Sunday, 4 May 2003
Charles Saatchi has done it again. Barely a fortnight after allowing the launch party for his new London gallery to be over-run by naked gatecrashers, the high priest of Britart has once more set tongues wagging – this time over rumours of a rift with his long-time collaborator, the art dealer Jay Jopling.
Charles Saatchi has done it again. Barely a fortnight after allowing the launch party for his new London gallery to be over-run by naked gatecrashers, the high priest of Britart has once more set tongues wagging – this time over rumours of a rift with his long-time collaborator, the art dealer Jay Jopling.
Though the art world is notorious for its squabbles and rivalries, the cause of the present contretemps is said to be more than usually personal. Jopling, sources say, is fuming at Saatchi's apparent decision to sell off all but one of the works by the dealer's wife, video and photographic artist Sam Taylor-Wood.
As if this weren't enough of a slight, Taylor-Wood has been omitted from Saatchi's new Thames-side gallery. And not one of her pieces – even the controversial update of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper from Saatchi's era-defining 1997 Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy – is name-checked in the glossy book published to accompany it. 100: The Work That Changed British Art features reproductions of 100 works, ranging from the notorious (Tracey Emin's My Bed) to the more obscure (White Canoe by Peter Doig), yet nowhere in its 220 pages is Ms Taylor-Wood's name mentioned.
As if to rub salt into her wounds, in his introduction to the volume, Saatchi writes about his love of "recent British art" and, implicitly, the items in his own collection. He describes the scene it represents as "pretty much the only art that will be worth more than a footnote in future chronicles of the 20th century".
Though evidence for the scale of Saatchi's disposal of Taylor-Wood's work is circumstantial, at least some of the 18 or more pieces by the artist that have appeared at auction in London and New York over the past two years are known to have hailed from his collection. These include Killing Time, a four-screened video installation, which was bought back by Jopling at Christie's for £17,625 in February last year, before being sold on to Tate Modern.
Sources close to Saatchi have confirmed that the former advertising tycoon now owns only one of her works, Spankers Hill, a photo of Ms Taylor-Wood dressed as a rabbit caught in a car's headlights. At the height of his promotion of the Young British Artists in the mid-1990s, he had a far larger number. Five were included in the Sensation show alone.
For Ms Taylor-Wood and her husband, whose gallery, White Cube, represents her, the perils of falling out of fashion with Charles Saatchi will be all too clear. The composition of Saatchi's collection at any one time is seen as such a barometer of prevailing tastes that his decision to sell off work by an individual artist can have a damaging effect on their market value.
One art market insider said of Ms Taylor-Wood's absence from Saatchi's new County Hall gallery: "You should put two and two together. I'm sure he's been selling her stuff. It's a real slight, although in the end it's probably a blessing for her. I think a lot of the work in the gallery comes off really badly. It's meant to be in a white space, and against the backdrop of County Hall a lot of it doesn't really work. He's proved he's an advertising expert – but not an art expert."
Neither Saatchi nor Jopling are showing any signs of going public with their differences. The Saatchi Gallery declined to comment, and a spokeswoman for White Cube said: "Jay's position is that he has no comment because there isn't an issue."
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