Focus: Out of the ashes - the new stars of Britart

Whatever you think of Damien or Tracey, last week's fire was a disaster for modern British art. But Mike Bygrave and Malcolm Doney see a new wave coming to the rescue

Sunday, 30 May 2004

Laugh if you want. Lots of people have, in the wake of the fire that destroyed some of Britart's most famous works last week. Tracey Emin's tent and Chris Ofili's art made with excrement are easy targets. The giggling classes were typified by the audience and panel on Radio 4's Any Questions last night. One guest even joked about his artistic evaluation being "vindicated" by the flames. But then the host, Jonathan Dimbleby, quietly pointed out that the destruction of 50 paintings by the abstract artist Patrick Heron was actually a huge and serious loss to British art. The giggling stopped.

Laugh if you want. Lots of people have, in the wake of the fire that destroyed some of Britart's most famous works last week. Tracey Emin's tent and Chris Ofili's art made with excrement are easy targets. The giggling classes were typified by the audience and panel on Radio 4's Any Questions last night. One guest even joked about his artistic evaluation being "vindicated" by the flames. But then the host, Jonathan Dimbleby, quietly pointed out that the destruction of 50 paintings by the abstract artist Patrick Heron was actually a huge and serious loss to British art. The giggling stopped.

Dealers and collectors are taking the fire very seriously, as you would expect. As full details of exactly what was burned at the Momart warehouse in east London continue to emerge, many are asking how on earth such a thing could have been allowed to happen. The author and collector Shirley Conran and the painter Gillian Ayres, for example, have hired a lawyer to investigate a possible claim of negligence against Momart after paintings worth around £1m were lost. Eight of them were owned by Ayres and 12 by Conran "covering pretty much everything Gillian did for 10 years between the 1980s and 1990s", according to Razi Mireskandari of the lawyers Simons Muirhead and Burton. "It's not just the money, because people are insured. But something very close to her heart has gone. It's irreplaceable, so we'll be saying to Momart, 'please give us an explanation and what if anything could have been done to prevent it'. It's very early days and we must await the result of the fire brigade's investigation, but a storage facility like this should be no different from a museum. There seems to have been no security staff. You'd expect there to be some sort of advance system. Installation facilities that store very valuable material usually have a system of fireproof shutters."

By Thursday afternoon, Momart said it had given all its clients full lists of what was lost, but as the Crafts Council (which lost 21 pieces from its 1,300-piece permanent collection) points out: "They're lists of what Momart believes has gone." "We can't get on to the site," explained Momart spokeswoman Caroline Feltham. "It's all cordoned off." For the same reason "though we're hopeful something may be saved we need to take a look and we can't do that. Our insurers are satisfied we took the necessary steps to ensure the safekeeping of art works in our possession and we stand by that".

Momart is known as a specialist in handling, moving and storing contemporary art, with clients including the two Tate galleries, the National Gallery and Buckingham Palace. The razed warehouse was one of three Momart facilities in London. Besides having their own, limited liability insurance, such major storage companies will usually offer to arrange insurance for collectors' works, but most collectors have their works insured privately. The managing director of Momart, Eugene Boyle, described his firm as "deeply saddened", but stressed that "the fire, and the loss of any possessions, is an issue for our clients and their insurers. It would be wholly inappropriate for Momart to discuss such details in the media".

Clare Pardy of AXA Art insurers said: "If you're a collector and come to us, you agree with us a value upfront and the policy is written on that basis." Thereafter that value, while it can be increased by agreement or on renewal like ordinary insurance, is sacrosanct. "The agreed value is the agreed value and that's what we pay," Other insurers offer market value policies which means "at the time of the loss we have to establish what the market value is", says Robert Read of the leading art insurance company Hiscox. "We normally rely on experts to help us do that - Sotheby's, Christie's, prominent dealers and so on."

His own "guesstimate" of how much insurance money may be paid out is around £50m. Others says it could be twice as much. Attitudes to the loss vary just as wildly - Tracey Emin's comment that she was more concerned about the deaths in Iraq and the Dominican Republic may become as famous as her tent - but one question rings out loud and clear over the sirens. What happens now for British art? The Independent on Sunday's art critic Charles Darwent says history will "mark this as the moment when Britart ceased". So what comes next? The collectors will carry on buying, but will they do so with the enthusiasm of people who have just cleared out their attic and been given more cash to spend? And will they invest their insurance money in exciting new artists, revitalising a market that was becoming jaded?

Professor Sir Christopher Frayling, chairman of the Arts Council, would not put it as crassly as that, but he says: "Contemporary art is tidal and there is a strong tide against the 1990s Britart style." The landscape of the art world had begun to change before the fire, he says. To landscape, as it happens, and portraiture and abstraction. Painting, though it had never gone away, has began to make a bit of comeback. "For some time young artists have been trying to find a new idiom," says Sir Christopher. "In particular there's a new concentration on painting."

Sam Chatterton Dickson, a director of the Flowers East gallery, says: "There is a national instinct to enjoy newness. When people seem to be trotting out the same stuff they lose interest. In the same way that the tabloids turn on celebrities, people in the art world wait like vultures to signal the death of a movement."

Next month, Art Review magazine is to publish its list of the 25 best young British artists. Three of these, Daniel Sinsel, Varda Caivano and Pearl Shiung (none of whom, it turns out, was born in Britain), complete their MAs only this year, yet they already have had solo shows in prestigious galleries. Charlotte Edwards, deputy editor of Art Review, says: "Collectors are going into BA shows and picking up artists younger and younger in search of the next best thing. At this year's degree shows I saw barely any installations, barely any photography, barely any film. There's a revival of the traditions of landscape, portrait and wonderful abstract painting."

This crop of young painters is less autobiographical, or egocentric, than the most celebrated members of Britart. The gallery owner Alison Jacques, who worked as a curator with a number of Young British Artists, as the leading lights of Britart were also called, says the work she now shows is "more objective, less about the personality of the artist".

One of the major advantages contemporary British artists have - arguably a legacy of the YBAs - is that Britain, and London in particular, is seen by the art world as very sexy. Stuart Evans, former chair of the Patrons of New Art at the Tate and the curator of the art collection of lawyers Simmons & Simmons, says: "The scene here is very rich. There are very good artists, lots of younger artists and more and more come here in part because of that. If we've been the new Paris, it's been like that since the 1990s." Alison Jacques concurs. "British art is in good shape. It's the European centre for contemporary art. People love to come and work here. There's a buzz about the place."

Charlotte Edwards adds: "British art schools are producing generation after generation of technically skilled, talented artists. There is everything to be hopeful about."

'Terrible loss? YBAs made only a few star pieces'

By Ossian Ward

So does this blaze constitute a disaster for the Young British Artists that ruled the art world during the 1990s, or is it a value-enhancing stroke of luck for a bygone movement? By some estimates, the Momart warehouses in Leyton may have held the greatest concentration of British contemporary art from the past decade anywhere in the world. Although the YBA phenomenon produced only a handful of star pieces, the fire is unlikely to send their prices rocketing any higher because only a small portion was lost; just 100 of Charles Saatchi's 7,000-strong collection, in addition to works by Damien Hirst from his personal stockpile.

Jake and Dinos Chapman'swar sculpture was chief among a small number of important works destroyed. Saatchi commissioned the artists to make Hell for £50,000, but the installation would have been worth maybe 10 times that amount. The gruesomely detailed toy soldier diorama was the Chapman brothers' greatest work in terms of visual impact and scale. Displeased with the installation of Hell in its last outing at Saatchi's County Hall gallery in London and ambiguous about the loss ("It's only a work of art"), the Chapmans will surely miss their magnum opus in any retrospective. However, as their nomination for last year's Turner Prize proved, they are at the height of their powers and will surely make many more masterpieces.

Damien Hirst has been less sanguine but it is unclear whether any of his major pieces were destroyed. His giant £1.5m bronze Charity survived the fire, but many of his spin and butterfly paintings, worth between £85,000 and £250,000 each, perished. It will make little difference to Hirst's market value as almost all of his work is produced in editions and series. If works from his early career have been lost, they will be even harder to replace than they have been to conserve (think tanks of formaldehyde and rotting carcasses) and so the value of his scarce early-Nineties period artworks could increase.

Tracey Emin's Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963-1995 gained iconic status during the YBA frenzy of 1997 when the Sensation exhibition opened at the Royal Academy. Lost alongside her version of a Margate beach hut, the embroidered tent will be missed, perhaps more so by the artist, pictured, than anyone else.

This year many of the so-called YBAs are turning 40. Perhaps some of them need to draw a line under their previous work in order to progress. On the other hand, Saatchi has a museum to fill and will no doubt regret selling 130 lesser works of YBA art and donating 100 to the Arts Council in 1999.

Ossian Ward was formerly editor of 'Art Review'

THE BEST OF THE NEW BREED

Untitled by Pearl C Hsiung

Postgraduate student at Goldsmiths College who won a prize promoting cultural exchange with China. Painter and photographer to be shown in this year's Royal Academy summer show

Untitled by Varda Caivano

Born in Buenos Aires in 1971, Caivano will graduate this summer from the painting course at the Royal College of Art. Work can currently be seen for free at the college's annual student show.

Untitled (Couple) by Daniel Sinsel

Born in Munich 27 years ago, Sinsel is another about to graduate from the painting course at the Royal College of Art in Kensington. His work is included in the college's annual student show

HOW TO SPEND THAT INSURANCE MONEY

Doris Saatchi, private collector: 'Look again at the great art of the past. I would spend it on the minimalist masters, particularly Angus Martin and Robert Ryman.'

Sir Christopher Frayling, Arts Council chairman: 'Give scholarships to lots of students so the next generation can be as successful as the YBAs.'

Sam Chatterton Dixon, director of Flowers East gallery: 'Buy paintings by Trevor Hutton and Stephen Chambers. With the rest I'd buy a Vuillard.'

Hirst statue survives fire but toll of other artists' work grows

By Jonathan Brown and Genevieve Roberts
Friday, 28 May 2004

Damien Hirst's bronze sculpture Charity - based on the old Spastic Society collection box - survived the fire which destroyed an estimated £50m worth of modern British art.

Damien Hirst's bronze sculpture Charity ­ based on the old Spastic Society collection box ­ survived the fire which destroyed an estimated £50m worth of modern British art.

The 22ft bronze was discovered leaning against a "precarious wall" in the warehouse yard yesterday.

A spokeswoman for Hirst's Science Ltd said: "A bronze is about the only thing that would survive the fire." She said that she expected the work to be salvaged assuming there was no more damage from falling masonry.

Meanwhile Momart, the owners of the art warehouse at Leyton in east London, denied that negligence led to Monday's blaze. The company is facing at least two legal actions over its stewardship of items belonging to the author Shirley Conran, and Gillian Ayres, the artist who lost a number of personal pieces dating back to the 1950s. At least one other major collecting family is consideringaction.

More details emerged of the losses yesterday. It was confirmed that more than 50 works by the late British abstract painter Patrick Heron, including his final two paintings, were destroyed. The works belonged to Mr Heron's two daughters.

Charles Saatchi lost more than 100 pieces including two Tracey Emin pieces, Hell by the Chapman brothers and works by Gary Hume and Sarah Lucas. Damien Hirst lost 16 paintings that were not part of the Saatchi collection.

Also lost were 20 pieces from the Crafts Council, including Floorpad, a 1972 work by Ann Sutton, Britain's leading textile artist. Many more pieces had a lucky escape, she said, because much of her stored work was recently removed to be shown as a part of a national retrospective tour.

Ms Sutton told The Independent yesterday: "What I would love to see is the salvaged work. An exhibition of burnt art would be fascinating, because it's not something we ever do to our pieces."

Louise Taylor, the director of the Crafts Council, which has a collection of 1,300 pieces, said: "This is a significant loss for all the craftspeople involved and for the British public ... They are in most cases one-off pieces, which cannot be replaced. The losses will leave a gap in the history of craft."

Also destroyed was work by the furniture maker Michael Anastassiades, who lost four single-edition tables, a reversible bench by Shin and Tomoko Azumi, the cutting-edge designers whose furniture featured in the last series of the reality television series Big Brother, and work by Ron Arad and El Ultimo Grito.

Two bowls made by Alison Britton, one of Britain's leading potters, were also lost.

Eugene Boyle, the managing director of Momart, said initial indications were that the blaze had started in an adjacent unit but that the cause was still unknown. It could be up to three days before forensic fire investigators complete their task of sifting through the wreckage.

Momart's clients include the National Gallery, Tate Modern, Tate Britain and Buckingham Palace. The destroyed warehouse represents between five and 10 per cent of the company's storage capacity.

Mr Boyle declined to reveal further details of which works had been destroyed.

He said: "Our insurers are completely satisfied that we took all the necessary steps to ensure the safekeeping of the works of art in our possession. We take security and safety very seriously and have enjoyed a blemish-free record since we were founded in 1971."

Raz Mireskandari, a solicitor who is representing Ms Ayres and Mrs Conran, said both women were "enraged" by their loss. He said: "The key question is, to what extent should Momart have been concerned at what was being stored at the other premises?" More than 20 works by Ms Ayres, belonging to both women, were destroyed in the fire.

With estimates putting the eventual total loss at upwards of £50m, the insurance industry was putting on a brave face.

Richard Northcott, the executive director of Heath Lambert, confirmed his company insured Momart.

"It is too early to say what impact, if any, this loss will have on insurance rates and capacity in the specialist art market," he said.

Why Britart is a burning issue

By Thomas Sutcliffe
Friday, 28 May 2004

A minute's silence, please, in memory of the Britart landmarks that were destroyed in Tuesday night's fire at a Momart warehouse in east London.

A minute's silence, please, in memory of the Britart landmarks that were destroyed in Tuesday night's fire at a Momart warehouse in east London. Without fear of contradiction, they can be said, on this occasion anyway, to have generated more fire than smoke. And now, 60 seconds over, a huge round of applause for the Chapman brothers, who reacted to the news that their piece Hell was feared to be among the casualties with a masterly display of British phlegm. "We will just make it again," Dinos Chapman was reported as saying. "It's only art."

If you never saw Hell, then you may not grasp just how heroic this insouciance is - because he's not exactly talking about an afternoon's watercolour work here. Hell was a huge model landscape, contained in nine display cases arranged as a swastika and composed of some 5,000 tiny model figures, each of them individually hand-painted and customised to represent vengeful mutants and their stormtrooper victims. The very first thing that struck you on seeing Hell was that it represented brain-cramping quantities of tedious labour - so to dismiss its destruction so lightly was stoical, to say the least.

It's perhaps understandable that others couldn't show quite the same stiff upper lip. Carole Hastings, the director of Momart, could be forgiven for being "devastated", since it was her professional obligation to keep the works safe. And it would be inhuman not feel a little for Charles Saatchi (also "devastated"), given that he has a proprietary interest in many of the missing pieces. Less explicable was Brian Sewell's reported comment that it could be an "appalling tragedy" for contemporary British art, given the torching he's given in the past to several contemporary British artists. But perhaps he felt it was best to be tactful while the ashes were still warm.

Whatever the case, it was surely the Chapmans' reaction to this event that properly got it in perspective for the vast majority of us, even those of us who count ourselves as art-lovers. It certainly chimed with the Daily Mirror's cheerfully flippant headline "Saatchi and Scorchi", which seemed to give vent to a little pulse of schadenfreude with regard to millionaire art collectors and conceptual art. And it agreed with the editorial cartoon which featured a newsman doing a live report in front of a smouldering building and saying, "And it seems millions of pounds of meaningless tat has been lost to the nation for ever."

Dinos Chapman's remark was, of course, calculatedly contrarian and, as such, entirely consistent with the brothers' previous public pronouncements about art, which are more often delivered by Jake. These are generally characterised by an open hostility to any kind of aesthetic sanctimony. Jake is on record as scorning the notion of gallery-going as a kind of "redemptive religion for poor people from council estates who then go off and perhaps instead of using MFI will use Ikea". The Chapmans' recent reworking of a set of Goya prints by overpainting them with cartoon clowns and rabbits made it plain they don't have much time for the "holy relic" approach to works of art. And one of the reasons these kind of remarks generate the frisson they do is they seem to play right into the hands of the philistines.

Take that line, "we'll just make it again"; an offhand concession that the original work of art is not a one-off at all and that stock phrases of appreciation such as "unique", "inimi- table" and "irreplaceable" (the latter actually used by Charles Saatchi) are just so much hot air. The first half of Dinos Chapman's remark rakes its boot down the shin of high-art proselytisers; the second chops their legs from under them: "It's only art". Only? And this from Turner-prize nominees? You can easily imagine Richard Littlejohn being so dismissive, but not any of the mullahs of high seriousness and life transformation, for whom a gallery is the closest thing we have to a sacred space. If it's only art and entirely replaceable, then what price our respect for the authentic work of art itself?

As it happens, most reports of the fire found that easy to answer: £40,000 in the case of Tracey Emin's embroidered tent Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-95, an estimated £500,000 for Hell, and an overall ballpark figure of "tens of millions" for the total loss. As is so often the case when art makes it into the news pages, the insurance value of the work came before any of the more intangible values. That, in truth, was what Dinos Chapman was kicking at with his knowing act of indifference to the "tragedy". Because though the tangible assets might have been incinerated, the ideas - and the artists - haven't. For all its mischievousness, his response takes the event far more seriously than those who have treated it as an appalling disaster.

They lie in ashes, the dreams of Britain's best modern artists

By Jonathan Brown
Thursday, 27 May 2004

The smell of burning plastic cast an acrid pall yesterday over this anonymous part of east London's industrial hinterland, wafting from the twisted frame of what remained of a commercial hangar. There, among the grey-black wreckage, lay the ashes of some of the most colourful and controversial experiments in modern art.

The smell of burning plastic cast an acrid pall yesterday over this anonymous part of east London's industrial hinterland, wafting from the twisted frame of what remained of a commercial hangar. There, among the grey-black wreckage, lay the ashes of some of the most colourful and controversial experiments in modern art.

Speculation on what was consumed by the fire, which started at 4am in Argall Avenue, Leyton, on Monday, remains rife. For one of the units in these nondescript premises, shared with garages, import-exporters and greasy spoon cafés belonged to Momart, the blue-chip facilitator to Britain's art establishment.

As well as transporting and housing royal and national collections, Momart also claims as clients some of the world's wealthiest private collectors and leading artists. Among these is Charles Saatchi. Yesterday, he alone had lost more than 100 artworks.

Insurance experts say the final cost will be in the tens of millions of pounds, but the loss of the work itself - from a wildly enjoyable period in British art - will cast the greatest shadow.

Damien Hirst lost 16 paintings, including his own Butterfly and Spin creations as well as the 22ft bronze statue Charity modelled on the old Spastics Society collection box.

Also among the devastation were works by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume. There was also a Chris Ofili, a Gavin Turk and a Martin Maloney. Add to this a Richard Patterson an Alex Katz and a Dextor Dalwood and the scale of the loss becomes clear. And these are just some of the artists whose work has been identified.

Young artists Fiona Rae, Rebecca Warren, Enrico David and Jason Brooks also had pieces destroyed. The list appears to go and on and on. There were also suggestions that a large number of other works belonging to a private collector had been burnt.

The loss of the Saatchis alone is equivalent to two-thirds of the exhibits at his gallery on London's South Bank. He is said to have 2,500 pieces in his private collection. A spokeswoman for Mr Saatchi said yesterday that he was deeply affected by the fire."Many of these pieces are great personal favourites and works he considers irreplaceable in the history of British art," she said. Perhaps the two most notorious losses are works by Tracey Emin - Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1994, her tent embroidered with the names of former lovers, and her Whitstable beach hut, The Last Thing I Said is Don't Leave Me Here. Yesterday she said she was saddened by the loss, but said the damage could have been even greater had she not removed a "large number" of works from storage last week.

"I'm upset these seminal pieces have been lost and they cannot be recreated ... I've lost my hut and my tent. I feel like I have lost some friends. I thought those works would be around forever, and I never imagined being in a world without them. It sounds sentimental, but this is what I do." She warned it was important to see the fire in context. "I'm also very upset about those people whose wedding got bombed [in Iraq] last week and people being dug out from under 400ft of mud in the Dominican Republic ... the news is bad at the moment."

Other artists dealt with the loss in typically unconventional fashion. Jake Chapman, whose piece Hell, created with his brother Dinos was lost, said: "I hold God personally responsible and on a scale of one to 10 of how annoyed I am, I'd say, about 11."

Chris Ofili, whose abstraction of elephant dung Afrobluff was destroyed, remarked: "The super hero Captain Shit has in-built protection against the flames of Babylon ... he will return ... the saga continues."

Dexter Dalwood said his loss had been small. "It is a tragedy but we can't bring the works back, and it would have been far worse if a child had died."

Senior management at Momart spent much of the day in crisis meetings after admitting between five and 10 per cent of its holdings had been destroyed.

The company which has the Royal Collection, The Tate, and the Royal Academy among its many clients, declined to detail the loss but said it was working with fire investigators to ascertain the cause of the fire.

"We are deeply saddened by the loss and are in constant contact with all of our clients, affected or otherwise. We have been overwhelmed by the support offered by our clients and others in the industry," said Eugene Boyle, Momart managing director.

Robert Read, an art underwriter with Robert Hiscox, Europe's leading insurer of fine art, said it was the worst single loss in Britain since £100m of art was destroyed in 1991.

WHAT THEY SAID WHEN THEY FOUND THEIR WORKS HAD GONE FOREVER

Tracey Emin

"I'm upset, but I'm also upset about those whose wedding got bombed, and people being dug out from mud in the Dominican Republic."

Damien Hirst

"Some work has been lost but at this stage we don't know exactly what. The situation is still being assessed and we may know later today what has gone."

Jake Chapman

"I hold God responsible and on a scale of one to 10 of how annoyed I am, I'd say, about 11."

Dexter Dalwood

"It is a tragedy but we can't bring the works back, and it would have been far worse if a child had died."

Chris Ofili

"The super hero Captain Shit has inbuilt protection against the flames of Babylon ... he will return ... the saga continues."

Charles Saatchi

"Many of these pieces are great personal favourites and irreplaceable in British art."

Up in flames: the sensational art that will never be seen again

Patrick Caulfield Hedone's

Tim Noble/Sue Webster Ms Understood and Mr Meanour

Craigie Horsfield Carrer Muntaner, Barcelona

Paula Rego The Ambassador of Jesus

Gavin Turk Floater

Tracey Emin Everyone I Ever Slept with 1963-95

Michael Craig-Martin Mood Change One

Chris Ofili Afrobluff

Martin Maloney Sony Levi

Tracey Emin The Last Thing I Said Is Dont Leave Me Here

Dexter Dalwood Che Guevara's Mountain Hideaway

Richard Patterson Motocrosser II

Sarah Lucas Down Below

Jake and Dinos Chapman From Hell

Gary Hume Dolphin Painting

Sensational, but no cause for despair

Losing this art will be like losing close relatives - but then, many of us are quite happy to shed husbands and move on

Janet Street-Porter
Thursday, 27 May 2004

Woke up yesterday morning to find a 2am text message from Tracey Emin on my mobile - "I was OK now Im HURT TKE BUT NO ONE DIED and IDEAS CONTINUE. The WAR in ARAQ (sic) is WRONG x".

For Tracey, everything that happens in her life, from Docket the cat going missing to her trip to Memphis in Egypt, ends up in her work, and the text messages are running news bulletins from Traceyworld. One day someone will print them all out and sell them, no doubt.

Dinos Chapman, when told that the tent Tracey had made embroidered with all the names of her lovers was destroyed, is reported to have said: "That would be nice." No love lost there, then. British artists, always lumped together in a homogenous group by many in the media, are as lively and competitive a group of people as you ever could meet.

Next to my bed in London hangs the Chapman brothers' astonishing set of engravings based on Goya's Disasters of War, and I always feel they start my day on exactly the right footing. At its best, their work is exhilarating, confrontational, uplifting. Now, their most accomplished piece, Hell, a giant tableau constructed using thousands of toy soldiers, has been destroyed along with Tracey's tent in the dreadful fire that swept through a warehouse in east London on Monday morning.

The blaze has wiped out millions of pounds worth of art by people who have become household names; Tracey, Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Sarah Lucas. Not only artists were the losers - Shirley Conran has said goodbye to her collection of paintings by Gillian Ayres, and Charles Saatchi has lost a big chunk of the Brit Art he has so painstakingly built up over the past decade.

For all the ironic wit the Chapmans are famous for - to the extent of saying they can make their piece again (highly unlikely as it took over a year in the first place) - this fire is both good and bad news for British art.

It's bad news for collectors - although people like Charles Saatchi are demonised by critics, artists and a lot of the media, there is no doubting his passion and total commitment to what he buys. For Charles, his art is like his family - he places it around his house, he delights in your reaction to it, he adores showing and sharing it.

I laughed over the stories about Marc Quinn's Bloodhead melting in the freezer in Mr Saatchi's kitchen - a patently untrue fantasy from the start. In his guest loo, you are confronted with a Quinn, and there's a Chapman family of little girls with willies on their foreheads staring out from his Eaton Square drawing room window. There's Paula Rego in the hall and Dwayne Hanson on the landing. Charles is a robust enough personality to bring his art right into the middle of his everyday life. He gets a charge from it, just as all collectors do, and just as I do in my small way with that first look at a Chapman in the morning.

So losing this art will be like losing close relatives - but then, many of us are quite happy to shed husbands and wives and move on seamlessly to the next. So I will not be surprised to discover that next week Mr Saatchi will be back to his daily routine, scouring small galleries and college diploma shows here and in New York, and buying whatever takes his fancy. He'll feel a sense of loss, but there's always the next great acquisition.

And for the artists too, this is a win-win situation. Sure, they've lost something unique and special from their past; but once your work has been bought by a collector it passes from your hands into their private world, only rarely being placed on public display. From the moment you sign up with a dealer, and sell that first work, you have lost control over the journey your work has embarked on.

And as many of our contemporary artists have become more and more successful, they employ assistants and technicians so that they can keep up with the demand for their work. Damien Hirst has studios in Devon and London, and a small army of dedicated workers who turn his complex ideas into reality. Tracey Emin is conscientious in ensuring that her ideas are often on public display, from working in collaboration with the pupils at a primary school on a charity project, to displaying her latest work in a restaurant (Sketch) where you or I could enjoy it over a cup of tea and a pastry.

The best of all these artists, like Marc Quinn and Gary Hume, work in a whole range of mediums, from painting to photography to sculpture to carpets. They see each new project as a challenge and a way to be invigorated - that's what I find so refreshing, their total disregard for the possibility of failure. Unlike our politicians, our leading contemporary artists constantly take risks, reacting and responding to the world around them.

Since the Sensation exhibition featuring Charles Saatchi's collection was shown in London and then in New York, the international art scene has flocked to London. Last year's Frieze Art fair in Regent's Park (with another planned for this summer) was a stunning success with the public and purchasers from abroad. And the boom in Brit Art hasn't slowed down.

The prices made by British art at auctions in New York last week show that now collectors within the American mainstream are discovering the delights of our top artists. A 1992 piece by Damien Hirst fetched a cool million dollars, while a flashing neon sign by Tim Noble and Sue Webster made $231,000; works by Mona Hatoum and Gary Hume fetched over $100,000 dollars each.

Tracey's message was right: in spite of the fire, ideas go on. But the losers in all of this are you, the public. The Tate Modern, under Nick Serota's stewardship, has been strangely cautious when it comes to investing in home-grown new art. They might host the Turner prize, and work by Sarah Lucas, Damien and Angus Fairhurst, but how much do they own?

If you and I want to see the best new contemporary art, then we will have to visit private galleries like White Cube, Maureen Paley, Sadie Coles or Mr Saatchi's collection at the old GLC building. There may be temporary exhibitions in public galleries, like the Baltic or Tate Britain, but Mr Serota has been criminally slow to purchase work for his permanent collection by young artists who now are being lauded around the world. And our elected leaders have been slow to invest in it too. What's Ken got outside his offices?

Where I live in Clerkenwell, the council has allowed large-scale developement and demolition by canny developers, without ever forcing them to put anything back for the public to enjoy. St John Street once had a boarded up public toilet, now demolished. In its place stands a single lonely sapling, surrounded by motorbikes.

Tessa Jowell needs to force local and regional councils to place art in public places, funded by developers to add to the character of neighbourhoods. Otherwise our best new art, like much that has been destroyed in this fire, will end up abroad, or hanging in a private home.

Emin: 'I'm more upset about kids being killed in Iraq'

By Jonathan Brown
Thursday, 27 May 2004

The art world was describing it as a tragedy, the insurers were facing a bill for £10m and Charles Saatchi was left pondering an irreplaceable hole in his extensive private collection.

The art world was describing it as a tragedy, the insurers were facing a bill for £10m and Charles Saatchi was left pondering an irreplaceable hole in his extensive private collection.

A fire which swept through an east London warehouse was confirmed yesterday to have destroyed some of the most high-profile modern art works of recent years. Among them were two pieces by Tracey Emin, and work by the Chapman brothers, Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume. Damien Hirst confirmed that he had lost 16 paintings. In addition there was his 22ft bronze statue Charity , based on the old Spastic Society collection boxes, which was recently auctioned for charity.

More than 100 of the items stored at the Momart warehouse came from Charles Saatchi's private collection. A spokeswoman for his gallery said: "Many of the works that have been lost are great personal favourites of Charles Saatchi's, and works that he considers to be irreplaceable in the history of British art."

It was a view echoed throughout the art world. But Emin, two of whose works were lost in the blaze - her "tent and her hut" was seeing the larger picture. "I'm upset ... I'm also very upset about those people whose wedding got bombed last week [in Iraq], and people being dug out from under 400ft of mud in the Dominican Republic ... the news is bad at the moment," she told The Independent .

At least 363 people were dead and hundreds missing in the Dominican Republic yesterday as a result of serious flooding. The fallout over the deaths of about 40 Iraqis at a wedding celebration in theQaim region, near the Syrian border, continues to reverberate.

Last night in east London firefighters were continuing to damp down the warehouse destroyed by the fire. The cause of the blaze was not yet known. Fire investigators were expected to begin their search at first light.

London Warehouse Fire Destroys Artworks

By SARAH LYALL

Published: May 27, 2004

A fire that began on Monday and ripped through a warehouse in east London has destroyed millions of dollars worth of work by leading contemporary British artists, dozens of them from the vast collection of Charles Saatchi, the warehouse's owner and Mr. Saatchi said on Wednesday.

Among the works that have been lost are pieces by Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili, Tracey Emin, Rachel Whiteread and Jake and Dinos Chapman, all part of the influential and showy Young British Artist movement championed and sustained by Mr. Saatchi for the last 15 or so years.

Well-known works destroyed in the fire, which raged for two days and leveled the warehouse, included Ms. Emin's ''Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995,'' a tent on which she had stitched the names of dozens of past lovers; and the Chapman brothers' ''Hell,'' a series of nine miniature landscapes depicting the horrors of war that took them two years to make and that, according to some reports, cost Mr. Saatchi £500,000, or about $905,000.

The fire broke out early Monday in an industrial park full of small businesses, spreading from another building into a warehouse belonging to Momart, a company that specializes in handling, storing and transporting art and antiquities. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said that the fire was being ''treated as suspicious'' -- which is routine in such cases -- but would not confirm reports that it had been caused by explosions in gas canisters stored in a building adjoining the art warehouse.

In a statement Momart, whose clients include Tate Modern, the Tate Britain, the National Gallery and Buckingham Palace, said that it had lost 5 to 10 percent of the artwork it stores. It declined to estimate the cost of the works that had been destroyed, but news reports speculated that the pieces were worth millions of pounds.

Momart is highly respected in London and, according to its Web site, www.momart.co.uk, has handled most ''major exhibitions in the U.K. over the past 20 years.''

In its statement issued late Wednesday Momart said the fire was so fierce that company officials had not been allowed onto the site, known in Britain as an industrial estate, and thus had been ''unable to ascertain the exact condition of the works that were stored there.'' The company said however that ''it would appear that all the buildings on the estate have been destroyed.''

Momart also said that confidentiality agreements meant it could not provide details of the works that had been destroyed or the clients who owned them. But it said, ''We can confirm that the facility contained works owned by a wide range of commercial galleries and individual collectors.''

Details of the works that were destroyed trickled out all day Wednesday, though. A spokeswoman for Mr. Hirst, Jude Tyrell, said that Mr. Hirst had lost a number of pieces from his personal collection, including 16 of his own paintings depicting butterflies and ''spinning'' designs, as well as works by Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas and Angus Fairhurst. ''Charity,'' a 22-foot-tall bronze statue by Mr. Hirst owned by another collector, which news reports said was worth more than £1 million (about $1.8 million), was also destroyed, Ms. Tyrell said.

Mr. Hirst, best known for work like his dead shark floating eerily in a tank of formaldehyde, is one of the most important figures in the Young British Artist movement. To the extent that the movement had a specific beginning, it was when he commandeered an abandoned warehouse in 1988 and organized ''Freeze,'' a show of his and his friends' taboo-breaking works in video, sculpture, painting, collage and photography that investigated themes like life, death and the angst of existence.

A number of pieces from ''Freeze'' were destroyed in the fire, said Will Paget, a spokesman for the Saatchi Gallery.

Mr. Paget said that Mr. Saatchi had lost about 100 pieces but that his collection was evenly spread out among six warehouses, only one of which had been destroyed. But Mr. Saatchi was said to be devastated at the loss of so much of the collection he had lovingly and cannily built up.

''Many of these works are great personal favorites of Charles Saatchi and works he considers to be completely irreplaceable for the history of British art,'' Mr. Paget said.

In a statement Ms. Emin said she was ''very saddened'' at the loss of works that ''had great personal and emotional value and are irreplaceable.'' She added, ''It is a great tragedy for British culture that so much art was destroyed in the fire.''

Several of the artists, including Ms. Emin, Mr. Hirst and the Chapmans, are represented by the White Cube, a gallery that, as much as Mr. Saatchi, is strongly identified with the Young British Artist movement.

Jay Jopling, the gallery's director, said he did not yet have a complete list of which works had been destroyed. ''A number of our artists have been affected by this terrible tragedy, and everyone is in a state of profound shock,'' he said.

As for the Chapman brothers, whose depictions of mutilated plastic dolls with extra limbs and genitals in strange places have attracted attention and opprobrium, they reacted to the fire by telling The Daily Telegraph that ''Hell,'' the piece that was destroyed, was ''only art'' and that they could make it again.

The work, depicting scenes of disaster and chaos, was made from 5,000 figures portraying skeletons, Nazis, soldiers and deformed humans that had been cast and hand-painted by the artists.

Although he later said that ''on a scale of 1 to 10 of how annoyed I am, I'd say about 11,'' Jake Chapman also joked to The Telegraph that the work ''can't be burned, because it's hotter in hell than it is in there.'' He added, ''I suspect, in fact, it will, in fact, have gone up in value if it has been burned to death.''

Correction: May 28, 2004, Friday Because of an editing error, an article in The Arts yesterday about a London fire that destroyed millions of dollars' worth of art misidentified the warehouse owner in some copies. It is Momart, a company that handles, stores and transports art and antiquities -- not Charles Saatchi, the collector, who owned dozens of the lost works.

Only art's enemies cheer the Saatchi bonfire

From The Times

May 27, 2004

By Jeanette Winterton NEWS of the fire destroying a vast collection of work by Britpack artists, including Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, the Chapman brothers and Gillian Ayres, is bringing joy to the philistines who would have paid good money to torch it themselves.

Not since a Tower Hamlets council bulldozer demolished Rachel Whiteread’s House 1993-94 on the day it won the Turner Prize have so many landscape-loving art-idiots felt so self-righteous and so vindicated.

The visual arts make the British nervous. We don’t know what we are looking at and we don’t know how to look. Recent rows over the Trafalgar Square plinth have seen us mooning over “proper” sculpture, and denouncing Marc Quinn for having the cheek to call his marble statue of the disabled, pregnant Alison Lapper, a work of art.

Even Sir Roy Strong, who knows a thing or two, wanted an equestrian statue of the young Queen Victoria to occupy the empty plinth. The joke is that if you ask anyone to name what is on the other plinths, they don’t have a clue. The British like their art invisible.

The great strength of Brit Art in recent years is that is has forced the debate on what art is and who it is for. Even the tabloids, not known for their in-depth art debates, have had to talk about Tracey and her tent and her bed, and Damien and his formaldehyde friends. People who would never step inside an art gallery have been to the Saatchi Gallery. Go there, and the room is alive with talk. Of course some people think it’s rubbish, but they are as energetically combated by those who are finding something in such images for the first time.

A VIBRANT culture needs living art, and it needs all of us to be in dialogue with that art. More people are coming to the visual arts now than ever before, and I believe that this is because of the brand new way that Brit Art has engaged the popular imagination.

If culture is to stay alive and not become a sentimental museum, it must encourage a supply of controversial art. It is right that we question the art that is made today, but it is equally right that we question ourselves; is our response honest or kneejerk? Are we open to what we see, or are we conditioned by habit and assumption?

The informal Constable appreciation society forget that their hero had tomatoes thrown at his pictures, and that they were considered crude daubs by those who complained that Constable did not understand chiaroscuro, and simply laid one primary colour next to another without grading. He also took his easel outdoors and painted from nature — which was pretty shocking to the studio artists who would never have dreamt of getting their feet wet.

When the critic for The Times reviewed Roger Fry’s landmark exhibition at the Grafton galleries in 1911, featuring work by Matisse, Cézanne, and Picasso, he declared that the frames were worth more than the pictures.

Rubbing our hands over the charred remains of Brit Art is not far from cheering at the burning of books. Anyone who is glad to see creative energy and serious thought go up in flames is an enemy of culture and the worst kind of yob. I do not care whether or not all of the destroyed works were of equal value or whether all of them would have stood the test of time. I care that we in Britain are making some of the most interesting art in the world. We should be proud of that. To lose it in a careless fire is a loss to all of us because — and this is where the philistines get it hopelessly wrong — the art of our own time is a living bridge to the art of the past and the future. Burning bridges, like burning books, is a favourite sport of barbarians everywhere.

Fears for Saatchi's collection after fire guts art warehouse

By Andrew Johnson and Danielle Demetriou
Wednesday, 26 May 2004

Works by some of Britain's best-known contemporary artists, including Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas and the Chapman brothers, are feared destroyed after a fire at a warehouse in east London.

Works by some of Britain's best-known contemporary artists, including Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and the Chapman brothers, are feared destroyed after a fire at a warehouse in east London.

Reports last night suggested that Emin's Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1994 ­ a tent on the inside of which are embroidered 102 names, including those of her family ­ and Hell by Jake and Dinos Chapman may have been lost, along with other works from the collection of Charles Saatchi.

The warehouse belonged to Momart, which looks after the Queen's collection and stores works for Tate Modern, the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York. Its personnel installed Damien Hirst's shark in its tank of formaldehyde, moved the V&A's enormous Raphael cartoons and took the Royal Academy's Sensation! exhibition to Berlin and New York.

A Saatchi spokesman said: "We are waiting for Momart to give us final confirmation. Charles is devastated and is hoping it is not as bad as first indications suggest. Key works have been lost. It's absolutely tragic."

Last night Dinos Chapman said he believed Hell ­ a controversial depiction of the Apocalypse containing 5,000 individually cast and painted figures of skeletons and Nazi soldiers, which took two years to make ­ had been destroyed.

Anna Maris, a director of Momart, said she could not confirm which works had been destroyed. "There's going to be a number of works by artists everybody's heard of, but also artists nobody's heard of. There will have been works that have never been exhibited, some of which have been stored since the 1980s," she said.

The company had three warehouses on the site, an industrial estate in Leyton. It was in the process of transferring work from the destroyed warehouse, which was the size of a football pitch, to a new unit.

"Some works were only moved a couple of weeks ago, so they had a narrow escape," Ms Maris said. "We don't know how the fire started, but we don't believe it started in the warehouse. We are devastated for our clients that have lost work."

Her fellow director Carole Hastings added that the warehouse could have contained more than 100 works ­ between 5 and 10 per cent of the works in Momart's care. "There is a mixture of paintings, big pieces and sculptures," she said.

Five hundred people were evacuated from nearby streets as more than 80 firefighters tackled the blaze, which began shortly before 4am on Monday. Last night some pockets of fire were still being damped down.

The loss of the works will be a devastating blow not only to the artists and Mr Saatchi, but to Britain's contemporary art scene. Hirst, Emin and the Chapmans have been at the forefront of the contemporary art movement for more than a decade. Renowned for their iconoclastic work, originality and disregard for convention and form, their work has attracted hundreds of thousands of people to exhibitions across the globe.

Momart was unable yesterday to put a figure on the value of the lost works, but played down reports that it could run into millions of pounds.

Malcolm Tarling, spokesman for the Association of British Insurers, said works would be insured according to the amount they would be likely to fetch at auction. "A work of art is by definition irreplaceable, because you can't go out and buy another." Many works of art are insured by specialist companies, he said.

Hell formed the centrepiece of a retrospective of the Chapman brothers' work at the Saatchi gallery in London which ended in March. Mr Saatchi reportedly commissioned the sculpture for £500,000 in 1998.

Hell is a series of nine miniature landscapes displayed in glass tanks. Its bloody scenes of disaster and destruction are made up of hundreds of tiny trees and rocks bought from model shops. They create a landscape for 5,000 individually cast and painted figures of skeletons and Nazi soldiers molesting each other. It helped to gain the brothers a Turner prize nomination in 2003.

Hell formed part of the Sensation! exhibition in 1997, along with Emin's Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, which was bought by Saatchi for £40,000. The tent contains the names of 102 people, including her family, friends, twin brother and her two aborted foetuses.

The art critic Brian Sewell said: "Major works by these artists destroyed now is going to affect our perception of the development of art in the late 20th century."

'Saatchi of the North' unveils BritArt cache to the public

DIY tycoon challenges the establishment with a new show in London and plans for his own gallery in Manchester

By Anthony Barnes and Sam Parkhouse
Sunday, 9 May 2004

A business tycoon who has secretly hoarded one of Britain's finest modern art collections, said to be rivalled only by that of Charles Saatchi, is to give the public a first glimpse of the works.

A business tycoon who has secretly hoarded one of Britain's finest modern art collections, said to be rivalled only by that of Charles Saatchi, is to give the public a first glimpse of the works.

Frank Cohen, a multi-millionaire who made his fortune from a DIY business, has a cache of 1,000 works, largely stored in a warehouse in the West Midlands.

He has agreed to display around 30 pieces in London. They include work by last year's Turner Prize winner, Grayson Perry, and fellow Turner nominees Jake and Dinos Chapman, as well as the young German artists Mr Cohen has been championing in recent years. Also on show will be work by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami.

Mr Cohen, 60, is worth around £45m. He is now planning a more permanent outlet for his collection, with a dedicated gallery in his home city of Manchester.

One of last year's Turner Prize judges, Mr Cohen has been hailed for his keen eye and dubbed the "Saatchi of the North". He built up his fortune with the DIY business Glyn Webb Home Improvements and his first purchase was a work by LS Lowry called My Family, bought because he said it reminded him of his humble upbringing.

Speaking of his ambitions, Mr Cohen said: "Art is such a passion of mine and I want to give something back. I would love to be part of creating a proper art scene in Manchester. But more than this, I want to put right the situation that, outside London and people like Saatchi with his gallery, there are no privately run art galleries and collections.

"I will be able to bring in collections at a few months' notice that the Tate would love to have but is not flexible enough to handle because it plans years in advance."

Tom Morton, a contributing editor of the art magazine Frieze, said: "His pieces are very well selected. He has a very deep and sensitive eye.

"Everyone has moved on from the whole BritArt story and the most exciting thing at the moment is collecting young German artists."

The unprecedented look into Mr Cohen's collection takes place next month as part of Art Fortnight London, featuring events in more than 70 galleries and auction houses around the capital.

Meredith Etherington-Smith, project director for Art Fortnight London, said: "There have been one or two pieces in small shows but Frank Cohen's collection has never been seen on this scale. It's a bit of a coup.

"He chose the pieces and I found this fantastic 18th-century house in Mayfair. The idea was to have pieces that would look amazing and respond to the rococo interior.

"It took me a long time to persuade him to do this and it wasn't so much me as the house that did it.

"He just loves art. His motivation is genuinely owning things and finding things and encouraging young artists. He collects things that he really responds to. He's a very pure collector. I'm not going to draw any analogies with any other collectors."

Mr Cohen follows in the footsteps of other passionate private collectors such as the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who displayed his pre-Raphaelite works at the Royal Academy of Arts in London last year. The exhibition went on to become an unexpected blockbuster.

Mr Cohen is planning to open his gallery in the Spinningfields development in Manchester city centre. He has just reached a deal with a property developer.

Art Fortnight London runs from 21 June to 5 July. Frank Cohen's collection can be seen at 3 Grafton Street, London W1

New king of contemporary art opens gallery to rival Saatchi

By Anthony Barnes, Arts and Media Correspondent
Sunday, 2 May 2004

He is reckoned to be the best-connected art dealer in the world. He represents many of the greatest artists of the past 50 years - including Jeff Koons, Howard Hodgkin, Richard Serra and the estate of Andy Warhol.

He is reckoned to be the best-connected art dealer in the world. He represents many of the greatest artists of the past 50 years - including Jeff Koons, Howard Hodgkin, Richard Serra and the estate of Andy Warhol.

And now Larry Gagosian, the influential New York dealer, is to shake up the British art market with the opening later this month of the biggest dealership in the capital. The finishing touches are being applied to an enormous converted garage measuring 12,500 sq ft which will house the gallery situated in King's Cross in central London. The Gagosian Gallery is more than three times larger than White Cube, the gallery run by the current dealer "king" of British contemporary art, Jay Jopling.

Gagosian has already had his fair share of stirring things up over here with yesterday's opening of the "Stations of the Cross" exhibition at his Heddon Street gallery in London's West End. This provocative exhibition - a collaboration between Damien Hirst and David Bailey - has Christ portrayed as a woman and has elicited a certain shock among churchmen. It is described by the gallery as part of Hirst's "fascination with Christian iconography".

But Gagosian's arrival in King's Cross and speculation about the artists he could lure to his Caruso St John-designed stable has shaken up what was becoming a moribund market.

Cristina Ruiz, editor of The Art Newspaper said: "This will undeniably have a huge impact on the London art scene. I think he's probably the most influential dealer of our times."

The opening within the next few weeks is being greeted as recognition that London is an important player in the world market for contemporary art and will bring in major exhibitions by some of the art world's biggest stars.

But it will also raise questions about whether some leading artistic lights may be tempted to leave their present dealers to show their work at the new venue.

Ms Ruiz predicts the opening will spur others to move to King's Cross. "All it takes is one major gallery to make a move and I think we will see a flocking effect and within a few years we'll see several spaces in that area."

Ms Ruiz said it would be intriguing to see what would happen when the British artists Gagosian represents in New York want to mount a major London show. "I would be very surprised if it came to a falling out," she said. "I'm sure somebody as savvy as Gagosian will move very carefully."

Stefan Ratibor, a director of the Gagosian Gallery in Heddon Street, said the new space would be used for both major exhibitions and to display works for sale. But he dismissed suggestions that Gagosian would tempt artists to move from rival dealers. "Absolutely not. There is nothing aggressive - this will only be a very positive relationship.

"We've had a West End gallery for four years. This was a question of scale. Certain artists needed a different structure - to be on a larger scale and sky-lit. Some want natural daylight which we didn't have in the existing space, and that was very much in the forefront of our minds. We see it as a mission to show the highest quality art."

Mr Gagosian's shows in New York in recent years have included eminent artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and he is currently running a retrospective of Willem de Kooning.

The art critic Brian Sewell welcomed Gagosian's move, which he said would challenge the tastes of major institutions such as the Tate. "It will be marvellous if Gagosian gets to take on the officially sanctioned art of [Tate director Sir Nicholas] Serota. Painters who would not be brought in by Tate Modern will now become visible," he said.

Mr Sewell also welcomed the unprecedented attack Charles Saatchi launched on his critics in an interview last week after his latest exhibition, New Blood, was widely derided: "It is pitiful so many critics find it easier to review me than the art."

Mr Sewell supported his rant: "I'm at his elbow on this. Bite back man, don't put up with it. "Most critics are ill informed little pigs who know nothing about anything. They are the bottom of the journalistic heap and the problem is that their editors don't care about the arts."