The short and tragic career of Nat Tate reads almost like a ghost story from the shadow side of Manhattan's hectic art scene in the 1950s. Here is a taste of William Boyd's monograph, 'Nat Tate: An American Artist, 1928-1960'.

I still don't know what made me climb the stairs to Alice Singer's 57th Street gallery.

It was June 1997, New York City. The show was titled, 'Crowding the Air - American Drawing 1900-1990', and it seemed impossibly ambitious for her smallish space. Furthermore, the notices of it which I had read in the Times and the New Yorker disdainfully prefigured one's natural prejudices. It was late afternoon, I was hot and I was tired and I wandered past dozens of unremarkable drawings and sketches - a Feininger, a Warhol shoe, a Twombly doodle caught my eye - before I was held and shocked by something I had never expected to see. It was a drawing, 12"2 8", in ink, mixed media and collage: Bridge no. 122. I did not need to read the printed label beside it to know it was by Nat Tate.

It was undated, but I knew it must have been executed in the early 1950s, part of his once legendary, now almost entirely forgotten series of drawings inspired by Hart Crane's great poem, The Bridge. All the drawings in this series - and it was reputed to run eventually to over 200 - were of similar format: at the top was the boldly stylised representation of a bridge, sometimes a forest of girders, sometimes a simple arc, and on the bottom two thirds or half of the page was accumulated a sort of clutter or litter - slashing ink strokes, or furious cross-hatching, occasional half-representational figures, sometimes obscenely graffito-like, sometimes finely and carefully drawn, or lettering, or pasted letters, illustrations torn from magazines, skilfully juxtaposed collages in a style reminiscent of Kurt Schwitters. 'I like bridges', Nat Tate once told an acquaintance, 'so strong, so simple - but imagine what flows in the river underneath.'

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