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On the evening of April 1, 1998, David Bowie hosted a party at Jeff Koons's Manhattan studio. Many from the New York art world were there because Bowie was launching the first publications of his new art-publishing house, 21.

At one stage in the evening, Bowie read some excerpts from a short biography 21 was publishing. It was called Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928--1960. It was full of photographs and illustrations, and it was written by me. Nat Tate was a short-lived member of the famous New York School, which flourished in the late 1940s and 1950s and included such luminaries as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning. Tate committed suicide in 1960 by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry (his body was never found) after having burned 99 percent of his life's work during the last weekend of his life. Hence the artistic oblivion he found himself in almost 40 years later; only a few works remained to testify to his intriguing talent.

After Bowie gave his reading, an English journalist named David Lister, who worked for the Independent newspaper in London--a national newspaper--wandered through the crowd in Koons's studio, chatting to people about Tate. Some people claimed to have heard of him, a few had seen some of the work, and all agreed that his short, abruptly self-terminated life was very sad.

A week later, 21 Publishing planned a similar launch in London. A new restaurant, Mash, was the venue, and, just as in New York, much of London's art world had been invited. I gave major interviews on BBC Radio and to national newspapers. The eminent journalists who interviewed me were hugely intrigued by this forgotten American artist, highly curious as to how I had found out about this overlooked talent. An excerpt from the book ran in the Sunday Telegraph.

And then it was all exposed as an elaborate hoax. Nat Tate had never existed. Nat Tate was a fiction. He was a figment of William Boyd's imagination.

The hoax was broken by Lister, the English journalist at the Bowie-Koons party. He was one of the very small band of conspirators and felt he couldn't sit on this scoop any longer, and the story duly appeared on the front page of the Independent: HOW A BRITISH NOVELIST FOOLED THE U.S. ART WORLD. It was picked up internationally (it was on the front page of the New York Times Arts section), and for 24 hours it became a global talking point. I was interviewed by radio stations and newspapers around the world. I was on Voice of America. I had a 20-minute interview on the late-night news-magazine program on BBC TV. And so on and so forth. And thus the myth of the great Nat Tate art hoax was born.

It wasn't planned this way. Nat Tate was created out of a desire to experiment--to see if something entirely fictitious could experience a life in the world as something wholly credible, real, and true. I wanted to launch the book out into the public arena and see what would happen, to see who bought the story wholesale and who was suspicious. I wondered how long it would take for us to be rumbled. A month? Six months? A year or so? At the time, I was on the editorial board of an art magazine called Modern Painters, as was David Bowie, which is how we met. With the editor's cooperation, I came up with the idea of creating an imaginary painter. However, his life would be tricked out with absolute authenticity: photographs, reminiscences, examples of surviving artwork. Bowie suggested we publish it as a small, beautifully produced art monograph. Those details were taken care of by 21 Publishing (and the finished book was both beautiful and highly professionally produced), while I concentrated on the complex fabrication of Tate's short and troubled life--born illegitimate in New Jersey, orphaned at eight, adopted by a rich couple from Long Island--and on producing the few drawings that survived his bitter and destructive auto-da-fé.

I had been collecting anonymous photographs--from junk shops and yard sales--for some years for another project and so was easily able to produce images of the people in Tate's life: his adoptive father, his gallerist, and Tate himself. The sole emblematic image we have of Tate as an adult was cropped out of a family snapshot bought from a stall in a French antique fair. Tall, handsome, broad-shouldered--who was the original? I have no idea. We also reproduced real pictures of real people: Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and other contemporary figures. The whole mix was meant to be so plausible that if any doubt intruded, it would be canceled out by something obviously real.

For me, the key ingredient was the testimony of people who could "remember" meeting Tate. I asked two friends--Gore Vidal and Picasso biographer John Richardson--to join the circle of conspirators. Their anecdotal testimony in the book acts with massive veridical force. Here is Gore Vidal on meeting Tate: He was "an essentially dignified drunk with nothing to say. Unlike most American painters, he was unverbal." Then Richardson describes how he introduced Tate to Picasso at a luncheon and then gained him access to Braque in his studio at Varengeville in Normandy: "It was obvious that Tate had a drink problem ... but I found him charming and unassuming." The evidence was overwhelming. It must be true. Nat Tate must have existed.

And here we are, 13 years after the event, and the phenomenon has never stopped. There have been three TV documentaries about Tate. The biography has been translated into French and German and will be republished in the U.K. and the U.S. this month. In the 2010 TV dramatization of my novel Any Human Heart, Tate is played by the actor Theo Cross. And, even more bizarrely, the first authenticated Tate drawing to go on the open market is about to be auctioned in London.

It just goes to show that everybody loves a hoax, even one as relatively short term and confined as the Nat Tate hoax. Something about people being hoodwinked--being tricked and bamboozled--is endlessly alluring, I suppose. Something deep in our nature responds to these kinds of stories. It's the only way I can really explain Tate's extraordinary longevity and renown.

As for myself, I feel a bit like a Dr. Frankenstein confronting his benign monster--not fearful but baffled, amused, and full of affection. Tate seems to have taken on a life of his own that has less and less to do with me. And once an artwork by this wholly fictional painter is bought for hard cash at auction, I suppose further that the whole hoax will have come full circle. Fiction and reality will have melded inexorably. Tate doesn't need me anymore; he's on his own. Nat lives!

This article was originally published in the April 2011 issue of Harper's BAZAAR.



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