Saatchi's Clean Sweep
Charles Saatchi's art-buying habits are similar to an eating disorder: he binges; then he purges. Last week the British advertising magnate went on a shopping spree. The day before an exhibition opened at the Anderson O'Day Gallery in West London, Mr. Saatchi bought out the entire show, five abstract paintings by an unknown 32-year-old British artist named Simon Callery. The works were priced at $:4,000 and $:5,000 each, and Prue O'Day, an owner of the gallery, said Mr. Saatchi spent $:20,000, or about $29,000. Mr. Saatchi first saw Mr. Callery's work a month before, at a new artist's space near King's Cross in London called Cubitt Street Studios, where he bought an abstract landscape painting.
Such sprees are nothing new for Mr. Saatchi. But just as fast as he buys many works by a single artist, he has been known to sell them, sending prices on a rapid roller-coaster ride. This fickle behavior is a subject of great interest to gallery owners, artists, auction-house experts and collectors, who keep close tabs on Mr. Saatchi's dealings because he has been known to inflate an artist's reputation and then deflate it in short order, all single-handed. For example, in the 1980's Mr. Saatchi bought, in bulk, the work of the Italian artist Sandro Chia, and then, shortly after, he sold the work and Mr. Chia's prices tumbled. They have never quite recovered.
Just last month, Mr. Saatchi sold several important works to David Geffen of Los Angeles, the multi-millionaire producer and investor. Most of Mr. Saatchi's purges, however, occur at Sotheby's sales of contemporary art in New York. Over the last two years, he has been the mainstay of these auctions, selling millions of dollars' worth of art by such celebrated artists as Malcolm Morley, Cy Twombly, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Mr. Morley is one artist whose prices have fallen, in part because of Mr. Saatchi's offerings at auction and also the threat of his selling off more important Morleys known to be in his collection. An Ever-Rotating Collection
Mr. Saatchi's London-based advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, founded with his brother, Maurice, has reported losses for the last two years. In that time, the collector's art-buying has been more modest and less frequent than in the boom years of the 80's. Instead of buying big-name artists at big prices, Mr. Saatchi has recently concentrated on young British painters whose prices are low and whose reputations he is helping to establish. He buys not only for his own personal collection, but also for the Saatchi Collection, his small museum on Boundary Road in northwest London; open to the public by appointment, it has no permanent holdings but is more like a rotating showcase for Mr. Saatchi's new acquisitions.
Mr. Saatchi is no stranger to the Anderson O'Day Gallery. Two days after a young British artist, Alex Hartley, had an opening there in May, Mr. Saatchi bought all four works. And two years ago at the gallery, he bought two paintings by another young British artist, Abigail Lane.
While Mr. Saatchi declined to comment on his recent purchases, Ms. O'Day said, "He's terribly interested in what's happening and is someone who really knows what he is looking at." Asked whether she is concerned that he may turn around and quickly sell the works, devaluing her artists in the process, she replied: "It's a slight worry. But his input is vital, since no one else is buying right now." Wanted: Young Collectors
If you're under 35, rich and collect art, Thomas Krens wants you.
The Guggenheim Museum, where Mr. Krens is the director, is recruiting members for its newly formed Young Collectors Council. So far, this "trustees in training program," as the museum calls it, includes Bill and Karen Lauder, Alan Mnuchin, Liz Macklowe, Elizabeth Sarnoff, Jay Maloney, Jason Rubell, Jennifer and Craig Barnett, and Mark Hamm.
"It's a list still in formation," said Marc Glimcher, who has organized the council with Michael Govan, the Guggenheim's deputy director.
"It's a serious group," said Mr. Glimcher, a son of Arne Glimcher, the owner of the Pace Gallery in Manhattan and a film producer. "We will raise money by holding movie screenings and premieres and organizing lectures, symposiums, debates and publications." He added that the members would use their Hollywood connections to raise money to renovate a theater, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, under the museum's rotunda.
Mr. Govan said the idea for the Young Collectors Council had been percolating for four or five months. "The concept of old-fashioned philanthropy is dying," he said. "So many collectors these days are looking to start their own museums. This is our way of trying to devise an important role for young collectors, now and in the future."
He emphasized that the new group would work with the existing junior committee, although the two have different functions. The junior committee organizes fund-raising events for the museum in general. The council is to work on projects specifically related to exhibitions. The Met's New Rembrandt
Rembrandts, real and not so real, were a hot topic this week. A real one, "Portrait of a Man," from 1632, has just been added to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's permanent collection. The painting was actually given to the museum in 1964 by Mary Louise Elsworth, who died on Tuesday, in memory of her husband, Lincoln Elsworth, a celebrated aviator and explorer who died in 1951.
The painting, which has been valued at $9 million, was donated in 1964, the last year of a tax law that allowed people to give art to museums while retaining a life interest in the work and gaining a deduction based on the "remainder interest," the estimated value of the work after the owner's death. While Mrs. Elsworth kept the painting in her Manhattan apartment, she occasionally lent it to the museum.
Ashton Hawkins, the executive vice president and counsel to the Met's trustees, said the museum had about 30 other such outstanding gifts. This Rembrandt is particularly special, he said, because "the Rembrandt Research Project has written that this painting is genuine and that the signature and date are by the artist." All That Glistters . . .
The Met is lucky. Re-evaluating Rembrandts has been a continuing exercise among scholars both in the United States and abroad, and the number of authenticated Rembrandts continues to shrink. Two belonging to the National Gallery of Art in Washington have not received such glowing reports. "A Turk," circa 1635, and a 1650 self-portrait may not have been painted by the Dutch master after all. One was downgraded by the Research Project, a group financed by the Dutch Government-that has been studying the artist's work all over the world. The other has not yet been evaluated, but scholars have questioned its attribution.
Dennis Weller, the assistant curator of Northern Baroque paintings at the National Gallery, said X-rays and laboratory examinations suggest that "A Turk" was never completed and that the style of the brush strokes was similar to the work of Govert Flinck, one of Rembrandt's students.
"And an X-ray of the self-portrait showed no sense of Rembrandt," Mr. Weller added. One telltale sign, he said, was that the X-rays showed that the painter had applied lead white only to highlights of the face, rather to the entire face, as Rembrandt always did.
"A lot of students of Rembrandt did portraits of him that were later considered self-portraits," said Dr. Walter Liedtke, a curator of European paintings at the Met. "Anything that vaguely resembled a Rembrandt in the 18th century was attributed to Rembrandt."
Mr. Liedtke also said he believed that the "survival rate" of works believed to be by Rembrandt these days is roughly 50 percent. "In 1900, the consensus was that there existed about 700 true Rembrandts," Mr. Liedtke said, adding that the figure has now dropped to about 250. A Harnett Donated
The National Gallery did have one piece of good news this week. It received "The Old Violin," from 1886, one of the most famous trompe l'oeil paintings by the American artist William M. Harnett. The painting was bought for the museum by Mr. and Mrs. Richard Mellon Scaife in honor of Paul Mellon, a major benefactor to the museum. (Mr. Scaife and Mr. Mellon are second cousins.)
While the museum declined to disclose the painting's price, art experts said it had been valued in excess of $5 million. "This is a very great acquisition for us," said Earl A. Powell 3d, the museum's director. "We have a small Harnett, but nothing of this stature. It represents the pinnacle of American still-life painting."
The work is a centerpiece of a traveling Harnett retrospective that opened in March 1992 at the Metropolitan Museum. The show went on to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Its last stop is the National Gallery, where it opens on Sunday and continues through June 13.
