Sewell and Saatchi ... our critic on the collector's impact on art

 
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28 February 2013

The Tate Gallery, in all its manifestations and in all the responsibilities imposed on it in its first half-century - and which, since then, have grown more complex - has never had enough money. It has always had too much to do and far too little with which to do it, its internal interests often in conflict. The historic British collection jogs along on jingoism, but the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist holding is weaker than that of many a provincial German or American museum and can only stay so, and the collection of immediately contemporary art, even of work by British artists, has year by year fallen far behind many a private holding.

It is in this last sector that Charles Saatchi seemed, for a quarter of a century or so, to be the nation's saviour, a free spirit untrammelled by trustees and all the other constraints of public gallery bureaucracy, rich as Croesus and able to buy at whim.

By 1992, Saatchi was well on the way to forming the collection for which he is most widely known, that of work by Young British Artists (the YBAs).

He became a lurking presence in the marketplace at a time when a jubilant, buoyant and disarmingly ignorant art market had extended from Cork Street and Bond Street to far-off Portobello Road and its remoter environs, and when journalists by the dozen, equally ignorant, were confidently writing about the wonderful discoveries to be made in art schools from Glasgow to Goldsmiths, Belfast to Brighton. Saatchi walked into these poky little galleries and the even pokier booths in which graduating students exhibited their wares and sometimes bought the lot. Then their little worlds stood still.

For several years, as the only buyer in this marketplace, he had cruel leverage over both the artists, unknown or virtually so, and the dealers offering their work - few could resist bulk purchase at half-price and never mind how delayed the payment might be, for their conviction was that Saatchi's interest in them was an Open Sesame to fame and fortune. Swiftly, artists concluded that Saatchi's taste was easily identifiable and that they could and then should conform to it with "one-off shockers", as Chris Ofili put it, "something designed to attract his attention": but if they failed in this intention - not shocking enough, not crudely sexual enough, not puerile enough - they failed utterly, for Saatchi's tastes were never quite as predictable as they assumed and work blatantly addressed to them would attract no other collector or dealer, for Saatchi-art was either Saatchi's art or nobody's. Artists whose work he did buy, promote and support found themselves in a relationship with a patron of unmatched power in Britain, part a mesmeric Svengali and part a second Kahnweiler, Picasso's earliest dealer, assiduously adventurist.

These and other dispersals led me to conclude that Saatchi's judgment, the instant decision for which he has so often been praised, is uncertain and that he has to own things, to see them every day, even to live with them, before he can decide whether or not he really wants them. It was when Saatchi began to sell things of which he had wearied that I began, cautiously, to respect him as a collector, for this is exactly what collectors must do if their collections are to reflect judgment acquired through experience. Others interpreted his sales as taking a profit, as pursuing his gambles on futures to their logical end. Perhaps both interpretations are in part correct.

In recent years he has given the impression of hastily assembling for temporary exhibition groups of paintings that can pass for surveys of immediately contemporary art in Germany, America, China and other parts of the world that offer thoroughly international (and indistinguishable) mimicries of Western art - but these have not been the scrupulous investigations of the responsible gallery curator but happy accidents for the roving predator with too little time to spare.

If there is a Saatchi art at the end of this century's first decade, it is less the cutting edge of the Arts Council or the breaking of bounds and leaping of boundaries favoured by the Turner Prize than a taste for figurative art that is bizarre, grotesque, ghoulish, sexual and calculatedly offensive, much tempered by huge scale, for most of these characteristics are intensely nastier writ small.

His taste for overwhelming scale and shallow assertiveness of imagery must come from his experience in the advertising industry, to the images of which his chosen art is so often close.

In retrospect, Saatchi now seems with his Young British Artists to have been remarkably courageous. To have known so little about art and yet to have ventured without hesitation into such shark-infested waters was an adventure as rash as Colonel Fawcett's up the Amazon, from the dread piranhas of which he never returned. Saatchi, of course, had a merry group of fawning lackeys to give him confidence, to spout on his behalf the jargon and jabberwocky of the contemporary curator.

With the piecemeal dispersal of this collection, often for huge profits, Saatchi has been accused of betraying the nation's heritage, of selling to foreign collectors the great icons of late 20th-century British art. His accusers forget that he was, in a sense, as much the maker of these icons as the artists, that he enabled works that would almost certainly have remained ideas, even those of dark obsession, to be realised in the flesh - literally so in the case of sharks, sheep and cattle - and that he advanced funds, paid stipends and offered guarantees that allowed artists to fulfil whims without the anxieties of unpaid household bills. The most important of these guarantees was the certainty that Saatchi, as patron, would use his commercial skills to magnify the fame of every artist who responded as willing puppet to his patronage. There can be no doubt that just as Hirst made a shark into a work of art, Saatchi made Hirst into an artist: Serota and the Tate could never have done that.

There are those who see Saatchi as a Medici, a Gonzaga, a Charles I, a Tate, a Leverhulme, a Samuel Courtauld of his day - but he is not of their ilk, for he is as much driven to disperse as to acquire, and the interval between acquisition and dispersal has shortened. He seems, moreover, to have had no wish to enlist any of his collections as a memorial to himself or the artists he has sponsored. At the same time, what for years seemed his disproportionate power compared with great state institutions for the visual arts and traditional art dealers (some of them institutions too), has diminished to the point at which his activities as collector, exhibitor and seemingly inexorable force in the marketplace no longer matter. Gone are the days when Saatchi and Serota seemed equal powers in the land - Serota who once, at Whitechapel, seemed so inspired, and inspiring, now, at Tate Modern, reduced to the role of desiccated administrator and unloved headmaster; Saatchi, always the lively one, ingenious and provocative, now the ringmaster of a circus that has sold its clowns and acrobats.

For Saatchi, it had begun to seem a running into sand, a wretched end, but suddenly, in October 2008, yet another Saatchi was revealed, sober, sane and reasonable, performing the useful service of exposing the bathetic dreadfulness of Art Now from wherever in the world he chooses. In his latest gallery, light, proportional and functional within the handsome classical skin of an early 19th-century army barracks in the heart of Chelsea, he has created a friendly tool with which to perform such curatorial exposures, its giant portico a thousand times more welcoming than the doom-laden entrance to Tate Modern. He has taken a quarter of a century to reach this third incarnation of his gallery and, at last, it has an air of permanence. That air raises a very serious question: with Saatchi's death, what then? Ironically he has against a great deal of scornful opposition (including my own) performed a great good. We may have cared for very little of the work he has shown us over the years, but he enabled us to see it as it happened and, looking back, my impression is that he made no particular claim for any of it, that as a curator he was dispassionate, unlike those who work for state-owned galleries and the Arts Council and invariably claim that their chosen contemporary artists have merit enough to become the Old Masters of the next generation.

Saatchi, more than any man, has been, and still is, responsible for letting us see immediately Art Now in its infancy. We should honour him for it by ensuring that his latest gallery becomes a lasting relic of all that he has done for art in Britain.

Booth-Clibborn Editions presents The History of The Saatchi Gallery (booth-clibborn.com), available at £85. Extract from Charles Saatchi by Brian Sewell, from the essay included in the book.

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