Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928-1960

by William Boyd

  Willem de Kooning in his studio, by Harry Bowden, 1950, Stanford University of Art. Gift of Lois Bowden and Charles Campbell

  The 1952 Aperto Gallery show marks the start of Nat Tate’s brief encounter with fame. Hanging with him were pictures by Barnett Newman, Lee Krasner, Todd Heuber and Adolf Gottlieb. Clement Greenberg wrote in the short-lived handbill AtR (destined to fail, according to Mountstuart, with such a crass title, as well as being distributed free): ‘. . . and there were some promising, oddly disturbing drawings by Nat Tate, though he would be well advised to pay fewer visits to Mr de Kooning’s studio.’ As Janet Felzer angrily pointed out, Nat Tate had been working in almost complete isolation, apart from his exposure to other painters at the Hofmann Summer School. None of the rampant cross-fertilisation currently taking place in the New York art scene of the early ’50s could be applied to him. Indeed, while Tate was notionally a member of the ‘New York School’ and at the end of his life what might be termed an Abstract Expressionist, his pictures are always sidelined, or differentiated, by their idiosyncracies. He was both like and very unlike his contemporaries. However, what caused most astonishment was that all of Tate’s drawings were sold before the show officially opened. Janet Felzer later told Mountstuart that Peter Barkasian had made it a condition of Nat’s participation that he should have first refusal on all his work – and naturally he bought them entire.

  Peter Barkasian

  Logan Mountstuart’s journal:

  November 5th. Gunpowder Treason and Plot at J’s gallery. Annoyingly, the show seems to be a wild success. Frank raving boringly on about his ‘discovery’ – everything sold in a flash. I met this prodigy later. A quiet tall handsome boy who reminded me of Ulrich [a friend of Mountstuart from the period of his incarceration in Switzerland, 1944–45]. He stood quietly in a corner, drinking Scotch, wearing a grey suit. Heavy dark blond hair. Janet was on fire, said she had been smoking heroin (can one do this?) and offered me some. I said I was too old for those games. Bumped into Tate again as I was leaving and complimented him on his work. I asked if he had anything else for sale and he said – most oddly – that I would have to ask his father. Later Pablo shat copiously in the middle of the room, so Larry Rivers told me.

  Left to right: John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Patsy Southgate, Bill Berkson, Kenneth Koch with lamp sculpture by Larry Rivers, 1964

  Frank O’Hara with Franz Kline at the Cedar Tavern, March 1959

  Janet Felzer abandoned the Aperto Gallery in Hudson Street and moved uptown to Madison Avenue (and 78th Street) where she opened the Janet Felzer Gallery in 1954 with another landmark show including works by Philip Guston, William Baziotes and Martha Heuber (Todd’s sister). Nat Tate moved north with Janet Felzer, and in the 1954 exhibition he had one large solitary canvas called White Building. This announced the start of another sequence, this time in oil, a series of façades of a house with crudely painted doors and windows in black almost invisible under a screen of thinned white oil paint. ‘Like ghost houses,’ Mountstuart remarked. The deliberate monochrome was again individual, owing nothing to Kline, Motherwell or de Kooning – with the first of whom Nat had now become friendly. They were in fact, as Mountstuart recognised, images of Windrose, painted from photographs, of a large size (5´×8´) and, according to Janet Felzer, Nat completed ‘at least eight or ten’ over the next few years. Barkasian bought them all, hanging them in sequence in the capacious entrance hall at the house, where they were, reputedly, most impressive. None has survived.

  Franz Kline, 1956

  Mountstuart was a particular admirer of the White Building sequence, intrigued by the way the much erased and repainted and then overpainted simplifications of window embrasure, arch, column, frieze and portico somehow defied obliteration by the layers of white, turps-thinned oil paint that was repeatedly laid over them. What looked like a scumbled and overworked gesso field with blurry grey/black markings revealed itself, after some moments of staring, ‘to be a real record of a real house in a real place’. Mountstuart thought also that these spectral canvases ‘were a profound statement of time and time passing, of the brave refusal of man’s artefacts to be completely overwhelmed by oblivion’.

  The mid ’50s marks the period of Mountstuart’s closest contacts with Nat Tate. He weekended at Windrose several times and came to know the Barkasians. The photo of an uncomfortable looking Peter Barkasian on the beach at Fire Island was taken by Logan Mountstuart in 1957. A measure of this new relaxation was the sale to Mountstuart of three drawings from the Bridge sequence. Barkasian realised that he could not, with Nat’s mounting renown, maintain a monopoly on the artist’s work. Consequently, Janet Felzer was allowed to sell a few drawings and some gouache studies for the White Building oils. As Nat Tate’s profile was steadily raised there were many more offers made than there were works available. Nat was not a fast or prolific artist, indeed it was sufficient for him merely to show from time to time; unlike most of his contemporaries he had no economic incentive: Barkasian’s generous allowance was maintained and he paid Janet Felzer the market rates for Nat’s work and, as Felzer explained to Mountstuart, she could hardly complain. In terms of the commission she made, Nat Tate was virtually her most successful artist. Even so, she continued to encourage and push him, persisting with the idea of a solo show, but Nat was reluctant, happy merely to hang with other artists in her gallery.

  This was, perhaps, the period of his life when he was at his most content, accepted and admired by his peers, finally free of Windrose, living on his own in Manhattan, with a lively group of artists and friends, most of whom were savouring the fruits of their success and international acclaim. Nat Tate cut a slightly different figure from his peers – a tall, fit-looking young man, he was well groomed, disdaining the jeans and dungarees favoured by other artists of the New York School. In the summer he was always deeply tanned, Mountstuart remembered, also commenting that he seemed to choose his clothes with care – such as midnight-blue suits with cream linen shirts – and that he had a predilection for light, self-coloured ties, ivory, silver-grey, pale banana yellow. He was handsome – and he knew it – but there was nothing predatory or narcissistic about him. ‘Sometimes he seemed almost embarrassed by the stares he attracted from both males and females,’ Janet Felzer noted, ‘as if to say “Why are they looking at me? What have I done now?” ’

  Peter Barkasian on the beach at Fire Island, 1957. © The Estate of Logan Mountstuart, 1958

  By the mid-1950s, the era of Abstract Expressionism and Action Painting was well under way. Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning led the pack, closely followed by other artists such as David Smith, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. The New York School was into its well-heeled, drink-fuelled, fame-driven stride. Like many artistic movements that claim the attention of the media, a deal of self-conscious myth-making occurred and stereotypes duly emerged (the artist as visionary drunk, the artist as surly macho brute, the artist as brawling suffering genius), as well as many a brief minor talent, seeking their moment of glory. Much of the initial socialising – the drinking, the talking, the sex – centred around the Cedar Tavern on University Place and 8th Street in Greenwich Village.

  Regulars at the Cedar Tavern, 24 University Place, October 1959

  Frank O’Hara at the Museum of Modern Art with (left) Roy Lichtenstein and (right) Henry Geldzahler

  As Elaine de Kooning said, ‘around 1950 everyone just got drunk and the whole art world went on a long, long bender.’ The Cedar Tavern, a drab, shabby place (which is still there, still remarkably authentic), is in a way the symbolic artefact of the period – playing the kind of role the Café Flore does in the annals of left-bank Parisian Existentialism – eternally conjuring up an image of famous artists drinking at the bar, talking and quarrelling about art, turkeycocking, eyeing up the art groupies that were drawn to the place, curiously circling them. It was a charged, exciting time, and for Nat Tate a first real taste of escape, of true independence. Like everybody else, lik
e every other artist he met, Nat began drinking heavily, joining the long, long bender that was going on around him. Gore Vidal met him at this time and remembered him as an ‘essentially dignified drunk with nothing to say. Unlike most American painters, he was unverbal. “He was a great lover,” Peggy Guggenheim told me years later. “Almost in a class with Sam Beckett who had bad skin. I loved Sam for six months. A record for me. Nat for – oh, six weeks at the outside.” ’4

  For Nat Tate, Frank O’Hara remained a mentor-figure and friend. It is not clear if they were ever lovers (O’Hara was living with Joe LeSueur from 1955) but the relationship took on more professional dimensions when O’Hara, as curator, selected two of the White Building paintings for the 4th São Paulo Bienal in 1957. There is an uncollected poem O’Hara wrote around that time called What if we hadn’t had such great names? that captures some of the flavour of those heady days in the ’50s, when the art world looked to New York for its inspiration, and the city’s artists, it seemed, could do no wrong.

  What if we hadn’t had such great names?

  What if we had been called

  Gilbert Kline, Jonathan Pollock, Cyril

  O’Hara, Jennifer Krasner, Timothy Rivers,

  Philip Tate?. . .

  We were lucky people, lucky to be living

  then and in NYC. Quelle chance! Lucky

  (watch out posterity, here we come!)

  that we had such great names.

  Mountstuart, however, decided that Nat Tate and O’Hara were in fact lovers – however temporary – and confided as much to his journal on, it has to be said, the slimmest of evidence. In 1958, out of four visits he made to Nat’s 22nd Street studio, O’Hara happened to be there three times. Circumstantial evidence, perhaps, but Mountstuart was always inclined to rush to judgement, and he never really liked O’Hara, distrusting his loquacity and envying his popularity.

  Early in 1959, however, there seems to have been some cooling off between Tate and O’Hara (largely on O’Hara’s side, prompted by Barkasian’s refusal to lend any Tates for O’Hara’s ‘Documenta II’ show in Kassel, West Germany), and Mountstuart began to see more of Nat. The artist was still drinking heavily, Mountstuart recorded (no mean imbiber himself, so it must have been unignorably copious), and there is a possibility that Tate merely saw the British writer as a stalwart and congenial drinking companion. None the less, it was about this time that Mountstuart bought (for $2,000 and $2,750) two canvases from what was dubbed the ‘Third Panel Triptych’ period of Nat Tate’s work.

  Franz Kline with Didier van Taller, 1955

  Logan Mountstuart’s journal:

  April 23. To Nat’s around 6 p.m. to collect Still Life no. 5. He was already quite drunk and kept repeating that Janet was to know nothing about this sale. I reassured him. We went into the studio where I watched him at work for an hour. He was swigging direct from a Jack Daniel’s bottle. He was working on a triptych and the final panel was primed and ready on the big easel. We listened to music (Scriabin, I think) and talked aimlessly about the forthcoming trip to France and Italy – where he should go, who he should see. Nat seemed to be waiting to reach a certain plateau of drunkenness, seemed to be waiting for the booze to trigger the precise moment. Suddenly he threw the dust sheets off the other two completed panels. There was, first, a nude, an orthodox odalisque, more yellow than flesh toned, and then, in the second panel, another version of it, more stylised and crudely flashy – very sub-de Kooning. Nat stood there staring at the two panels, drinking, and then literally attacked the big canvas with a wide brush and tubes of cadmium yellow, laying on great swathes of colour. He seemed quite deranged to me. I left after an hour with my still life and he was still at it, rubbing off most of what he had done with a rag then going hard at it again, this time with black and green.

  The Third Panel Triptychs appeared wholly abstract, painted in a kind of drunken frenzy, even though they were purported copies of the first two panels which were more orthodoxly representational, and which explains their run-of-the-mill figurative titles – Sag Harbour Sunset, Still life with Baseball Mitt, Yellow Nude, Portrait of K (possibly Kenneth Koch). When the third panel was completed to his satisfaction, Nat destroyed the other two – thus erasing the sources and breaking the causal chain forever. Peter Barkasian did not like this direction his protégé’s painting was taking (perhaps he was aware of the dérèglement de sens which was involved in their composition) and for the first time Janet Felzer was able to sell Nat’s work more widely, five or six of the Third Panel Triptychs going to private clients and at least one to a public gallery of twentieth-century art (the Sander-Lynde Institute, Philadelphia).

  Nat Tate, Portrait of K, 1958, 91.44 × 121.92 cm. The Sander-Lynde Institute, Philadelphia

  A measure of this wider distribution and his growing renown was the irruption into Nat Tate’s life of the notorious dealer Didier van Taller. Van Taller was a predatory and ambiguous figure who – so he claimed – operated from a gallery in Brussels and who haunted and disrupted the New York art world intermittently throughout the late ’50s and early ’60s. He had made a determined effort to woo Franz Kline from his dealer Sidney Janis. Having failed in this, he now turned his attention to other members of the New York School, Nat Tate being a prime target along with Robert Motherwell and the sculptress Louise Nevelson.

  Nat categorically refused to see van Taller (his loyalty to the Felzer Gallery was absolute), but, curiously, Peter Barkasian seemed to like the man and they were often seen together socially. According to Mountstuart, Nat grew very disturbed by this association, convinced that Barkasian was contemplating a large sale of his Tate holdings to van Taller (Mountstuart speculated that Barkasian was in financial difficulties – this seems unlikely, however).

  Left to right: Peter Barkasian, Irina Barkasian, Didier van Taller, Unknown. New York, 1958

  Whether it was Nat Tate’s increasing alcoholic dependency, or signs of some incipient crack-up, the van Taller intrusion deeply – and irrationally – upset him, according to both Felzer and Mountstuart, and seems to have marked the beginning of his decline. In any event, no decision was taken, and no sale was made. Didier van Taller moved out of Nat’s life, and in the Fall of 1959 Peter Barkasian and Nat embarked – in apparent good spirits – on their long projected trip to Europe.

  Logan Mountstuart, 1959

  Janet Felzer says they spent a fortnight in London before going to France as guests of Douglas Cooper (the celebrated collector) at the Château de Castille near Avignon, where, one memorable Sunday, they lunched with Picasso. John Richardson, who met Nat at this time, remembered: ‘It was obvious that Tate had a drink problem, and there seemed to be some tension between him and Barkasian, but I found him charming and unassuming. I don’t think he spoke to Picasso beyond saying “hello” and “goodbye”. Barkasian rather hogged Picasso, as I recall.’5

  Pablo Picasso: ‘You live a poet’s life,’ he told Hélène Parmelin, ‘and I a convict’s.’

  Braque sitting at the table on the terrace of his house at Varengeville

  Cooper, who was travelling to Paris, accompanied Tate and Barkasian north and introduced them to Georges Braque, at Braque’s house in Varengeville, Normandy.

  Georges Braque was seventy-eight years old at the time of Tate’s visit, and, along with Picasso and Matisse, one of the three great pillars of twentieth-century art. Braque, a serene, modest and genial character, was at the height of his mature powers, his great sequence of studio interiors – a chain of masterworks created over two decades and almost unrivalled in modern painting – recently completed.

  Georges Braque, La Terrasse, 1948–61, oil on canvas, 97 × 130. Private Collection

  According to Janet Felzer, Nat felt vastly more at ease with Braque than with Picasso and gladly accepted when Braque offered to show him around his studio. Braque was then reworking his painting La Terrasse, which he had begun some eleven years earlier, a fact that Tate found astonishing, not to say incomprehensibl
e. He was also deeply moved and captivated by some of the smaller elongated landscapes and seascapes in the studio. Apparently Tate ventured the opinion that they reminded him of van Gogh’s late landscapes. After gently correcting Tate’s pronunciation (‘Van Go? Non, mon ami, jamais’), Braque commented that he ‘regarded van Gogh as a great painter of night.’ The observation seemed to trouble Nat unduly, as if it was prophetic or gnomic in some sinister way (he reiterated it to both Felzer and Mountstuart). There is a photograph of the fête champêtre that Nat and Barkasian had with Braque and his family and friends during that visit, taken by Barkasian, one assumes, as he is absent from the picture. Braque himself sits at the centre of the table, dappled with autumn sunshine, while the women of the household fuss over the food and the placement. Nat stands close to the master, on his left, a plate in his hand, almost as if he is about to serve him. But his gaze is unfocused, he looks out of frame, at something in the middle distance, or perhaps just lost in his darkening thoughts. Nothing would ever be the same again.

  The fête champêtre at Varengeville, September 1959. Georges Braque (seated centre), Nat Tate (standing to Braque’s left), Mme. Braque (standing, pointing)

  Indeed, shortly after the visit to Varengeville, the trip to France was abruptly curtailed, the Italian segment was cancelled and Tate and Barkasian returned immediately to New York.