Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928-1960 Read Free Page A

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
     

     
    Frank O’Hara with Franz Kline at the Cedar Tavern, March 1959
    Janet Felzer abandoned the Aperto Gallery in Hudson Street and moved uptown to Madison Avenue (and 78th Street) where she opened the Janet Felzer Gallery in 1954 with another landmark show including works by Philip Guston, William Baziotes and Martha Heuber (Todd’s sister). Nat Tate moved north with Janet Felzer, and in the 1954 exhibition he had one large solitary canvas called White Building . This announced the start of another sequence, this time in oil, a series of façades of a house with crudely painted doors and windows in black almost invisible under a screen of thinned white oil paint. ‘Like ghost houses,’ Mountstuart remarked. The deliberate monochrome was again individual, owing nothing to Kline, Motherwell or de Kooning – with the first of whom Nat had now become friendly. They were in fact, as Mountstuart recognised, images of Windrose, painted from photographs, of a large size (5´×8´) and, according to Janet Felzer, Nat completed ‘at least eight or ten’ over the next few years. Barkasian bought them all, hanging them in sequence in the capacious entrance hall at the house, where they were, reputedly, most impressive. None has survived.
     

     
    Franz Kline, 1956
    Mountstuart was a particular admirer of the White Building sequence, intrigued by the way the much erased and repainted and then overpainted simplifications of window embrasure, arch, column, frieze and portico somehow defied obliteration by the layers of white, turps-thinned oil paint that was repeatedly laid over them. What looked like a scumbled and overworked gesso field with blurry grey/black markings revealed itself, after some moments of staring, ‘to be a real record of a real house in a real place’. Mountstuart thought also that these spectral canvases ‘were a profound statement of time and time passing, of the brave refusal of man’s artefacts to be completely overwhelmed by oblivion’.
     
     
     

     

The mid ’50s marks the period of Mountstuart’s closest contacts with Nat Tate. He weekended at Windrose several times and came to know the Barkasians. The photo of an uncomfortable looking Peter Barkasian on the beach at Fire Island was taken by Logan Mountstuart in 1957. A measure of this new relaxation was the sale to Mountstuart of three drawings from the Bridge sequence. Barkasian realised that he could not, with Nat’s mounting renown, maintain a monopoly on the artist’s work. Consequently, Janet Felzer was allowed to sell a few drawings and some gouache studies for the White Building oils. As Nat Tate’s profile was steadily raised there were many more offers made than there were works available. Nat was not a fast or prolific artist, indeed it was sufficient for him merely to show from time to