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 werethere 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 committedsuicide 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 thelast weekend of his life. Hence the artistic oblivion he found himself in almost 40 years later; only a few works remained to testify to hisintriguing talent.

After Bowie gave his reading, an English journalist named David Lister, who worked for the Independent newspaper in London--a nationalnewspaper--wandered through the crowd in Koons's studio, chatting to people about Tate. Some people claimed to have heard of him, a few had seensome 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 ofLondon's art world had been invited. I gave major interviews on BBC Radio and to national newspapers. The eminent journalists who interviewed mewere hugely intrigued by this forgotten American artist, highly curious as to how I had found out about this overlooked talent. An excerpt from thebook 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'simagination.

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 hecouldn't sit on this scoop any longer, and the story duly appeared on the front page of the Independent: HOW A BRITISH NOVELIST FOOLED THEU.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 globaltalking 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 thelate-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 alife 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, tosee 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 theeditor's cooperation, I came up with the idea of creating an imaginary painter. However, his life would be tricked out with absoluteauthenticity: photographs, reminiscences, examples of surviving artwork. Bowie suggested we publish it as a small, beautifully produced artmonograph.

For me, the key ingredient was the testimony of people who could "remember" meeting Tate. I asked two friends--Gore Vidal and Picassobiographer John Richardson--to join the circle of conspirators. Their anecdotal testimony in the book acts with massive veridical force. Here is GoreVidal on meeting Tate: He was "an essentially dignified drunk with nothing to say. Unlike most American painters, he was unverbal." ThenRichardson 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 biographyhas 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 novelAny Human Heart, Tate is played by the actor Theo Cross. And, even more bizarrely, the first authenticated Tate drawing to go on the openmarket is about to be auctioned in London.

To read the complete article, see:
THE BIGGEST ART HOAX IN HISTORY(www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a695/nat-tate-art-hoax/)