indigent. Biographer, belle-lettriste, editor, failed novelist, he was perhaps most successful at happening to be in the right place at the right time during most of the century, and his journal – a huge, copious document – will probably prove his lasting memorial. Mountstuart lived in New York from 1947–71 and his extensive journals provide a remarkably candid and intimate portrait of the Manhattan artistic and literary circles in which he moved. Indeed even my own patchy and conflicting account of Nat Tate’s life and times – full of ambiguities and contention – could not have been compiled without the Mountstuart journals and the letters between Mountstuart and Janet Felzer2, the dealer who first showed Tate’s work in her lower Manhattan ‘co-op’ gallery in 1952.

  Mountstuart met Nat Tate in that year and saw him from time to time thereafter. Although he could not be described as a close friend, Mountstuart was also a patron – he owned several Tate drawings, three from the Bridge sequence, and at least two of the larger, later paintings – and was a regular visitor to Tate’s studio on 22nd Street and Lexington Avenue, a rare honour. Tate, by nature a diffident and awkward personality, seemed curiously at ease with Mountstuart (at least by Mountstuart’s account). Mountstuart himself thought this was because he was British – and therefore ‘foreign’ – and also because he knew Europe and European artists. Nat Tate visited Europe only once in his short life, a trip he had both dreaded and longed for.

  Nathwell – ‘Nat’ – Tate was born on the 7th March 1928, probably in Union Beach, New Jersey. His mother, Mary (née Tager), told him his father had been a fisherman from Nantucket who had drowned at sea before Nat had been born. The regular contradictions and elaborations of Mary Tate’s story (Nathwell senior was variously a submariner, a naval architect, a merchant seaman killed ‘in a war’, a deep sea diver) later convinced his son that he was in fact illegitimate. However, there was in all the versions a link with the sea and, with ominous symbolism, the death was always the same – drowning. The only relative Mary Tate appeared to have was an aunt in Union Beach, whom Nat recalled visiting a few times. In his darker moments he fantasised that his mother had been a dockside whore and that he was the product of a swift and carnal midnight coupling with a sailor. Hence, he argued, the consistency of the identities she bestowed on his father. Whether this man was still alive, or who he actually was, Nat would clearly never know. He decided that his mother had had, in her imagination, his father ‘drowned’ as a punishment and as a mark of her own shame. It is plausible, though perhaps a little fanciful, to find some psychological sources here for the Bridge drawings: to see the bridges – simple, clear, strong – as a way of traversing safely the dark and turbulent water below, to walk, unsmirched and untouched, over the rebarbative flotsam and jetsam on the river bed beneath.

  Nat Tate, aged nine, in the gardens of Windrose, 1937

  Whatever the identity of the mysterious Nathwell Tate senior, Mary Tager took his name, referred to herself as Mrs Nathwell Tate, and pointedly described herself to anyone who asked as a widow. She remains a shadowy figure: ‘I remember my mother was a great polisher of glasses,’ Tate once recalled to Mountstuart, ‘perhaps she once worked in a bar . . .’. In any event she was a good housekeeper and she moved with her little boy to Peconic, Long Island, where she found work with Peter and Irina Barkasian as a kitchen maid, later being promoted to cook. Nat Tate was three years old, it was 1931, Peconic was his first real home; he had no memories of any life before Peconic and he had no idea where Mary Tate had moved from.

  Peter Barkasian was a wealthy man: his father Dusan Barkasian had built up a logging and timber business into the conglomerate known as Albany Paper Mills. On his father’s death in 1927, Peter immediately, and presciently, sold Albany Paper to Du Pont Chemicals and retired (aged 36) to live comfortably on the proceeds. The 1929 crash left him unscathed and his finances intact.

  He bought a small but elegant summer house, Windrose, on the north fork of Long Island, where he and Irina lived in some style. Windrose was a curiosity: built in the 1890s, it was loosely modelled on the Petit Trianon and was designed by an architect called Fairfield Douglas who had worked for a while in the firm of Richard Morris Hunt. Barkasian had two long wings added in the same white stucco, neo-classical manner, had the garden re-landscaped and a small hill bull-dozed flat to afford a better southern view of Peconic Bay.

  Windrose, Fairfield Douglas

  More than two thousand trees and ornamental shrubs were planted. His ‘retirement’ was to be in the grandest style. The couple were childless: Irina concerned herself with local charities; Peter, cash rich in the Depression, travelled to New York once a week, where he diligently managed his portfolio of stocks and shares and established a small reputation as a connoisseur and collector – Tiffany lamps were his particular passion, but he also bought and sold pictures in a modest way and he had a fine collection of John Marin watercolours.

  The eastern reaches of Long Island in the 1930s presented a picture of bleakness and deprivation: flat potato fields and isolated village communities of clam and scallop fishers, many of which still did not have electricity. Here and there were pockets of more cosmopolitan activity. East Hampton and Amagansett, on the south shore, had been attracting artists for decades, but Peconic, on the north of the bay, was on the wrong side of the tracks, artistically speaking, or ‘below the bridge’, as the local expression ran. Windrose seemed to be a rich man’s folly, but Peter Barkasian did not care: it was his own world, bought and paid for.

  Nat T
ate, aged sixteen, at Briarcliff, middle row, fourth from the right

  Mary Tate was killed by a speeding delivery van as she stepped out of a drugstore in Riverhead, Long Island, one February morning in 1936. Nat was eight years old. He recalled to Mountstuart that he learnt of his mother’s death when a boy leaned out of a window overlooking the schoolyard where he was playing and bawled, ‘Hey, Tate, your mom’s been run over by a truck.’ He thought it was a cruel joke, shrugged and carried on with his softball game. It was only when he saw the headmaster grimly crossing the playground towards him that he realised he was an orphan.

  It was natural – inevitable? – that the Barkasians should adopt Mary Tate’s orphan boy; it was also Nat Tate’s first substantial stroke of good fortune, if the enormous personal tragedy of the loss of one’s mother can be looked at in such a way. Little is known of the next few years, unfamiliarly cossetted and privileged as they must have been. ‘I hated my adolescence,’ he once cryptically told Mountstuart, ‘all spunk and shame’, and he never talked much about his teenage years or about the boarding school he was sent to – Briarcliff in Connecticut, now defunct. There is a poignant and touching photograph of him at home in Peconic on a holiday (it can’t have been long after his mother’s death). The boy, standing on a lawn, awkward, arms akimbo, looking away from the camera, the new soccer ball on the grass between his feet, perhaps kicked over towards him by a genial Peter Barkasian, learning to be a ‘Dad’. A few years later (in 1944) a more formal pose reveals the sixteen-year-old standing behind the left shoulder of the Dean of Briarcliff (Reverend Davis Trigg). Nat’s unsmiling face, plump with puppy fat, this time seems to stare out at the camera resentfully, his thick butter-blond hair scraped back from his forehead in a damp, disciplined lick.

  Academically, Nat did not excel. The only subject that engaged him was art, or ‘Paint and Drawing’ as it was known at Briarcliff. Nat did graduate but his grades were disappointing – only in ‘Paint and Drawing’ was he an ‘A’ student. And at this stage of his life his second stroke of luck occurred. Keen to capitalise on any vestige of a gift that his son might display, Peter Barkasian managed to have Nat enrolled in an art school, the celebrated Hofmann Summer School – which moved from its downtown Manhattan base each summer to Provincetown, Massachusetts. Nat never attended classes at West 9th Street in Manhattan, but for the four summers of 1947–51 he studied under the eccentric but vigorously modern tutelage of Hans Hofmann in the small fishing village on Cape Cod Bay.

  Hans Hofmann’s Summer School in Provincetown, 1956. Photograph by Arnold Newman

  Hans Hofmann was a German émigré who had come to America in 1930. A big, blustering man with an adamantine ego and sense of mission, he was steeped in European Modernism and armed with redoubtable and abstruse theories about the integrity of the two-dimensional plane of the canvas. Its ‘flatness’ was its defining feature, and the artist’s sole task was to respect this as he arranged his coloured pigments upon it. Paint was ‘inert’, representation was wrongheaded, abstraction was God. In the ’40s and the ’50s, Hofmann’s dogmatic asseverations, delivered at his art school in downtown Manhattan and in the summer in Provincetown, profoundly influenced a whole generation of American artists.

  At Provincetown, Nat Tate was still socially ill-at-ease during those Cape Cod summers, shy and unsure of himself. He did not mix much with the other students, guilty, so he told Mountstuart, about being so well off, and he is barely remembered by any of the school’s more celebrated alumni. He dressed soberly, almost old-fashionedly, in jackets and ties (a habit he was never fully to abandon), worked hard and, out of classroom hours, kept himself largely to himself.

  Hans Hofmann

  For the rest of the year he lived with the Barkasians. Peter was excited by the genuine talent that Nat was showing, and for the first time, one senses, he truly began to take an interest in his adopted son, renovating and transforming a small summer-house in the garden at Windrose, which Nat used as a studio and den. Logan Mountstuart observed that ‘although Nat has two parents he only ever talks about Peter – Peter this, Peter that – Irina was there, somewhere, but always in the distant background; it was as if, now Nat had left school, her role was over and Peter stepped in.’ Janet Felzer, in a letter to Mountstuart in 1961, put it more bluntly: ‘the fact was that during the Provincetown years Peter B. slowly but surely fell in love with his son.’

  Nat Tate’s studio at Windrose

  Whether Felzer’s assessment is true or false, the relationship between the two grew closer. Peter Barkasian paid Nat a generous monthly allowance in return for which he was given all the art that Nat wished to see preserved. In 1950 Barkasian began to catalogue every sketch and painting he received. Each work was labelled, dated and, if not hung, was stored carefully away in a strong room in the main house. Felzer again: ‘Peter thought he had a genius working at the bottom of the garden – so he started to log and collect his output for posterity.’

  No one knows when Nat Tate began his Bridge sequence of drawings, or why he was so taken with the Hart Crane poem3. The best guess puts it some time in 1950. Certainly by the time Janet Felzer first saw some of the drawings in 1952 their numberings were already up in the eighties and nineties.

  Felzer was driving back from Long Island to New York – she had been weekending in Southampton – with the poet and critic Frank O’Hara. They stopped for a drink in Islip and, killing some time, wandered into a local gallery there, which happened to be run by a friend of Peter Barkasian (from whom Barkasian had bought two Winslow Homer watercolours, it seemed). Half a dozen of Nat Tate’s Bridge drawings were hung in a back room.

  Cambridge, Mass., 1947. Left to right; Janet Felzer, Logan Mountstuart, Unknown, Franz Kline, and ‘Pablo’ the Norwich terrier.

  Frank O’Hara, c. 1955

  Hart Crane

  Janet Felzer (1922–1977) was an energetic and influential figure in the New York gallery world of the 1950s. A moderately talented painter herself (she had studied in Rome), she founded one of the early co-op galleries in the late ’40s called Aperto. The co-op galleries were a short-lived phenomenon, vaguely inspired, as the name indicates, by the concept of a guild or brotherhood, established by groups of young and little known artists who wanted a space to show their work. They each made a contribution to the running costs and were thereby entitled to hang their paintings on the gallery’s walls – usually a downtown loft or warehouse space. The most famous of the co-op galleries was in Jane Street in Greenwich Village where Larry Rivers first showed.

  Aperto moved two or three times in its short life before it settled in an old peanut factory in Hudson Street. Its co-operative status soon became purely nominal as Janet Felzer herself took over the running costs, and although certain artists could claim to belong to the Aperto group (and made erratic financial contributions) it was essentially run and owned by Felzer herself. Janet Felzer possessed an eclectic and modern taste which governed her choice of artists, but she most favoured those with some overt intellectual heft (Jackson Pollock left her ‘cold as a glacier’, she said). She recognised the Hart Crane debt in Tate’s powerful, intense drawings and was immediately captivated. ‘That Crane fellow should charge you a commission,’ Franz Kline once jokingly observed to Nat when he later became a succès fou. ‘Hart is dead,’ Nat replied, flatly, ‘so it doesn’t matter.’ Kline denied this heatedly and fiercely until he was advised they were talking about Hart – not Art. (Mountstuart witnessed this droll exchange in, appropriately, the Cedar Tavern.)

  The fact that Felzer was with Frank O’Hara, himself a poet (and an admirer of Crane’s work), seems to have consolidated her instinctive enthusiasm for the drawings. O’Hara was a fascinating and central figure of the New York art scene of the 1950s and ’60s. A homosexual with a slight, elfin figure and a conspicuous hooked nose, he – like the poet John Ashbery – was a key link in the chain that bound the world of literature to that of contemporary painting. O’Hara was a published poet a
nd also worked at the Museum of Modern Art as a curator. A garrulous but beguiling nature made him a popular figure – his premature death in an auto accident in 1966 robbed the art world of one of its most singular presences.

  Encouraged by O’Hara’s enthusiasm, Felzer retrieved Nat Tate’s address and phone number from the gallery owner and the two returned to New York brimful with excitement and gleeful self-satisfaction at their discovery.

  Janet Felzer, 1954

  Logan Mountstuart’s journal:

  July 10 [1952] . . . Frank was there, impish and irritating, drunk as a skunk and deeply tanned. For half an hour he had me pinned in a corner yodelling on about some barbarian genius called Pate [sic] he had unearthed in Long Island. ‘At last an artist with a brain, thank gaaaahhhhd.’ Back to Janet’s place . . .

  Mountstuart was having an affair with Janet Felzer at the time, a lengthy and tormented relationship that over the years knew many periods of chill and hostility before somehow reviving fervidly. In his journals Mountstuart is convinced that Nat Tate and Janet slept together in 1952 ‘on at least three separate’ occasions, though no one else can confirm that this ever took place. Felzer was a dark vivacious woman, always fashionably dressed, and with pronounced cheekbones that gave her an exotic, Slavonic look. She went everywhere with an ill-disciplined, yapping Norwich terrier she called Pablo (‘Pablo drove us apart again and again,’ Mountstuart confessed, ‘he was, finally, the victor.’)