Free Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928-1960 by William Boyd Page B

on the north of the bay, was on the wrong side of the tracks, artistically speaking, or ‘below the bridge’, as the local expression ran. Windrose seemed to be a rich man’s folly, but Peter Barkasian did not care: it was his own world, bought and paid for.
     

     
    Nat Tate, aged sixteen, at Briarcliff, middle row, fourth from the right
    Mary Tate was killed by a speeding delivery van as she stepped out of a drugstore in Riverhead, Long Island, one February morning in 1936. Nat was eight years old. He recalled to Mountstuart that he learnt of his mother’s death when a boy leaned out of a window overlooking the schoolyard where he was playing and bawled, ‘Hey, Tate, your mom’s been run over by a truck.’ He thought it was a cruel joke, shrugged and carried on with his softball game. It was only when he saw the headmaster grimly crossing the playground towards him that he realised he was an orphan.
    It was natural – inevitable? – that the Barkasians should adopt Mary Tate’s orphan boy; it was also Nat Tate’s first substantial stroke of good fortune, if the enormous personal tragedy of the loss of one’s mother can be looked at in such a way. Little is known of the next few years, unfamiliarly cossetted and privileged as they must have been. ‘I hated my adolescence,’ he once cryptically told Mountstuart, ‘all spunk and shame’, and he never talked much about his teenage years or about the boarding school he was sent to – Briarcliff in Connecticut, now defunct. There is a poignant and touching photograph of him at home in Peconic on a holiday (it can’t have been long after his mother’s death). The boy, standing on a lawn, awkward, arms akimbo, looking away from the camera, the new soccer ball on the grass between his feet, perhaps kicked over towards him by a genial Peter Barkasian, learning to be a ‘Dad’. A few years later (in 1944) a more formal pose reveals the sixteen-year-old standing behind the left shoulder of the Dean of Briarcliff (Reverend Davis Trigg). Nat’s unsmiling face, plump with puppy fat, this time seems to stare out at the camera resentfully, his thick butter-blond hair scraped back from his forehead in a damp, disciplined lick.
    Academically, Nat did not excel. The only subject that engaged him was art, or ‘Paint and Drawing’ as it was known at Briarcliff. Nat did graduate but his grades were disappointing – only in ‘Paint and Drawing’ was he an ‘A’ student. And at this stage of his life his second stroke of luck occurred. Keen to capitalise on any vestige of a gift that his son might display, Peter Barkasian managed to have Nat enrolled in an art school, the celebrated Hofmann Summer School – which moved from its downtown Manhattan base each summer to Provincetown, Massachusetts. Nat never attended classes at West 9th Street in Manhattan, but for the four summers of 1947–51 he studied under the eccentric but vigorously modern tutelage of Hans Hofmann in the small fishing village on Cape Cod Bay.
     

     
    Hans Hofmann’s Summer School in Provincetown, 1956. Photograph by Arnold Newman
    Hans Hofmann was a German émigré who had come to America in 1930. A big, blustering man with an adamantine ego and sense of mission, he was steeped in European Modernism and armed with redoubtable and abstruse theories about the integrity of the two-dimensional plane of the canvas. Its ‘flatness’ was its defining feature, and the artist’s sole task was to respect this as he arranged his coloured pigments upon it. Paint was ‘inert’, representation was wrongheaded, abstraction was God. In the ’40s and the ’50s, Hofmann’s dogmatic asseverations, delivered at his art school in downtown Manhattan and in the summer in Provincetown, profoundly influenced a whole generation of American artists.
    At Provincetown, Nat Tate was still socially ill-at-ease during those Cape Cod summers, shy and unsure of himself. He did not mix much with the other students, guilty,