Art

In my late teens I decided that I wanted to go to art school and become a painter. I was good at art, I took my A-level a year early and, to be honest, at that stage of my education I was more enthused about art than I was by literature. This was not to be: my father’s implacable objection to this plan provoked no rebellion in me and so I decided to follow the path of literature instead, a calling about which he was marginally less disparaging. Decades on, I have to concede that perhaps he was right to dissuade me. But, all the same, my old ambition still nags at me from time to time. It was Karen Wright, editor of Modern Painters magazine, who in 1998 unwittingly re-opened this small Pandora’s box when she asked me to write for her journal and then, a little while later, invited me to join its editorial board.

Suddenly, I had a toe in the world I had hankered to belong to as a schoolboy and I found that, even if I couldn’t be a painter, at least I was happy to write about art. It was not a difficult compromise.

Most of the pieces I have written for Modern Painters and other magazines and newspapers have been largely about British painting, post World War Two. I am no expert in the fine art, scholarly sense, but I feel British painters of that era are both underestimated and undervalued. I was more than prepared to try and boost reputations unjustly in decline.

The other feature of my connection to Modern Painters was that it provided me with the opportunity to invent my fictitious American painter Nat Tate (see pages 306–8) who, for about a week or ten days in 1998, enjoyed a certain notoriety on both sides of the Atlantic, as indeed did I, as the perceived perpetrator of a hoax on the New York art world. Nat Tate seemed to have a strange half-life for a while (I was interviewed on Newsnight about his work and there was a Channel 4 documentary made about him) and his réclame still rumbles on. Most interestingly for me, however, is that Nat’s curious existence has returned me, if not to painting, then to drawing again: from time to time I discover a “lost” Nat Tate and give it to a friend as a present. I am Nat’s only begetter, after all, and also the source of all his surviving art: perhaps the old ambition has been lying dormant all these years and may be beginning to stir again.

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