Lloyd Webber to leave his art collection to the nation

By James Morrison, Arts and Media Correspondent
Sunday, 14 September 2003

Lord Lloyd-Webber is to leave his priceless art collection in trust to the nation when he dies - together with sets and costumes from the musicals that earned him his millions.

Lord Lloyd-Webber is to leave his priceless art collection in trust to the nation when he dies - together with sets and costumes from the musicals that earned him his millions.

The songwriter and impresario has unveiled plans to put his vast array of art works and theatrical memorabilia on public display after his death in a museum at Sydmonton Court, his sprawling country home in Berkshire.

Lloyd Webber makes his pledge publicly on television this week, on the eve of the opening of an exhibition of his Pre-Raphaelite and 20th-century masters at the Royal Academy. He details the scheme further in an interview with the latest edition of the London gallery's own magazine, in which he outlines plans for visitors to be ferried to his house in batches from a "staging post" by the nearby A34.

Lloyd Webber's philanthropic gesture will be especially welcomed by fans of Victorian art, as his Pre-Raphaelite collection is regarded as one of the world's finest. It includes one of only five oil paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in private hands and enough works by Sir Edward Burne-Jones to fill the RA's largest room.

Among the other highlights of the exhibition will be Picasso's Blue Period portrait, Angel Fernandez de Soto, famously bought by the peer for £18m, and Canaletto's The Old Horse Guards from St James's Park.

Lloyd Webber's extraordinary promise to leave his collection to posterity in his will is made as he gives Lord Bragg a guided tour of Sydmonton on a special edition on Friday of ITV1's The South Bank Show. Standing beside Richard Dadd's Contradiction: Oberon and Titania, a painting that is now so fragile he has been advised never to lend it out again, the 55-year-old peer says: "It will be eventually part of my whole plan to put my entire art collection, hopefully in situ, when I am dead ... on display."

In the RA magazine, he adds: "We've bought a site near Sydmonton, which could be a staging post. I think people would quite like to see the collection in the context of where I lived. That's my wish: to keep it in one place."

It is not just Lloyd Webber's art collection which will be put on public view after his death. The proposed displays will house props, sets and costumes from his most celebrated stage musicals, among them Cats, Starlight Express and The Phantom of the Opera. He is undecided about whether to charge the public for viewing the collection.

Lloyd Webber's new appetite for philanthropy has received an idiosyncratic welcome from Norman Rosenthal, the RA's exhibitions secretary. While describing the loaned artworks as looking "like the proverbial million dollars", he said of the peer: "He's like Charles Saatchi. Both of them are, in the nicest sense of the word, insecure about what they are doing. All great collectors have a touch of madness about them."

'Pre-Raphaelites and Other Masters: The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection' runs at the Royal Academy from 20 September until 12 December

Meet Mr Kim, the Britart benefactor who has Damien Hirst and Saatchi in his sights

By Robin Stummer
Sunday, 7 September 2003

As Damien Hirst's first solo exhibition for eight years opens this week in London, the artist's major new benefactor, poised to replace Charles Saatchi as Britart's bankroller-in-chief, can be revealed as a mysterious South Korean millionaire-cum-artist.

As Damien Hirst's first solo exhibition for eight years opens this week in London, the artist's major new benefactor, poised to replace Charles Saatchi as Britart's bankroller-in-chief, can be revealed as a mysterious South Korean millionaire-cum-artist.

Kim Chang-il, a collector, entrepreneur and self-proclaimed aesthete, is the mastermind of an assault on London's claim to be the natural home of great British modern art.

Mr Kim, The Independent on Sunday can reveal, has bought Charity, the massive centrepiece of the new Hirst show, opening this Wednesday. He intends Charity - a 22ft-high, six-ton bronze based on the 1960s Spastics Society collection box girl - to be the crowning glory of his extensive collection of modern art, much of it British.

Mr Kim's investment means that the epicentre of the highly lucrative Britart revolution could well shift 5,500 miles from the heart of London to Cheonan, the anonymous shopping-and-sleeping suburb of Seoul, South Korea, where he keeps his art. Here, from next month, you will find one of the world's greatest private collections of Britart from the past 10 years, housed in a new gallery space specially created for dozens of works - including pieces by two enfants terribles, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Farewell Saatchi's Cool Britannia, hello Kim's Cool Korea.

On the face of it, Mr Kim is an unlikely successor to Charles Saatchi. Aged 53, Mr Kim made his fortune in retail and transport, and owns a chain of 14 restaurants, as well as a department store and entertainment complex.

The store, called Arario, has an art gallery housing hundreds of modern artworks culled from around the world, but for the past 15 years Mr Kim has been focusing on buying work created in Britain. As well as pieces by Hirst, he owns five works by Emin, and others by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Mona Hatoum, Marc Quinn, Gilbert & George and Antony Gormley.

Two years ago Mr Kim paid £1.3m for Hirst's Hymn, a 20ft-high sculpture in the style of a medical student's model of the human body, and installed it in the entrance to his department store. Around the same time, another version of Hymn was bought by Charles Saatchi for about £1m.

Though Mr Kim has long been known to art dealers, his sudden arrival as a key player on the international gallery circuit comes as the rift between Hirst and Mr Saatchi appears to be widening. Interviewed on Radio 4's Front Row last week, Hirst said he had no interest in Mr Saatchi's showpiece new modern art gallery on the South Bank, London, which has staged a retrospective of Hirst's work. "I think museums are for dead artists," he said. "I've seen all that work before in Charles's place. I don't think I'd like it really." Earlier this year, Hirst was conspicuously absent from the Saatchi Gallery's opening night party, calling the gallery "pointless" and "a waste of time".

If anything, Mr Kim's vision of how to offer modern British art to the public is even more acute and astute than Mr Saatchi's. "My dream is to provide the customer with what he or she wants," he says in the latest edition of the Art Newspaper, "but constantly to raise the consumer's expectation, to encourage them to dream... As a businessman I want the customer to see my art and the art of others and be rewarded with pleasure."

"Mr Kim is very happy with Charity," a spokeswoman for the Arario Gallery told The Independent on Sunday last week. "It complements Hymn. We are interested in modern art that is cutting edge, and British art is certainly that."

Charity is to be the centrepiece of Romance in the Age of Uncertainty, a major exhibition of Hirst's recent work that opens this week at the White Cube in Hoxton, east London. Mr Kim's office declined to reveal how much he has paid for Charity, but a figure in excess of the £1.3m paid for Hymn is likely. Art market sources told the IoS that all works at the Hirst exhibition have already been sold - but to whom?

The White Cube would not reveal any names, but the tally of recent investors in the Hirst oeuvre throws up a strange group of possibilities. Sir Elton John is known to own works by Hirst, and, this summer, David Beckham bought one of his prized "butterfly" works as a fourth wedding anniversary present for his wife, Victoria. And it might be unwise to rule out a Saatchi interest. Married last week to the TV cook Nigella Lawson, he might already have the perfect wedding present on order.