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

time; unlike most of his contemporaries he had no economic incentive: Barkasian’s generous allowance was maintained and he paid Janet Felzer the market rates for Nat’s work and, as Felzer explained to Mountstuart, she could hardly complain. In terms of the commission she made, Nat Tate was virtually her most successful artist. Even so, she continued to encourage and push him, persisting with the idea of a solo show, but Nat was reluctant, happy merely to hang with other artists in her gallery.
    This was, perhaps, the period of his life when he was at his most content, accepted and admired by his peers, finally free of Windrose, living on his own in Manhattan, with a lively group of artists and friends, most of whom were savouring the fruits of their success and international acclaim. Nat Tate cut a slightly different figure from his peers – a tall, fit-looking young man, he was well groomed, disdaining the jeans and dungarees favoured by other artists of the New York School. In the summer he was always deeply tanned, Mountstuart remembered, also commenting that he seemed to choose his clothes with care – such as midnight-blue suits with cream linen shirts – and that he had a predilection for light, self-coloured ties, ivory, silver-grey, pale banana yellow. He was handsome – and he knew it – but there was nothing predatory or narcissistic about him. ‘Sometimes he seemed almost embarrassed by the stares he attracted from both males and females,’ Janet Felzer noted, ‘as if to say “Why are they looking at me? What have I done now?” ’
     

     
    Peter Barkasian on the beach at Fire Island, 1957. © The Estate of Logan Mountstuart, 1958
    By the mid-1950s, the era of Abstract Expressionism and Action Painting was well under way. Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning led the pack, closely followed by other artists such as David Smith, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. The New York School was into its well-heeled, drink-fuelled, fame-driven stride. Like many artistic move ments that claim the attention of the media, a deal of self- conscious myth-making occurred and stereotypes duly emerged (the artist as visionary drunk, the artist as surly macho brute, the artist as brawling suffering genius), as well as many a brief minor talent, seeking their moment of glory. Much of the initial socialising – the drinking, the talking, the sex – centred around the Cedar Tavern on University Place and 8th Street in Greenwich Village.
     

     
    Regulars at the Cedar Tavern, 24 University Place, October 1959
     

     
    Frank O’Hara at the Museum of Modern Art with (left) Roy Lichtenstein and (right) Henry Geldzahler
    As Elaine de Kooning said, ‘around 1950 everyone just got drunk and the whole art world went on a long, long bender.’ The Cedar Tavern, a drab, shabby place (which is still there, still remarkably authentic), is in a way the symbolic artefact of the period – playing the kind of role the Café Flore does in the annals of left-bank Parisian Existentialism – eternally conjuring up an image of famous artists drinking at the bar, talking and quarrelling about art, turkeycocking, eyeing up the art groupies that were drawn to the place, curiously circling them. It was a charged, exciting time, and for Nat Tate a first real taste of escape, of true independence. Like everybody else, like every other artist he met, Nat began drinking heavily, joining the long, long bender that was going on around him. Gore Vidal met him at this time and remembered him as an ‘essentially dignified drunk with nothing to say. Unlike most American painters, he was unverbal. “He was a great lover,” Peggy Guggenheim told me years later. “Almost in a class with Sam Beckett who had bad skin. I loved Sam for six months. A record for me. Nat for – oh, six weeks at the outside.” ’ 4
    For Nat Tate, Frank O’Hara remained a mentor-figure and friend. It is not clear if they were ever lovers (O’Hara was living with Joe