How I uncovered one of the biggest art hoaxes of the nineties

A work of art, Study for Bridge Drawing, was recently sold for £4,000, after being valued by Sotheby’s at £2000-£3000. The artwork was by an artist called Nat Tate. So far, so unremarkable. But it gets better.

A previous work by Tate was sold for £7,250 in 2011 to the TV presenter Ant McPartlin. The late Nat Tate seems to attract celebrities. The launch of a book about him in 1998 – which I attended – was presided over by David Bowie. It took place at the New York studio of the then-fashionable American artist Jeff Koons on the corner of Broadway and East Houston Street.

Bowie, with his wife the former model Iman at his side, paid personal tribute to Tate and his tormented life as the New York art world listened with rapt attention. It was a shockingly sad story. The early 20th-century abstract expressionist suffered extreme depression, destroyed 99 per cent of his work, and eventually took his own life at the age of 31, jumping off the Staten Island ferry. His body was never found.

But, whatever the sad facts about Tate’s life and death, the party in 1998 was a glamorous one. Among Koons’s kitsch sculptures, the champagne and whisky flowed and the beaming Bowie was in fine form, and read an extract from the new biography of Nat Tate by the acclaimed British author William Boyd.

Among guests at the launch were artists Frank Stella and Julian Schnabel, the hip New York novelist Jay McInerney, fellow writers Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt, dealers, collectors, press and TV.

The gathering stopped sipping the whisky provided by the event’s sponsors while David Bowie spoke. The crowd took their eyes off Koons’s colourful sculptures of kittens, listened attentively, then resumed drinking, networking and seeing who could impress most with opinions about Tate’s life and work.

It was one hell of a night. A long overdue celebration of the work and life of Tate, the apparent lover of Peggy Guggenheim and friend of Braque and Picasso. Unfortunately, a couple of days later, I became the party pooper because I had discovered one incontrovertible fact about Nat Tate. He never existed.

The story of his remarkable rise and fall was a masterly and elaborate work of fiction by Boyd. His book Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960 was a moving and insightful chronicle of a great, forgotten artist. It was the first book to be released under the imprint of Bowie’s new venture, 21 Publishing and the book itself contained tributes from celebrities such as Bowie and Gore Vidal, who described the book on its cover as “a moving account of an artist too well understood by his time.”

Bowie himself very nearly went too far in writing on the jacket that “William Boyd’s description of Tate’s working procedure is so vivid that it convinces me that the small oil I picked up on Prince Street, New York, in the late sixties must indeed be one of the lost Third Panel Triptychs. The great sadness of this quiet and moving monograph is that the artist’s most profound dread – that God will make you an artist but only a mediocre artist – did not in retrospect apply to Nat Tate.”

Neither Jeff Koons – the host of the New York party – nor his fellow New York artists present were aware of the truth, or of the fact that at least one of the paintings in the book ascribed to Tate was by William Boyd himself. Photographs ostensibly of Tate were pictures taken by Boyd in various locations in the city.

The book also contained an exhaustive list of galleries where Tate had exhibited. And the conversations I overheard in Koons’ studio that evening by artworld aficionados claiming to remember seeing works by Tate and being a fan, were to come back to haunt and embarrass them. As Karen Wright, the then-editor of Modern Painters magazine and a director of Bowie’s publishing company, who was in on the hoax, later said: “Part of it was, we were very amused that people kept saying ‘yes, I’ve heard of him.’ There is a willingness not to appear foolish. Critics are too proud for that.”

The work, Study for Bridge Drawing, just like the work owned by Ant McPartlin, and the other 16 or so works from the Nat Tate oeuvre are all by the multi-talented William Boyd.

It is particularly interesting for me that Nat Tate and his reputation continue to have a place in the art world nearly three decades after Bowie’s party in his honour. My exposing of the fiction on the front page of The Independent a few days after Bowie’s party was the biggest scoop of my journalistic career and one that literally went around the world.

I had travelled to New York to attend the book launch as innocent of the truth as any of those swanky artworld characters who were to show up. It had dimly occurred to me that it was a bit of a coincidence that Nat Tate’s name was an amalgamation of London’s two most famous art galleries. But coincidences happen, and Boyd’s fascinating book was precise in its wealth of detail including the Broadway address of Tate’s former studio, the names and descriptions of his most celebrated works, galleries where they were displayed, and the exact day of that fateful journey on the Staten Island ferry.

And, if I had never personally seen any of Nat Tate’s haunting abstract expressionist works, and couldn’t quite recall hearing of him before, well, there are an awful lot of artists living and dead, and one can’t be abreast of all of them. Besides, like the attendees at that Bowie party, I now almost began to believe that somewhere in the recesses of my memory, I had come across the remarkable and tormented Mr Tate at some stage.

But when I got to New York I chatted about Tate with some key individuals involved in the launch and some of the enigmatic conversations left me a little suspicious. I had time on my hands with a day or two to go before the party, so I set off on my own personal Tate expedition to check out some of the detail in the book.

I went to inquire about Tate’s life, work and reputation at Alice Singer’s 57th Street gallery, where Boyd wrote he had first seen one of Tate’s drawings. The address did indeed exist. The Alice Singer gallery did not. Nor, I discovered, did any of the other galleries referred to in the book.

I began to consult distinguished dictionaries of art, yet there was no mention of Tate. I knew I had a big story on my hands.

William Boyd was not thrilled that the hoax was revealed so early and in advance of the London launch of the book, which, following The Independent front page story, was somewhat less glitzy and enthused than the New York event. I attended the London bash too but kept my head down. I had to see it out. Anyway, I received a hug and some over-generous words of praise in full view of the newsroom from my then-editor, Rosie Boycott, as she put the original story on the front page. So, there was no ducking out of the awkwardness of turning up at a London launch, whose guests now knew rather more than the organisers would have wanted.

It certainly did not bear comparison to the New York event presided over by David Bowie. Bowie, I should add, was in on the original hoax. It must have appealed to his impish sense of humour, not to mention his sense of mischief, love of fantasy and creating a persona.

Boyd’s objective in writing the book was an intriguing and sophisticated one. He has since said that he wrote his book, and created Tate and his collection of artworks as a counter to the “delirium” of Britain in the 1990s over the Young British Artists, the movement led by Damien Hirst. He said: “My aim was, first of all, to prove how powerful and credible a pure fiction could be and, at the same time, to try to create a kind of modern fable about the art world. In 1998 we were at the height of the Young British Artists’ delirium. The air was full of Hirst and Emin, Lucas, Hume, Chapman, Harvey, Ofili, Quinn and Turk. My own feeling was that some of these artists – who were never out of the media and who were achieving record prices for their artworks – were, to put it bluntly, not very good.

“However, there was a kind of feeding frenzy going on, an art-driven south sea bubble or tulip fever, and the story of Nat Tate in this context was meant to be exemplary. What is it like to be a very average artist who achieves great fame and wealth? What is it like when, as David Bowie stated in his blurb to the biography, God has chosen to make you an artist but only a mediocre one? This is Nat’s unhappy fate and it’s only when he is confronted with true artistic genius (in the shape of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque) that he finds the knowledge of his own single inadequacy too much to bear. He collects as much of his work as he can find and burns it. A few days later, in a fit of despair, he jumps off the Staten Island ferry as it crosses the Hudson River and drowns.”

Boyd says he is very pleased about the recent sale of a Tate artwork: “I’m delighted the Nat is being auctioned. It keeps the myth alive. It’s 24 years since the hoax, which is amazing.”

He actually created Study for Bridge Drawing, in pencil and ink, for a 2005 television show by the comedian Danny Wallace about the world’s greatest hoaxes. He gave the drawing to the show’s producer, Paul Crompton.

Crompton told The Times he recalled Boyd being filmed doing the drawing as though he was the original Nat Tate. “It was in black and white from some footage we’d ‘found’. Obviously, Tate didn’t exist, so the film goes from black and white to colour to reveal the hoax.”

He says he decided to sell the work, because “with my children in their teens and demanding university education, I thought I might say goodbye to it, so I can help to fund their rent and maintenance.”

I have to admit I didn’t think that most audacious of hoaxes would still have a life this distance from that memorable party, and my subsequent story. But Tate’s paintings still sell, and Boyd’s 1998 novel had a new edition as recently as 2020. In the afterword to that new edition, the author writes: “Much play has been made over the years that I deliberately appropriated the names of the two pre-eminent London public galleries – the National and the Tate –for this artist’s name. But, if I did so – and perhaps I did – it was done completely unconsciously.”

It remains one of history’s great hoaxes. And if this journalist’s work meant it was unmasked rather sooner than was intended, at least I and all the others at that New York party have indelibly in our memories the sight of Bowie reading from the story of the tragic life of Tate, and, most curiously, trying to suppress laughter as he did so.

A bizarre epilogue to the whole sage came when I discovered an early Wikipedia entry for Nat Tate and found that my part in it was duly recorded, but so was the conclusion that I too never existed.

Read David Lister’s original 1998 front-page story from The Independent archive here