Nat Tate — a novelist and a rock star invented a painter the art world claimed to remember

In New York City on April 1, 1998, the novelist William Boyd, the singer David Bowie, the critic John Richardson and the writer Gore Vidal launched a handsomely produced biography of an American abstract expressionist named Nat Tate — a painter who had never existed. The book, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960, was written by Boyd as a deliberate hoax and published by 21 Publishing, an imprint Bowie co-directed. At a party in Jeff Koons’s Manhattan studio, Bowie read aloud from the fictional life while guests from the upper reaches of the art world mingled, and several of them, prompted, recalled having seen Tate’s work or mourned his early death. None of it was real. The painter, his paintings, his suicide and his circle were inventions.

The fabrication was built to be plausible and to be flattering to anyone who pretended to recognize it. Boyd gave Tate a complete and poignant biography: born in 1928, a melancholic abstractionist who studied under Hans Hofmann, befriended Braque and Picasso, then destroyed roughly 99 percent of his own output and leapt to his death from the Staten Island Ferry in 1960 — a tidy explanation for why no one had heard of him. The name itself was a quiet joke, stitched from two London museums, the National Gallery and the Tate. The book carried grainy “period” photographs, reproductions of “his” paintings, and admiring quotations from real, eminent figures — Vidal and Richardson among them — who were in on the joke and lent their authority to a void.

The exposure came within about a week and from the inside. David Lister, arts correspondent of The Independent, had been at the launch and noticed how readily fashionable guests claimed acquaintance with an artist no reference work contained. He reported that the art world had been hoaxed, that Tate was Boyd’s invention, and that some of the biggest names present had been caught praising or remembering a man who never lived. The point of the prank, Boyd and his collaborators acknowledged, had been to test whether art-world authority would rather feign knowledge than admit a gap — and it had.

What makes Nat Tate a clean case of credulity is that it weaponized social vanity rather than forged evidence. The book lied, but its real engine was the listener who would not risk seeming ignorant by asking who Nat Tate was. The hoax measured the gap between what people knew and what they would claim to know in a room full of their peers, and found it wide.