Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928-1960 (3 page)

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 and 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.’)

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