Saatchi derides Turner prize shortlist as 'pseudo-controversial rehashed claptrap'

By Cahal Milmo
Monday, 25 November 2002

Charles Saatchi the advertising tycoon whose largesse has almost single-handedly sustained modern British art, has issued a blunt critique of its most cutting edge institution, the Turner prize.

Charles Saatchi the advertising tycoon whose largesse has almost single-handedly sustained modern British art, has issued a blunt critique of its most cutting edge institution, the Turner prize.

The multi-millionaire patron, whose 3,000-piece art collection includes works by many nominees for the award, dismissed its latest shortlist as "pseudo-controversial rehashed claptrap."

Saatchi, 59, said he could not understand why a series of 24 ethnographic sculptures holding McDonald's food by the British brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman – for which he paid £1m last month – was passed over by the judges.

Instead, he said, the contenders for this year's prize, which include a multi-coloured Perspex ceiling and the retelling of a pornographic film in pink letters, showed that those in charge of awarding the £20,000 prize were out of touch.

The broadside from the advertising executive turned art collector is the second example this month of the Turner prize proving its enduring ability to inspire as much annoyance as admiration in aesthetic circles. Kim Howells, the Culture minister and 1960s art student, emerged from a viewing of finalists' work to describe it as "conceptual bullshit".

Mr Saatchi, who was voted the most influential figure in the art world for next month's edition of Art Review magazine, said the latest work of the Chapman brothers, famed for their 21 child-sized mannequins sporting genitalia on their faces, was the sort of art that the Turner prize should have been showcasing.

He told The Sunday Telegraph: "That is what great art should be. Something that gives real visual pleasure and makes you sit up and think, not the pseudo-controversial rehashed claptrap that Turner judges actually believe is cutting-edge art."

Duvets at dawn ? modern art gurus fall out over Tracey's bed

A state of war exists between the Tate's Nicholas Serota and Charles Saatchi over Tracey Emin's 'sequel' to her infamous creation. By James Morrison

Sunday, 6 October 2002

With its delicately embroidered quilts, curtained surrounds and handsome brass frame, it owes more to Laura Ashley than the excesses of Brit Art. Three years after exhibiting a shabby bed strewn with vodka bottles and condoms, Tracey Emin has unveiled a smart four-poster whose dainty coverlets bear only faint traces of the emotional angst that inspired the original.

With its delicately embroidered quilts, curtained surrounds and handsome brass frame, it owes more to Laura Ashley than the excesses of Brit Art. Three years after exhibiting a shabby bed strewn with vodka bottles and condoms, Tracey Emin has unveiled a smart four-poster whose dainty coverlets bear only faint traces of the emotional angst that inspired the original.

But just days after appearing publicly for the first time in New York, the latest bed is set to become a battleground between the two biggest players on the British art scene. The work, sold to an anonymous buyer for an undisclosed sum last week, is believed to be en route to Charles Saatchi, the millionaire collector and advertising magnate.

If so, it would be viewed as a major lure to his promised "museum of modern art" in the former GLC headquarters on London's South Bank – and a personal affront to his arch-rival, Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Galleries. It would also be an ideal companion piece to its predecessor, My Bed, which Mr Saatchi bought from Emin for £150,000, and now keeps at the home he shares with the TV chef Nigella Lawson.

Mr Saatchi's suspected coup comes as Sir Nicholas shows signs of mounting frustration at the Tate's inability to compete with wealthy private bidders in the cut-throat salesrooms of the contemporary art market.

In a series of outspoken interviews, the normally publicity-shy director criticised ministers for failing to address the "acute" shortfalls that have left his four galleries with an acquisition fund of just £2m a year.

Last night, the Government, which is understood to be dismayed by his remarks, released figures for the first time showing that the Tate is one of the biggest beneficiaries of tax breaks to encourage landowners to give their works of art to the nation.

Over the past decade, it has used the inheritance tax scheme to obtain items worth nearly £23m, including Turner's The Temple of Poseidon at Sunium for £105,000, and a Millais painting worth £4.2m.

A Whitehall source told The Independent on Sunday: "The scheme is the unsung hero of the arts funding world. It's puzzling that institutions sometimes seem reluctant to acknowledge its benefits for their collections, when discussing their acquisitions."

However, Sir Nicholas, who the Tate insists acknowledges the value of the tax break, is known to have more on his mind than Old Masters. While publicly he will only say he wants to broaden his contemporary art collection, he is known to be infuriated by Mr Saatchi's acquisition of major Brit Art works such as My Bed and Damien Hirst's giant anatomical doll, Hymn. His anger has been compounded by the 59-year-old collector's repeated refusal to loan anything to Tate Modern, leaving it bereft of many of the defining works of Brit Art.

Observers believe that Sir Nicholas, 56, will perceive the "loss" of yet another high-profile Emin work to Mr Saatchi as a call to all-out war.

One prominent fine art journalist said: "I think there's personal animosity between them.

"Nicholas Serota is angry with Charles Saatchi. He's annoyed that Saatchi has some of the biggest works from that particular moment in modern art, and he's not playing ball. He's not willing to lend anything to the Tate."

He added that Sir Nicholas was already plotting to outwit Saatchi over future acquisitions. In particular, he is believed to be negotiating the purchase of Upper Room, 12 paintings of monkeys by the Turner Prize-winner Chris Ofili, loosely based on the Stations of the Cross, from London's Victoria Miro Gallery.

"Victoria Miro wants to sell the piece to a public institution," said the journalist. "Also, a lot of the Brit Art artists have been annoyed with Saatchi for years, because, as well as being a collector, he is a dealer. He's not just in it for the love of art."

Neither Sir Nicholas nor Mr Saatchi could be contacted.

Brit art's square dealer moves on

After Eton he sold fire extinguishers, then he sold us Emin and Hirst. As Jay Jopling adds the final touches to his revamped White Cube 2 gallery, he's already looking ahead to another opening in the market

• Rose Aidin
• The Observer,
• Sunday September 22 2002
• Article history

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This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday September 22 2002 on p6 of the Features and reviews section. It was last updated at 00:29 on September 22 2002.

Jay Jopling is the man who sold Britain contemporary art. When Jopling opened his White Cube gallery in 1993, the stars of artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Sam Taylor-Wood were mere twinkles. By the time of Charles Saatchi's 1997 Sensation! exhibition at the Royal Academy, White Cube's rollcall of young British artists had become household names and bankable commodities.

Now, 10 years on, Jopling is consolidating his operation, moving his original tiny cube of a gallery from London's St James's to its satellite premises in Hoxton Square in the East End. There, in a classic piece of Jopling performance, two new storeys have been added to his gallery's original building. The cube components of the building were fabricated in Manchester, transported by lorry to Hoxton and then craned into place.

'Some people watching were convinced that the two new storeys were really a Damien Hirst sculpture being installed,' chuckles Jopling, 'because the prefabricated parts have got all the shelves and vitrines built in like one of Damien's office pieces. It's a radical way to build.'

Hoxton Square was closed off for a week, but it's not the first time Jopling's White Cube gallery has brought the place to a standstill. Two thousand people attended the opening night of Tracey Emin's exhibition there last year, for example. If Jopling loves to sell, still more he adores stoking the fires to bring his ideas to life.

Jopling, now 39, learnt salesmanship through a holiday job in his late teens, selling fire extinguishers door to door. 'I really enjoyed it, so I took the fire extinguishers back to university, got a lot of people working under me selling them, and I'd then take a commission on what they sold.' His technique was so successful that he could sell fire extinguishers to people who already owned them and the fire extinguisher company offered him a directorship.

'I learnt a trick that if you poured lighter fuel on your sleeve and then lit it, you could get everybody's attention very quickly. And then just holding this small fire extinguisher you could extinguish the flames: it was very dramatic and a very effective hard sell.'

Like a fire, Jopling is hard to halt once he gets going. He speaks smoothly and hypnotically, drawing the listener along in his wake. Like a politician on Radio 4's Today programme, he resists interruptions and skilfully deflects questions by shifting the subject to one that suits him better. If this can be frustrating, you have to admire the chutzpah. In fact, even Jopling's father, Michael Jopling, Margaret Thatcher's one time Chief Whip and Minister for Agriculture, was astounded by his son's audacity in selling fire extinguishers. 'Fire extinguisher salesmen were the only people my father used to almost chase off the farm in Yorkshire,' says Jopling, laughing. 'They were such pests.'

He grew up on a 500-acre farm in North Yorkshire, went to boarding school in Scarborough at the age of seven and then to Eton. His patrician background is typical for an old-school art dealer or Christie's boy, if somewhat more unusual for one operating in the apparently egalitarian contemporary art market. Alan Clark, for example, ascribed to Michael Jopling the infamous description of Michael Heseltine as the sort of person who had to buy his own furniture.

'It was a great quote,' says Jopling, 'but my father immediately and publicly stated he'd not said it. It was a horribly arrogant comment, but at the same time very amusing.

'That Sloane sort of thing never really appealed to me,' he adds. 'I always wanted to combine business with culture, and the establishment with the avant-garde: those four elements are very true to me.'

On the day we met, Jopling had returned from a holiday at Elton John's villa in Nice with his wife, the artist Sam Taylor-Wood, and their daughter, Angelica: anything further from a Sloaney mini-break is hard to imagine. Jopling and his wife are often photographed in the company of celebrities. It may be 'New Establishment' but this beau monde is not inhabited, one imagines, by many of Jopling's Eton contemporaries.

Even at Eton, he was different. He formed a theatre company which he took to the Edinburgh Fringe, staged art exhibitions and founded a literary magazine to which he persuaded Bridget Riley to contribute a cover. At the age of 14, Jopling bought his first work of art, a limited-edition Gilbert & George book for £16 from the Anthony d'Offay gallery. He continues to collect contemporary art but says that it was at this point that he decided he wanted to work with living artists. So he studied history of art at Edinburgh University where he started dealing on the secondary art market and working with Glasgow-based artists.

In his final year at university, in 1985, Jopling and two friends organised a charity art auction which raised £250,000 for famine victims in West Africa. Jopling went to New York to ask art stars such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel and Keith Haring to donate their work. If he didn't think their offerings were good enough, he would demand another piece and often get it. Few could resist his force of personality and, likewise, the glamour and excitement of the New York art-star system may have sown the seed within Jopling of a strategy to come.

Following a brief flirtation with film-production, Jopling started working with artists such as Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn, putting on warehouse-style shows from his Brixton home. When Nicholas Serota formed a think-tank upon his appointment to the Tate in 1991, Jopling was asked to join it. 'I was very flattered to be included in this meeting to discuss how we got the newspapers to take contemporary art more seriously,' he recalls. 'Yet it seemed to me that if the tabloid press was only interested in ridiculing contemporary art, then get them to ridicule it properly, so that people actually take notice.

'So we got the Daily Star to take a bag of chips to one of Damien's fish in formaldehyde pieces which was then on show at the Serpentine and photograph it as the most expensive fish and chips in the world. Stunts like that forced people to know about the art and if they know about it, then that encouraged them to go and see it, and then they were forced to take a view. It certainly was a way of getting art into the public arena.'

Jopling's artists were responsible for some of the pieces, like Hirst's shark suspended in formaldehyde, which became icons of the Nineties. There was Marcus Harvey's Myra , an image of the Moors murderer made from children's handprints, Marc Quinn's Self, a mould of the artist's head made from his own blood, and Tracey Emin's My Bed. Key to Jopling's strategy was not only to enable the art to be made, but for it to be seen by as many people as possible. He understood the value of a high public profile to those considering investing in a nebulous market.

Likewise, Jopling persuaded Christie's to invest in his potential by giving him free use of their premises in the heart of London's most prestigious art trading street, Duke Street, St James's. Jopling smiles appreciatively as he remembers his sales pitch when, at the age of 29, he approached Christie's director, Christopher Davidge. 'I'd found out that Constable had been given a free studio by Christie's. Then we discussed how there weren't many contemporary art galleries this side of Piccadilly. I told him that I had some very interesting young artists, we talked a bit about them, and he was prepared to take a risk on me, for which I'll always be very grateful. And for five years they let us have that front-room. Very quickly, things started to snowball and we started to expand and do lots of different outside projects, as we continue to do.'

Now the 40-square foot gallery is closing after 10 years, which Jopling says was always his intention, but he seems sad to lose its flexibility: artists were only ever shown once, shows could be turned around at short notice, and overheads were low.

Yet since the opening of White Cube 2 in Hoxton Square, in May 2000, just before Tate Modern was launched, Jopling has been struggling to control a sprawling operation. Some have criticised his programming for its lack of coherence. His 25 staff have been spread across four different offices; now they'll all come together in the Hirst-style installation on top of White Cube 2.

The new-look gallery opens with an exhibition by White Cube star artist Gary Hume, and the launch of a new project space, 'Inside the White Cube', programmed by an outside curator with a changing exhibition each month. But Jopling is not standing still. He has bought a defunct electrical substation in Mason's Yard, opposite the original gallery, which he wants to rebuild. 'How many opportunities are there to build a free-standing building in this area? I'd love to do that - it would make a great gallery. All being well, we'll move in there in two years' time. If we don't get planning permission, we'll move on somewhere else in the West End.'

He is consumed by a passion for business and hates sitting still. The build-up of his energy as we talk is almost visible, as if he is itching to be released into some adrenaline-stoking deal. 'Sam says my epitaph should be, "All sense of hurry, gone", which is from my favourite Larkin poem. But I wouldn't have it any other way, it just feels right. And you know, the art market is very competitive; there are a lot of opportunities for artists, and it's important to grow with them. Their position just in terms of how they are looked on as artists is much more substantial than we ever imagined or thought possible. I've chosen to work with living artists, which has its own pressures, but if I had not had this gorgeous accident of being in London at just the right time, I might as well be selling anything, even fire extinguishers.'

· Gary Hume, 26 September onwards, White Cube 2, 48 Hoxton Square, London N1, 020 7930 5373: www.whitecube.com.

Saatchi to open museum of contemporary British art on south bank of Thames

By Louise Jury Media Correspondent
Friday, 13 September 2002

The advertising entrepreneur Charles Saatchi disclosed his long-awaited plans yesterday for a privately run museum of contemporary British art in the heart of London.

The advertising entrepreneur Charles Saatchi disclosed his long-awaited plans yesterday for a privately run museum of contemporary British art in the heart of London.

The new gallery will open next spring at County Hall, the former home of the Greater London Council, not far from Tate Modern on the south bank of the Thames. It will offer Mr Saatchi the opportunity to show more of his collection of nearly 3,000 works by some of the best-known younger British artists in a location likely to attract a wider audience than the gallery he ran for 15 years in St John's Wood, north London.

An exhibition of the art of Damien Hirst, including mammals in formaldehyde and the giant £1m sculpture entitled Hymn, is being tipped as a likely attention-grabbing debut for the new 30,000sq-ft space.

Mr Saatchi said: "Tate Modern is astonishing and I love the Hayward and Serpentine [galleries]. But I think that new British art is the most exciting in the world and needs a dedicated showcase.

"The extraordinary rooms in County Hall will make an interesting setting for works like Hirst's shark and Tracey Emin's bed.

"I don't want the artists I believe in having to wait until they are pensioners before the public has a chance to see their works in large-scale shows."

Mr Saatchi became the most important connoisseur of works by the generation emerging from art schools, notably Goldsmiths', at the beginning of the 1990s. He owns some of the most celebrated works by artists such as Hirst, Emin, the Chapman brothers, Sarah Lucas and Jenny Saville, in a private collection that rivals the holdings even of Tate Modern.

His influence and spending power have been immense and have not always been welcomed by critics who believe he has distorted the market.

Exhibitions at the new gallery will primarily feature work by young British artists, with many shows curated by Mr Saatchi. But the gallery will also show work from other international collections.

Nigel Hurst, who will run the gallery on a day-to-day basis, was not available for comment yesterday. But there are suggestions that Mr Saatchi expects up to a million visitors a year. The gallery will be open 12 hours a day, seven days a week. The London Aquarium, which occupies part of the County Hall basement, receives a million people a year and the nearby London Eye attracts 4 million. With close proximity to the Eurostar station at Waterloo, the Saatchi Gallery, which will charge an entrance fee, is likely to prove an extra attraction to art lovers from Europe.

Emin remakes her bed – with clean sheets

By James Morrison Arts and Media Correspondent
Sunday, 25 August 2002

Soiled sheets, empty vodka bottles, used condoms, a pair of bloodstained knickers – when Tracey Emin's My Bed was entered for the 1999 Turner Prize, its frankness alarmed even the most seasoned students of conceptual art.

Soiled sheets, empty vodka bottles, used condoms, a pair of bloodstained knickers – when Tracey Emin's My Bed was entered for the 1999 Turner Prize, its frankness alarmed even the most seasoned students of conceptual art.

Now, two years after advertising guru Charles Saatchi bought it for £150,000, Ms Emin is making the bed anew – this time it's a four-poster.

As she prepares for a trio of major solo shows, Emin is hard at work on the sequel. And far from simply embelishing her original idea, she has opted to start, literally, with a clean sheet. The new bed will be sturdy, with colourful appliquéd blankets and elaborate embroidered coverlets. Lying at its foot, as if to mock her critics, will be a gold deathmask of her face.

The bed is just one of a huge array of potentially provocative new work to be exhibited by the 39-year-old enfant terrible this autumn. One is a blanket decorated with the US flag and the wording of a flyer advertising bio-hazard suits and gas masks that was handed to Emin in London shortly after 11 September .

Like the bed, this piece, entitled Don't Try to Sell Me Your Fucking Fear, will be given its début at New York's Lehmann Maupin Gallery next month.

Other works revisit familiar territory. There are at least two other blankets, including one covered in her trademark appliquéd writing exploring the trauma of her abortion, the subject of a monologue in one of her early video pieces.

Honey Luard, spokeswoman for Emin's studio, White Cube, confirmed the as-yet-untitled new bed would be the centrepiece of the New York show. "It's a really beautiful bed and it's taking shape very well," she said. "Tracey has already made a cast of her face for the gold mask, and there will be lots of other surprises"

She added that Emin was preparing "something special" for the third of her shows, at Oxford's Museum of Modern Art: "It's going to be a really big new sculpture. We can't say what it will be at the moment, but it's likely to be a bridge of some sort."

Emin was unavailable for comment, but in The Art of Tracey Emin, to be published by Thames & Hudson in October, she reflects on My Bed.

Asked about her decision to sell it to Saatchi, whom she had snubbed initially because of his work on Conservative Party election campaigns, she says: "I was pleased Charles Saatchi bought it and it became like an icon... I didn't want to sell it; I wanted to keep it for myself. It is just a mattress and all the objects actually fitted into one dustbin bag. I wanted to keep it as a pension and I thought if I could keep this large sculpture it would be a really good thing to bring out when I was older."

On its notoriety among art critics, many of whom have argued that they could have made it themselves, she says: "But they haven't done it. It was a shame when it got criticised and people didn't see it for what it was. I always saw it as a damsel fainting, going 'Aahhhh'..."

Solved: the baffling case of the bloody head, the artist and his live-in TV cook

By Robert Mendick
Sunday, 7 July 2002

There may not be blood on the carpet after all. Reports of the demise of a £1m bust made from nine pints of the artist Marc Quinn's frozen blood may well have been greatly exaggerated.

There may not be blood on the carpet after all. Reports of the demise of a £1m bust made from nine pints of the artist Marc Quinn's frozen blood may well have been greatly exaggerated.

An Independent on Sunday investigation that Sherlock Holmes would have been proud of indicates Mr Quinn's bust called Self did not leak all over the floor of millionaire Charles Saatchi's home when builders accidentally disconnected its refrigeration unit. The chances are the builders never even pulled the plug.

This newspaper has tracked down sources close to the artist and also the designer employed to refurbish Mr Saatchi's kitchen. When Mr Quinn visits Mr Saatchi's apartment in Eaton Square, central London, tomorrow to view the damage for himself he may well find ... no damage.

According to news stories last week, the accidental defrosting had caused the statue to "gradually ebb away into ... a pool of blood".

But a source close to Mr Quinn has told The Independent on Sunday the artist is not unduly worried about what he will find at Mr Saatchi's home.

"If the bust has melted it would be a terrible tragedy. But Mr Quinn thinks that is very unlikely. It has a back-up power supply and the artist is not particularly worried about it. He would be if it has gone completely. Read into that what you like."

Mr Saatchi had ordered major improvements to the flat he now shares with Nigella Lawson, the television cook, so that the kitchen came up to her specifications.

Yesterday, the kitchen designer involved in last February's refit, when the refrigerated plinth that houses the bust was allegedly unplugged, said reports that he was to blame were "highly defamatory".

"This is absolutely nothing to do with me," said Laurence Pidgeon, who runs Alternative Plans design company. "You spend a long time building up your name – years and years and years – and it doesn't take very much to rock that."

Reports that the statue had melted first began to circulate in the Peterborough column of the Daily Telegraph. The story was seized upon by the rest of the media. Mr Saatchi's refusal to comment – he is a notoriously private man – helped to fuel speculation.

The fact that the paper mistakenly printed a photograph of Mr Saatchi's brother Maurice to accompany the story – it published an apology the next day – failed to quell enthusiasm for the rumour.

Mr Pidgeon is not convinced any damage was done to the bust, which sits on a plinth in a corridor between Mr Saatchi's new kitchen and dining room. Mr Pidgeon said rumours had spread of some accidental damage to the bust at the time the work was being carried out, but he was baffled why they should have re-emerged months later.

Mr Quinn's visit to the Saatchi household tomorrow should help to solve the mystery and quash the fervent speculation. As the source said: "If you owned a scuplture like that worth a £1m, would you leave it plugged in with builders around? I don't think Charles Saatchi is an idiot."

Bloody hell: a headache for Saatchi as prize artwork defrosts

By Chris Gray
Thursday, 4 July 2002

There will, one imagines, be blood on the carpet. Self, a sculpture of the artist Marc Quinn's head, cast in his own blood, has apparently been destroyed by builders inadvertently turning off a freezer belonging to the multimillionaire art collector Charles Saatchi.

There will, one imagines, be blood on the carpet. Self, a sculpture of the artist Marc Quinn's head, cast in his own blood, has apparently been destroyed by builders inadvertently turning off a freezer belonging to the multimillionaire art collector Charles Saatchi.

Quinn took nine pints of his own blood over five months to make the piece, which sat alongside dismembered limbs and pickled animals in 1997's controversial Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy.

But according to reports yesterday, it took just hours for the iconic contemporary British artwork to seep away after building work began in Mr Saatchi's London home.

Britain's leading contemporary art collector was storing Self at the home he shares with the television chef Nigella Lawson in Eaton Square, Belgravia, where he also keeps Tracey Emin's famous unmade bed. Mr Saatchi is said to enjoy showing visitors the room where he keeps Emin's £150,000 work My Bed, telling them he has told his nanny to clear it up, and Self was to have become the second highlight of the tour.

The freezer unit was apparently switched off as builders moved furniture around the flat for renovations.

Mr Saatchi paid a reputed £13,000 for the blood-filled head, which was made by Quinn in 1991. Mr Saatchi was not commenting yesterday on the fate of his prized possession, possibly because he was too furious to speak.

The Saatchi gallery did not return calls yesterday, and a spokeswoman from the White Cube gallery, whose owner, Jay Jopling, represents Quinn, said the artist did not want to make any comment.

But one report quoted an unnamed source, describing the unscheduled meltdown as a catastrophe for contemporary art. "It all went wrong when the builders started to take the old kitchen to pieces," said the source. "They turned the freezer off and moved it away from the wall. A pool of what looked suspiciously like blood appeared around the freezer. The builders looked inside and saw, to their horror, that one of Saatchi's pieces of modern art had melted."

Quinn, 38, has been at the cutting edge of British contemporary art since Self first brought him to public attention and caused people to faint when it was exhibited. Born in London, he graduated from Cambridge University in 1985 and has shown works widely in Europe and the United States. Last year he won the Woollaston Award for the "most distinguished work" at the Royal Academy's summer exhibition for his marble sculpture Catherine Long, part of a series depicting nude men and women who had lost one or more limbs.

Since 1991 he has remade Self twice, to reflect changes in his face as he grows older. The original was a unique, irreplaceable work.

Last night Sir Peter Blake, the pop artist who was behind last year's Royal Academy summer exhibition, said it would be a dramatic loss if the original Self had been destroyed. "If it has happened in these circumstances it seems crazy and very irresponsible. It was always a fragile study, as there was always a possibility that it would melt if there was a power cut. [Quinn] could do it again, but he is more than 10 years older now so it will not be exactly the same," he said.

Another source familiar with contemporary art collectors said that if Self had been ruined, it could not have been as simple as builders turning off a standard freezer.

"Charles Saatchi is a serious collector and looks after his artwork. I would be very surprised if he was keeping it in a kitchen freezer," they said.

Aga Khan threatens to take Islamic art overseas

By Cahal Milmo
Tuesday, 28 May 2002

The hopes of one of the world's richest men to build a museum on one of London's most prized sites suffered a blow yesterday when the site owner said it would prefer to sell to the NHS.

The hopes of one of the world's richest men to build a museum on one of London's most prized sites suffered a blow yesterday when the site owner said it would prefer to sell to the NHS.

The Aga Khan had selected Block Nine, a disused Victorian hospital building on the Thames opposite the Houses of Parliament, to house the largest collection of Islamic art in the English-speaking world.

Boasting some of the finest examples of Middle Eastern painting over the centuries, the museum would be the latest multimillion-pound addition to the string of cultural complexes lining the South Bank.

Until last month, the chances of the billionaire, known for his horse racing empire, securing his goal looked high. Now, faced with losing the site, the fear is that he might take his philanthropy abroad.

In an effort to guarantee a sale, the Aga Khan's charitable foundation has tabled a bid of £24m, considerably more than its market value, to Block Nine's owner, King's College, part of London University.

King's College was thought to be preparing to accept the bid from the Aga Khan until it realised that St Thomas' Hospital, which adjoins the triangular site of 1.8 acres, also wanted the land.

But, constrained by public finances, the Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Trust could only offer a counter-bid of £10m to £12m ­ leaving its owners with a prickly choice between profit and the health service.

The 40-strong ruling council of King's College will meet on 2 July to decide which of the two bids to accept but a spokesman yesterday confirmed its first duty would be to the NHS.

The spokesman said: "We work closely with St Thomas' and our preferred solution is one that will work with the hospital.

"They are our partners and it would not be in anyone's interests if they are put in a position of considerable antagonism and distrust."

The stance substantially increases the chances of the college's council opting to sell to St Thomas' to develop new facilities, including a nursing school. King's College already runs its medical school at St Thomas', where consultants passionately opposed to the sale for an "inflated price" have threatened to chain themselves to the railings if it goes ahead.

The board of the Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, has declared itself unanimously opposed to a sale to a third party by King's College, which gained ownership in 1998.

The price for expanding the hospital could be the loss to London of another South Bank cultural monument to sit alongside recent additions such as the Tate Modern and the proposed Saatchi Gallery.

The Aga Khan, who is spiritual leader of the Ismaili Shia Muslim sect, last year failed to secure his initial target site for his museum, the Royal Army Medical College next to the Tate Britain; that was sold to the Chelsea College of Art.

Senior sources within the Aga Khan's project said yesterday his desire to site his cultural complex in London could be eroded by a second failure to find a suitable premises.

One figure involved with the project said: "London was chosen because of its status as a crossroads between the East and the West but it would be understandable if, in the event that the current negotiations are not successful, the Aga Khan would eventually want to look elsewhere."