Nat Tate

Gifted by the Artist to the present owner

“Nat Tate's series of 'Bridge' drawings reputedly ran to two hundred or more and he produced them periodically throughout his short working life. They were inspired by Hart Crane's famous poem The Bridge (1930) and almost all the drawings take a similar format. At the top is a stylized representation of a bridge – sometimes very simple, sometimes more complex (as in the present work). Below the bridge is a representation of water, or of flotsam and jetsam, that takes up the larger portion of the page. Tate was once quoted as saying: 'I like bridges, so strong, so simple – but imagine what flows in the river beneath' (Tate quoted in W. Boyd, Nat Tate: an American Artist 1928 - 1960, Bloomsbury London 2011, p.11).” (William Boyd, 2011). 

In 1998, as a newly appointed member to the editorial board of ‘Modern Painters’ magazine, Boyd came up with the idea of creating a fictional artist, and thus Nat Tate was born (his name a combination of National Gallery and Tate Gallery). Boyd created a pseudo-biography of the artist – an American painter who committed suicide in 1960 having destroyed 99% of his work. David Bowie, also an editor of ‘Modern Painters’, wrote the blurb of the book and claimed to own a Nat Tate. This culminated with Bowie hosting a launch party in Jeff Koon’s Manhattan studio, 1 April 1998, attended by New York’s glitterati, which became a notorious event after the hoax was exposed a few days later.