An anonymous buyer paid more than £7,000 at Sotheby’s last night for the late Nat Tate’s signature work, Bridge No.114. The money will go to the Artists’ General Benevolent Fund because, of course, Nat Tate never existed — he was the invention of the novelist William Boyd, who also painted the atrocious picture above.
Tate was conceived in 1998, at the height of the fever for the Young British Artists, when Boyd decided to play an intellectual game. He would test the credulity of the art world by writing the biography of a fictional artist. Boyd’s imagination conjured an unappreciated American genius, whose work had been lost his contemporaries. Tate, exhausted by frustration and failure, threw himself into the Hudson river and drowned aged 32. His tragedy was told in just seventy pages.
This was both an investigation into the power of fiction and a satirical crack at the art scene.
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