Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928-1960 (5 page)

BOOK: Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928-1960
5.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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.

 

 

 

BOOK: Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928-1960
5.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Caught on Camera by Meg Maguire
The White Vixen by David Tindell
The Lantern Bearers (book III) by Rosemary Sutcliff, Charles Keeping
Sanctuary by Gary D. Svee
Once Bitten by Olivia Hutchinson
Category Five by Philip Donlay