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

  Logan Mountstuart’s journal:

  December 4th. Nat Tate came round, unannounced, last night – not drunk, indeed quite calm and composed. He offered me $6000 for my two paintings which I declined. He said he wanted to rework them (inspired, apparently, by a visit to Braque’s studio) and so I let him take them away, with some reluctance. He offered me $1500 for my three Bridge drawings – I said I would swop them for another painting. He became rather tetchy at this point – banging on about true artistic integrity and its conspicuous absence in NY etc etc – so I gave him a stiff drink and unhooked my two canvases from the wall, keen to see the back of him. Janet called later with a report of the same ‘reworking’ notion. She had given him back whatever work she had at the gallery. She thought it sounded a ‘neat’ idea.

  Neither Mountstuart nor Felzer was ever to see Nat Tate, nor their paintings, again.

  Janet Felzer, 1975

  Reconstructing the last days of Nat Tate’s life is problematic, but Janet Felzer made real efforts, seeking some explanation for the events that followed6, which she communicated to Mountstuart, who duly noted the details in his journal.

  Throughout December 1959 it is clear that Nat Tate tried either to buy back or asked to be allowed to ‘rework’ as many as possible of his paintings as were in public hands. There is no reason to doubt that he was sincere in this regard, that it was not, in Mountstuart’s uncharitable words, ‘little short of theft’. Nat Tate had seen Braque at work, had witnessed his tireless and dogged perfectionism at first hand, and it is entirely conceivable he was inspired by Braque’s example. In any event, he locked himself away in his Windrose studio and worked uninterrupted through the holiday season and into the early days of 1960. The only people to see him at this stage were Peter and Irina Barkasian and the Windrose staff.

  Something, though, went seriously wrong, either with the work, or else the heavy drinking took its toll (Tate was never a serious drug user), or else the long anticipated nervous breakdown arrived. In early January, while Peter Barkasian and Irina were away in Florida, he removed all his work from the studio, the house and the strongroom and, with the enthusiastic help of the janitor and his twelve-year-old son, burnt everything during the freezing afternoon of January 8th.

  Todd Heuber, 1957

  On January 10th he came to Manhattan and undertook a similar purge on the canvases in the 22nd Street studio, including, it is assumed, those he had taken from the Felzer Gallery, and Mountstuart’s two. With the slate wiped clean Nat embarked afresh, it is thought, beginning work on a new painting he entitled Orizaba/Return to Union Beach.

  On January 12th he called on Janet Felzer at the gallery but (to her eternal regret) she was out to lunch. He went downtown to the Museum of Modern Art and had coffee with Frank O’Hara and Todd Heuber who had also, coincidentally, dropped by. Heuber had recently returned from a trip to Scandinavia and he recalled Tate talking vaguely about going back to France and visiting Braque again. Tate only stayed about twenty minutes, O’Hara remembered, and he seemed in a composed though somewhat thoughtful mood – certainly there was nothing in his demeanour to cause alarm.

  Frank O’Hara leaving the Museum of Modern Art, January 1960

  However, sometime after lunch Nat Tate bought a ticket on the Staten Island ferry. On board the ferry, a few moments before five o’clock that afternoon, a young man was observed to remove his tweed coat, hat and scarf, and walk to the stern. The ship was midway between the Statue of Liberty and the Military Ocean Terminal at Bayonne, heading for the New Jersey shore and roughly in the direction of Union Beach, where, theoretically, it had all begun. The young man climbed the guard rail, heedless of the other passengers’ cries, spread his arms and leaped.

  Nat Tate’s body was never found. When news of the suicide and the circumstantial evidence – descriptions tallying, a taxi driver recalling a fare from MoMA to the ferry terminal, etc. – were collated the awful and depressing conclusions were reluctantly drawn. On the 15th January Logan Mountstuart and Jane Felzer went to Tate’s 22nd Street studio only to find Peter Barkasian already there supervising the packing up of Nat’s possessions.

  Hart Crane, portrait by David Alfaro Siqueiros, from The Hart Crane Collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York

  Logan Mountstuart’s journal:

  . . . the place was immaculate, tidy and ordered. In the kitchen glasses were clean and stacked, wastepaper baskets had been emptied. In the studio we saw one large canvas placed against the wall, obviously recently started, a crosshatched mass of bruised blues, purples and blacks. Its title Orizaba/Return to Union Beach was scrawled on the back and neither Janet or Barkasian picked up the reference. I told them that ‘Orizaba’ was the name of the ship that was carrying Hart Crane home from Havana on his last fatal journey in 1932. ‘Fatal?’ Barkasian said. ‘How did he die?’ Janet shrugged. I felt I had to tell him: ‘He drowned,’ I said, ‘he jumped overboard.’ Barkasian was shocked, driven to tears: the painting, inchoate and mystifying, was suddenly the only suicide note available. If poor Nat could not have contrived to live his life as an artist he at least ensured that the symbolic weight of its end was apt and to be duly noted.

  Why did Nat Tate kill himself? What made him throw himself into the icy confluence of the Hudson and the East River that January day in 1960? There are many theories, some glib, some complex. Mountstuart decided initially that he had fallen into a depression, drink-fuelled perhaps – ‘simply gone barking mad’ – and decided to kill himself. Janet Felzer considered that there was a deeper insecurity: she always suspected something had in fact occurred between Barkasian and van Taller, some deal had been struck – which Barkasian had denied but which, perhaps, Nat had unwittingly unearthed. This was the only way she could account for the almost wholesale destruction of his work. There was a desire there to frustrate Barkasian from beyond the grave, to punish him for an unforgivable betrayal.

  Standing there in Alice Singer’s gallery, thirty-seven years later, looking at Bridge no. 122, one of perhaps a dozen works by Nat Tate that survive (and wondering if it had once been one of Logan Mountstuart’s), I thought that the mystery of Nat Tate’s untimely death was explained perhaps by all of these answers, and more. Nat Tate had a talent, for sure, an uncertain gift, but perhaps he knew in the core of his being that it did not amount to much. Van Taller’s arrival was the presaging of a future he did not welcome. 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.

  Un-numbered Bridge drawing, 1959. Private Collection

  Larry Rivers giving the oration at Frank O’Hara’s funeral, July 28, 1966. Logan Mountstuart, present amongst the two hundred mourners, wrote: ‘a blazing, stifling hot day. Bizarre sight of hundreds of people in sunglasses. Larry’s speech surprisingly affecting. It was as if we all felt some kind of full stop had been made to our era. Nat Tate dead at 32. O’Hara at 40. I suppose they will become our plaster saints – something to be said for dying young.’

  My own feeling is that the meeting with Braque and the opportunity to see some of Braque’s great final paintings removed the last supports from a person and a personality that was, by all accounts, a fragile one, however charming and easy on the eye. The example of a truly great artist at the summit of his powers will – and perhaps should – have a daunting effect on a lesser talent, particularly one still finding its way. The difference in the case of Nat Tate was that it was not so much awe or reverence or a natural sense of inadequacy that he felt – as shame. And shame was an emotion he found impossible to live with.

  Logan Mountstuart later softened his brutal diagnosis, realising there were too many signs and signals about Nat’s final acts for them to be incoherent and deranged. He cited the quiet guile employed in reclaiming the work, the thoroughgoing and systematic destruction of everything
he could lay his hands on (99 per cent, Felzer ruefully calculated), the careful positioning of the incomplete Orizaba canvas with its encoded Hart Crane message, even the choice of death and its location. ‘He is one whose name is writ on water,’ Mountstuart commented a year or so after Nat Tate’s death – very wisely, I think. ‘It was all about drowning, in the end, I’m sure. Nat was drowning – literally and figuratively – and so he headed out to sea making for the Jersey shore where it all began, where he had been conceived, perhaps. There was in his suicide a great unhappy massing of symbols – of art, of blissful escape, of despair – and in his own desperate willed death by water lay a final bitter gesture towards the drowned father that he never knew.’

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank Sally Felzer for making available notes, photographs and documentation that her late sister had compiled about Nat Tate. I am grateful to the Alice Singer Gallery in New York, and Sander-Lynde Institute, Philadelphia, for permission to reproduce, respectively, Bridge no. 122 and Portrait of K. The help and encouragement provided by Gudrun Ingridsdottir (administrator of the Estate of Logan Mountstuart) has been invaluable.

  Notes

  1

  Logan Mountstuart: The Intimate Journals, edited by William Boyd, was published in September 1999.

  2

  Janet Felzer’s letters to Logan Mountstuart © the Estate of Logan Mountstuart 1997.

  3

  Hart Crane (1899–1932), American poet. Crane published only two collections of poetry in his lifetime, White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930), but is still recognised as the outstanding poet of his generation. A neurotic, unstable personality, he became convinced that his creative talent had become dissipated, and he committed suicide by jumping from a ship that was bringing him home from a year’s residence in Mexico.

  4

  Letter to the author, 1997.

  5

  Letter to the author, 1997.

  6

  This account of Nat Tate’s last days was compiled by Janet Felzer in the year after his death.

  Copyright © William Boyd 1998

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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  Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data has been applied for.

  ISBN: 978-1-60819-580-0 (hardcover)

  This edition published by Bloomsbury USA in 2011

  This e-book edition published in 2011

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-726-2

  www.bloomsburyusa.com

  Table of Contents

  Nat Tate

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Copyright Page

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