The Olympics of the art world

28/06/2004 Telegraph

Art Basel is the world's biggest contemporary art fair, where leading dealers compete to seduce wealthy collectors with their most expensive pieces. Anyone who is anyone was at this year's event – and so was Tom Horan

Into the vast exhibition centre in the Swiss town of Basel come thousands of people, striding forward with an iron purpose. The sun is shining and there is plenty inside that is fun and beautiful, but their faces do not betray even a hint of levity. The building is alive with intention, thick with the possibilities of beauty meeting money. They have gathered to do battle at the Olympic Games of modern artistic commerce – Art Basel, the biggest contemporary art fair in the world.

Money meets art

Inside the doors, staff at a central helpdesk slip without a flicker from German to French to English, Italian, Spanish, Romansch. The fair is open to the public and attracts 50,000 visitors in five days, but the artworld elite is already equipped with its security passes, and marches past the queues for day tickets. Without a glance at the hyper-efficient Swiss signage that marks out the 270 stands, the dealers – or "gallerists", as they prefer – make their way to their temporary homes. Here, inside miniature empires rented at 427 Swiss francs (£195) per square metre, they await the arrival of Art Basel's ruling class – the buyers.

The fair may offer the chance to see an array of post-1900 artworks that would put virtually any gallery in the world to shame, but it is the intricate, courtly dance of a thousand discreet business deals that makes the event so gripping. Descending on escalators from a labyrinth of cordoned-off anterooms and hospitality bays on the upper floors, come the collectors. The antennae of the gallerists begin to quiver as they sense the arrival in their territory of a rather special kind of person. The word "rich" being considered in this milieu the height of vulgarity, they are known in the trade as "individuals of high net worth".

Although I am wearing my best – indeed, my only – suit, I sense that even the rooky dealers on the edges of the hall have me marked the second they see me as an individual of virtually no net worth. I make my way from stand to stand. For the most part the gallerists are too busy attending to the buyers to bother with people who have just come to look. In closely packed, open-sided booths that have none of the intimidatory element of walking into a commercial gallery, you are so close to the art you can smell it. You are left to examine it at your leisure – and watch the artworld at work.

I go up to the first floor, where the younger galleries are billeted. Art Basel sells itself on the quality of the work it attracts, and this is maintained through strict vetting of applicants. A gallery must have been dealing for at least three years to qualify, and then its work is assessed by the fair's seven-man committee. I decide to head for the stand of White Cube, the London gallery run by Jay Jopling. An extraordinary character, Jopling is dealer-in-chief to Damien Hirst and many of Brit Art's key figures, and son of Lord Jopling, a former minister for agriculture. Before I can get there, however, I'm stopped in my tracks by four enormous basketball players on the far side of the floor.

The stunning series of manipulated colour photographs The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is at the stand of a New York gallery called The Project. The artist, Paul Pfeiffer, has taken action shots from big games and removed the hoop, the ball and all but a single, peripheral player. In turn, this player's uniform has been stripped of numbers, names, sponsors. The lone figure stands frozen and exposed in front of 20,000 cheering spectators. The effect is eerie. "Has there been any interest in the basketball images?" I ask Jenny Liu, the gallerist. She pulls on her cigarette. "They're sold," she says, "and we're in a quiet spot. It's Siberia out here, baby."

From the corner of my eye I catch sight of dismembered body parts hanging from a tree, being eaten by maggots and snails. It's the Chapman brothers' Sex II, for sale at White Cube. Of basketball-playing proportions himself, Jopling in full dealer mode is a compelling sight. He towers over a pair of fortysomething American women, whose haircuts alone have cost them the price of a Chapman brothers sketch. His signature heavy black glasses stand out like a logo for all of Brit Art, drawing crowds of people into the stand. Jopling reaches out a long arm and wraps it round the shoulders of his clients, enfolding them in a decade and a half of London art grooviness. It's irresistible.

	Individuals of high-net-worth

Now he and the two Americans have me wedged in against the rotting flesh of Sex II. "Are you coming to the Bulgari dinner tomorrow night, Jay?" one asks him. "Dinners schminners," he says. "I can't be bothered." I decide that now is the moment to catch his eye and get a word with him, but his command of the room is imperious, and I am blotted out in favour of someone with more noughts in their current account. I decide to take a break and regroup. Being so close to so much contemporary art is having an odd effect. The intensity of all that human expression is unsettling. I slip away upstairs to the Collectors Lounge.

Basel is a drug town, the centre of the pharmaceutical industry, a global business second only to the arms trade in terms of profitability. It's home to many superb art galleries, built on its astronomical wealth. Up in the Collectors Lounge, the financial hierarchies that make up the town are starkly set out. At one end, the luxury jeweller Bulgari has its enclosure, for those with an eye for a luxury jewel. But pride of place goes to Art Basel's other sponsor, Swiss bank UBS. Its VIP enclosure is so exclusive that you can't even see into it. It's ringed off in a circle of ruched curtain that stops just short of the floor, like the one that hides the wizard in The Wizard of Oz.

As they are at the stands on the floors below, most people are smoking. A group of Catalans in their mid-fifties sits down at my table. They talk in dollars, euros and Swiss francs, pet their mobiles, sip at flutes of champagne. They're wondering whether to go to the "Conversations" tonight, the first of a series of discussion panels about burning issues in the art world. They nod at Sam Keller as he breezes through the room, his shaven head glinting.

Keller is the organiser of Art Basel, a dynamic and preternaturally charming Swiss of 37. People love Keller. He has a smile that says success. In a magazine interview available throughout the lounge he describes the qualities required to do his job: "To serve, to listen, to calculate, to moderate, to motivate, to communicate, to analyse, to criticise, to organise, to change, to set goals, to risk, and to take yourself not too serious."

I head down to the ground floor, where the biggest operators are sited, to ask a long-established British gallerist, David Juda, about what makes Art Basel special. Juda's gallery Annely Juda is one of only five that have shown at every fair in the event's 35-year history. He's on the Basel committee. "You can go to a fair like Arco in Madrid," he says, "and find twice as many people, but it's a bit like going to the Ideal Home Exhibition. Boyfriends and girlfriends wandering around and you're not sure if they're really looking at what's in front of them. At Basel people stare intently and they're very serious. This year is a big selling year. You can feel the buzz of people buying. You can tell, because you can see dealers smiling."

Jopling is certainly smiling. He's winding up a chat with another little knot of Brit Art buyers. Sex II is sold, for £450,000. This is his skill, to ease the qualms of buyers, to reassure them that their money is well spent on Jake and Dinos Chapman's astonishing 5ft painted brass vision of putrefaction. I step up to Jopling. "Could I have a few words, Jay?" I'm 6ft 2in, but he looms over me like a great larch. "What's this?" he says, staring at my notes. "'Dinners schminners'? You've been writing down my conversations." Disaster. I say maybe I should come back tomorrow. He tosses my business card into a thick notebook that contains 500 others.

'The intense concentration of art makes huge demands'

I feel dazed. It will soon be time for the "Conversation" and I need to go and change. This intense concentration of art makes huge demands on the imagination, drains your last drop of empathy, exerts an unnerving power. Some of it is breathtaking. The proximity you get to the works – Miró, Picasso, Dalí, Duchamp, Hockney, Warhol, Koons, Hirst – is quite unlike a museum exhibition. All distance is removed; history comes alive; you can feel the ghosts of the makers hovering around them. And beneath it all the incessant whisper: "Anything you see can be yours."

The "Conversations" panel is made up of international museum directors, and starry names. There's the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, whose enormous sun installation The Weather Project caught the public imagination at Tate Modern last year. Next to him sits the British architect Zaha Hadid, whose innovative projects are lauded rather more frequently than they are built. Hadid keeps turning away from her mic to point at accompanying slides, so all we hear are single phrases: "urban context", "spatial experiences", "aggregates", "typography". None the less, everyone cheers. Eliasson says something about chalk, and then: "How do you present presentation?" No one seems to know.

Then a row starts between an inflammatory German museum boss who has been smoking roll-ups and the chief curator of the Guggenheim in New York. Just as things are getting personal, the lights come up and it's time for a dinner of Louis Quatorzian opulence. The guest speakers throw slightly nervous glances around the room as the high-net-worthers buttonhole them. During the perfunctory disco, I make a run for it.

I take a taxi to the Kunsthalle, which I've heard is the destination after a hard day's culture commerce. You've got to meet Frank Cohen, someone says in the packed open-air courtyard, he's a heavyweight British buyer, fantastic collection – made millions out of wallpaper. The style magazine, I ask? No, the stuff you put on the bathroom wall. He's from Cheshire – had a chain of DIY shops in the North.

Cohen is the soul of affability, full of bonhomie and dry Mancunian one-liners, and hugely enthusiastic about art. He lost some of his collection of a thousand-plus pieces in the recent London warehouse fire. "There's an art fair every week of the bloody year," he says above the din, tugging on a bottle of beer. "And there's only so many modern artists churning out stuff to fill 'em. But Basel's the one. It's where all the dealers bring out the good stuff they've been keepin' back." I ask him what makes him spend his money on contemporary art. "I love it. It's the thing – it's got a sense of what's going on, right now, today, in the world. It's bloody modernity, i'n't it?"

At the end of the night, as Jopling and the international young gallerists let it all hang out at Le Plaza, a basement disco beneath the Swissotel, I think back to a fleeting moment I witnessed earlier in the day. I was passing a tiny private sideroom at the stand of New York giants Gagosian, the premier traders in the modern art game. I caught a glimpse of an old man, finalising his purchase of a deep blue Andy Warhol painting, frosted in a diamond glitter. The Warhol was so dazzling, so iridescent, that it seemed to pulse with life. Looking at the Warhol, the old man too looked alive, animated. This was what all those rich people were here for. They betrayed it in their eyes: they knew that cold, arid money was worth nothing in the end. They were here to strike one last deal, and trade it in for vials of pure human spirit – the finest works of art in the world.

Which have great sell-on value, obviously.

The new Mr Big of modern art?

By Louise Jury Arts Correspondent
Tuesday, 22 June 2004

He is the Charles Saatchi of the North, the self-made millionaire credited with the most important private contemporary art collection in Britain after the advertising guru himself.

He is the Charles Saatchi of the North, the self-made millionaire credited with the most important private contemporary art collection in Britain after the advertising guru himself.

Tomorrow, Frank Cohen is inviting curious Londoners to see highlights of a collection that until now only his friends and a few art-lovers in Manchester have had the opportunity to view. In the splendour of a Grade I-listed Georgian townhouse, nearly 30 works by artists including the Chapman brothers and Luc Tuymans, the highly influential Belgian who is the subject of a summer show at Tate Modern, are going on show. There is a video installation by Matt Collishaw, Tracey Emin's ex-boyfriend, and sculptures by Paul McCarthy, the artist who had two giant inflatables bobbing around outside the Tate Modern last year.

"It's an incredibly fine collection," said Anthony McNerney, a specialist in post-war and contemporary art at Christie's who agreed to help Mr Cohen hang the show. "He's very knowledgeable and extremely well-read about contemporary art. He knows a lot of the dealers and listens to them, and he knows a great number of artists and talks to them. He's a consummate collector."

Frank Cohen, 60, lives in an affluent part of Cheshire with an Emin, a Grayson Perry pot and a Lowry among others, but only one piece from his home - a McCarthy - has made it to London. Most of his 1,000-strong collection, which is stored in the Midlands, is unsuitable for the ornate grandeur of the Georgian house that has been lent for the occasion by the bank, EFG.

But Mr Cohen is eager to know what the critics will make of this first glimpse of his private passion, art accumulated over 30 years and funded with the proceeds of a DIY/home improvement business he built from scratch and sold in 1997.

"I want to know what they will write about me. I'd like to know what the critics say," he said yesterday, as he swirled around the building, answering his mobile phone between making improvements to the hang.

He started young, collecting cigarette cards and coins, before moving into art three decades ago, starting with modern British painters and sculptors such as L S Lowry, Stanley Spencer, Barbara Hepworth and Eduardo Paolozzi.

"Then that period left me because the artists were dying and the dealers were dead and the contemporary art world took over from there," he said.

He has, in fact, displayed a few of his contemporary works before, to benefit a friend who runs a small gallery in Manchester. But, he noted, no critics deigned to take a look at that.

"When you live in Manchester, no one knows you exist," he said. "They're quite a close-knit community down here. I could have 50,000 pieces in my collection, but I'd still only be a collector."

Now he feels like a film star but he claims he does not care whether the critics like what they see or not. "I couldn't care less," he said. "I do what I do. I'm not the kind of person who's going to cry my eyes out if they say they don't like it."

The interest is immense with a cavalcade of international journalists passing through the not-quite complete show yesterday for a preview.

Mr Cohen's display is part of a giant initiative called Art Fortnight, in which the capital's auction houses and private and public art galleries are co-operating to promote London's pre-eminence in the art market.

He is taking part after being invited by the writer and Art Fortnight organiser, Meredith Etherington-Smith. It is, he adds, "a great opportunity". It is also, perhaps, a taster of the much bigger permanent gallery he intends to open in the heart of Manchester next year, a tantalising advertisement worthy of Charles Saatchi.

But Saatchi is the one subject Frank Cohen will not discuss. They are virtually the same age and both built a business empire instead of pursuing higher education. Like Saatchi, Cohen is a perfectionist, moving sculptures to left and right for maximum impact, railing at the chandeliers spoiling the view of a colourful Frank Ackerman. Where they differ is in Frank Cohen's chattiness. He is as voluble as Saatchi is reticent about his art. Mr Cohen makes clear he believes there is nothing to be gained by discussing Saatchi - even though the more famous collector has already popped in to take a look.

Critics will finally be able to compare their two collections properly when Frank Cohen opens his Manchester gallery. It will cover 25,000 sq ft in the heart of the city and will have space for up to 200 paintings and sculptures, enabling a proper display of contemporary Germans, such as Andrea Slominski and Tobias Rehberger, young Brits including this year's Turner prize nominee Yinka Shonibare, and Americans, such as his current favourite, Richard Prince.

McNerney said: "He's always spotting artists and championing young artists so there are some unsung heroes of contemporary art in his collection that will probably be the most exciting things to see."

Yet Mr Cohen has just one assistant and one conservator to help him with his collecting. His art is "pretty much" what he does these days, apart from the odd property deal.

He is proud of what he has. Looking around the exhibition yesterday, he almost bounced with excitement. "It looks good, doesn't it?" he said.

The Frank Cohen collection is on show with the Neil Kaplan collection of Rembrandt etchings at 3 Grafton Street, W1, on weekdays from tomorrow until 2 July.

I made more money as a stripper...

From The Times

June 15, 2004

Stella Vine was working as a £1,000-a-week soho stripper when she took up painting four years ago, and she remained unknown until Charles Saatchi paid £600 for her dripping-blood portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales. but far from playing the great Brit-art game she is a genuinely tortured artist

by Andrew Billen

THE RISE OF Stella Vine from stripper to Saatchi Gallery star has not been indifferently reported. Her bloody depiction of the heroin addict Rachel Whitear was condemned by the student’s bereaved parents as “distasteful and inappropriate”, a judgment heavily endorsed by the tabloids. A critic in The Times considered her next best known portrait, a scary-eyed Diana, Princess of Wales, with blood dribbling from her lips, “the artistic equivalent of an unpleasant hamburger: fat and slovenly”. A month after Charles Saatchi had launched his protégée, she announced that she might flee to Spain. “Good riddance,” wrote one columnist, confidently speaking for the nation.

In short — or so, at least, I assumed — things had gone brilliantly to plan: thanks to the reflexes of the art-media complex, a nobody who had not lifted a paintbrush until four years ago had become, overnight, a sensation. In this game no one gets hurt, although a few art buyers may get stung.

But the game remains a game only if you know what you are doing and, now that I meet her, I am not at all sure that Vine does.

The first clue that Saatchi’s Midas touch has not turned Stella’s life to gold is her residence, a converted butcher’s shop in a Bohemianised but still working-class street in East London. I say “converted” but I hesitate to say exactly what she has converted it into. Her front door, ajar so that a street seller can keep his stock inside, opens into a scuffed exhibition space, empty today but for a graffiti-covered gas cooker. An oubliette peers down into the dark dungeon quarters of Vine’s 18-year-old son, Jamie. Upstairs festers a beyond-squalid kitchen and farther upstairs — except that this flight has fallen down and been replaced by a ladder — is Vine’s bedroom. On the first floor, where we talk, is her studio: white-painted floorboards, an old mattress, an old cat on the old mattress, a Mac laptop and a chair. This is not cheerful artistic anarchy; it is emotional chaos.

Vine, 35, fair, rustic-skinned, of middle height, buxom in her Tommy T-shirt (overweight, she thinks, were she to return to stripping) joins the cat on the mat. I sit on the chair. She speaks in a regionally indefinite middle-class accent, her introspective confessional featuring sudden bursts of articulacy, learning, anger and distress. I’d guess this vessel of creativity was holed and sinking were the walls of the room not covered with confident paintings from her new show, Prozac and Private Views: a large wood circle containing Catherine Deneuve and smaller rectangles featuring a fleshy Geri Halliwell, Vine’s glamorous Aunt Ella, Denis and Margaret Thatcher, the bolshie Kitten from the latest series of Big Brother and a weeping Ted Hughes. The ailing cooker downstairs is another exhibit, the writing covering it from Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Courting controversy again, I say. Expect letters from the Plath-Hughes estate.

“Yeah, gas cooker. And Sylvia. Yeah,” Vine says, as if for the first time joining the dots of the poet’s suicide. “I don’t know what it is. I have a dark passionate sense of humour, I suppose, but at the same time I could just as easily cry over it as I could sort of be cheeky with it. I suppose I’m quite teenager about it and a bit stubborn.”

Vine thinks herself as much a teenager as her son. She most certainly has an adolescent’s capacity to appropriate the feelings of people with whom she identifies and incapacity to empathise with anyone else. The Whitear controversy is a case in point. Rachel was found dead, clutching a syringe, in her bed-sit in Devon four years ago. Although Vine has not had drug problems herself, Rachel’s image as used in an anti-drugs campaign made a profound impression on her. She had never imagined the resulting painting would be exhibited, let alone the day after police had exhumed Whitear’s body. Yet I discover that she still finds it impossible to grasp the offence that this grisly coincidence caused.

“I think if I met her parents we’d probably get on fine because they’d see that I’m actually quite similar to their daughter really, an artistic destructive person, very simple. She wrote dark poetry about heroin and other things and she was into Nirvana. When you see Rachel on the internet — her eyes, I mean I just think they’re almost my eyes.” Her voice catches as if she will cry. She was prescribed Prozac after her mother’s sudden death from a brain tumour last August. Off it now, and resisting going back on, she frequently sounds self-destructive.

“I always feel very close to the edge of just going. I know a lot of people say that and don’t mean it. But apart from my son . . . ” Her voice goes again . . . “there is nothing at all, really. I always admire the decision that people make in just deciding to end it, even though it’s kind of cruel when you have children and that could ruin their life. But I’m not sure that if you’re a very unhappy person you make an enormous difference by staying, really.”

Doomed females are her subject — Plath, Diana, Whitear — but as she tells me her life story its real stars emerge as the missing, abusive or exploitative males who make victims of women. She was born Melissa Robson in Alnwick, Northumberland, in 1969. When she was 3, her father had an affair with the lodger and left home, becoming an unreliable and infrequent figure in her life: not unlikeable but “difficult”, “grumpy” and “miserable”. Oddly, she got on better with his girlfriend, Astrid Jordan — so well that she later changed her surname to Jordan (by my count Vine has got through four names in her short life; even her gallery here trades under a pseudonym, Rosy Wilde).

For a while Stella, her mother Ellenor and older brother Alastair got on well enough in the castle town. When Stella was 7, however, her mother met and married an RAF officer and the family moved to Norwich, where another daughter was born. Stella hated her strict new stepfather, a miser who drew lines on milk bottles to check how much had been drunk when he wasn’t looking. Relations reached a crisis when Ellenor’s longstanding Crohn’s disease developed into bowel cancer. Feeling that she was being blamed by her stepfather for the illness, Stella asked a friend’s mother to foster her. Social services became involved, and acquiesced in her wish to abandon school, and she moved to a bed-sit. There, still under age, she was seduced by the building’s caretaker, ten years her senior.

At the age of 17 she gave birth to Jamie. By now his father was displaying a violent temper and when she moved out into single-parent housing in Norfolk he broke into her flat. So she left for London with Jamie, took a bed-sit in Tooting and enrolled in drama school, finding work on the fringe of fringe theatre and even auditioning for Mike Leigh. She fell in love with a fellow student and lived with him for four years before leaving him for someone else. The new relationship collapsed. Alone again, her acting career going nowhere, aged 26, she began working in strip joints, including the Windmill in Piccadilly.

During the day she was educating Jamie, whom she had removed from school because of bullying. To vary his lessons, in 2000 she took him to painting classes at Hampstead School of Art. It was she, however, who discovered her vocation. Unfortunately, something called Stuckism soon afterwards discovered her.

Formed in 1999 as a backlash to conceptual Brit Art, Stuckism takes its name from an insult tossed at one of its founders, Billy Childish, by his ex-girlfriend Tracey Emin, who said his paintings were “stuck, stuck, stuck”. It champions figurative painting but has its own strict rules. Vine now regards Stuckism as a misogynistic cult but she was impressed enough at the time by the hypnotic charms of its other founder, 48-year-old Charles Thomson. After a two-month romance, they married in New York in August 2001.

“I felt I would never ever amount to anything without him. That’s what he told me,” she says in explanation. The marriage was not a success. Actually, save for a brief reconciliation in London, it ended after a single day in a violent row at their hotel. Vine finally obtained her divorce in October last year. Any relief she felt, however, was short-lived. When the news of Saatchi’s championing of her made headlines this spring, the Stuckists vigorously set about claiming Vine for one of their own. Even now the home page of the interestingly obsessive Stuckist website features carries a huge headline, “THE STUCKIST STELLA VINE”, a tag that she furiously resents and regards as a form of harassment.

I wonder if it wouldn’t be simpler for her simply to acknowledge that they had a minor role and move on. I couldn’t have said anything worse. “‘Just admit it, yeah? ‘How could you possibly have taught yourself to paint? You’re just a blonde stripper’. Regardless of the fact that I’ve lived on my own since I was 13 and not been to school and brought a son up who’s now 18 and run theatre companies and bought a butcher’s shop, learnt guitar by myself, taught myself to sing, all this sort of stuff. Regardless of all that, of course, this dynamic man must have taught me to paint.

“I have said in my blogs and in interviews, the people who have inspired me, you know: Sophie Von Hellerman, Anna Bjerger, Paul Housley, Karen Kilimnik, Elizabeth Peyton. Three or four of those are London artists, younger than me, two of those are big, iconic American painters. I don’t have a problem being generous with who inspires me. If someone inspires me, hats off to them. I’ll sell their work for them. I don’t have a problem with that. But I do have a very, very big problem with someone who saw me coming and exploited me as a mascot.”

I say the Stuckists sound like a playground gang. This upsets her even more. “He’s full of shit and, basically, every time people ask me about this f***ing man, it’s impossible to get my point of view across. You’ve got the school playground and you’ve got some very clever bullies and everyone else goes, ‘Just ignore them’. And then this kid ends up hanging himself.”

I suggest that we change the subject.

In the past few months, she tells me, she has been having an affair. It has ended unhappily. She reckons her lover had not realised what an “aggressive and desperate a person” she was.

I say I am so sorry that success has not made her happier. “No, it doesn’t mean anything, does it? People occasionally ask for your autograph or say, ‘I saw you in the paper’, but that doesn’t mean anything at all.”

So what has Saatchi’s patronage brought? Money? Well, as a stripper she could earn £1,000 a week. Saatchi bought the two original paintings for £600 each. Do, as they say, the maths. But there is no going back to the clubs now because she would live in fear of a punter with a camera-phone selling a picture to a tabloid.

Rich, she is not. On the night of the Saatchi opening she arrived late because she was waiting for the café next door to open so she could borrow £10 for the fare.

Fame, meanwhile, has made her nervous and self-conscious about her art. The dripping blood — originally an accident of the thin paint she uses — has become a trademark in a way that she never intended. Nor has she become accepted into the YBA/Jay Jopling/Charles Saatchi set. When Charles and Nigella came to inspect her work, she hid upstairs, starstruck. She still has not met them.

“It’s understandable, isn’t it?” she asks. “You get that much attention, it’s bound to affect you a lot and you get really confused and lost.”

She says she feels very alone, wonders if she should take a night class in the hope of meeting someone. Maybe she should. There are some good men out there and she yet may spot one, for, despite everything, she is not a man-hater, rather the reverse. Indeed, when she was stripping she was generous and talkative with even “the real psychos”. Her indulgence towards dependent men — Jamie included — may be, as she says, slightly “warped”, but to ban all men from her life would surely be worse.

There’s other more positive news, I think, and it is revealing itself in her art: she is moving away from painting women exclusively as victims. Two-fingering Kitten, a tarty Deneuve, dignified Thatcher, even fat and happy Ginger Spice, these are positive images. And although Vine is still heavily grieving her mother, they are all living people. No, the last thing she should do now is give up and run off to Spain.

Perhaps, I suggest, I have seen her on a bad day. “Yeah, tomorrow I’ll be high as a kite, probably, really cocky and confident. ‘I’m putting a show on here. I’m the best thing since sliced bread’. I mean too extreme really, really irritating. No, don’t worry about me.”

And so I’ll try not to, but I do wonder if her succès de scandale does not point to another legacy of Brit Art. Thanks to its brutal flippancy, we now automatically imagine artists to be cynical sales persons.

Once upon a time I would not have been surprised to discover a suffering artist.

Prozac and Private Views is at Transition, 110a Lauriston Road, London E9, until July 4.

The artist made by Charles Saatchi sets out on her own with a £7,000 cast of celebrities

By Louise Jury Arts Correspondent
Thursday, 10 June 2004

The artist who was plucked from obscurity by Charles Saatchi when he bought her kitsch painting of Princess Diana will today unveil Margaret and Denis Thatcher as her new celebrity subjects in her first solo show.

The artist who was plucked from obscurity by Charles Saatchi when he bought her kitsch painting of Princess Diana will today unveil Margaret and Denis Thatcher as her new celebrity subjects in her first solo show.

Stella Vine, a former stripper, painted what she sees as a romantic portrait out of deep respect for the former Conservative leader. She said yesterday: "That's a very non-artist's thing to say because she's supposed to be so evil. But I bought my council house and it changed my life beyond belief. I think she was an extraordinary woman."

The also includes distinctive paintings of the former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, the model Jordan and the broadcaster Joan Bakewell, who is bizarrely featured with the dead German artist Joseph Beuys. Other works feature the actress Catherine Deneuve and the singers Courtney Love and PJ Harvey, all in Vine's bold brushwork.

Several had already been sold before the opening last night, some to collectors overseas, for sums of up to £7,000, eight times higher than her prices only four months ago. It is thought Mr Saatchi may buy the painting of the Thatchers.

Vine, a 35-year-old single mother, had been struggling to support her art by working as a stripper before her striking portrait of Diana with blood dripping from her lips was bought by Mr Saatchi and featured in the latest show at his gallery at County Hall, London. A second storm of publicity engulfed her when she showed a painting of the schoolgirl Rachel Whitear, who died of a heroin overdose.

After suffering from a serious depression, which only began to lift after a pilgrimage to Lourdes, Vine has emerged with the set of new works, which will open to the public at the Transition Gallery in Lauriston Road, east London, today.

"It's been a real nightmare. I've been really down and I had a little breakdown," Vine admitted yesterday as she steeled her nerves for the critics' response. She said she had no dealer and no experience in handling the surge of interest in her work, which had left her "worried sick".

In contrast with the apparently boundless confidence of a Tracey Emin or Sarah Lucas, Vine said yesterday she found it difficult to have faith in her work. "I'm so unconfident and my self-esteem is naturally low. You need the art world's advice to help you manage all this crazy stuff," she said.

"I think no one will like this stuff and then on a cockier day I think I'm making great work. I'm really proud of the Catherine Deneuve painting which I finished about four days ago. Without that, I would be feeling very, very worried about the show.

"I've really got to stop knocking myself and giving myself a hard time. I was this really down stripper who was struggling but could cope, then something wonderful and lovely happened. This was what I had dreamed of, to be recognised for doing something creative. But I was really lost and confused by the response."

Modern art warehouse was burgled before fire

By James Burleigh
Friday, 4 June 2004

A warehouse that burned to the ground in east London, destroying priceless works of modern art, was burgled shortly before the blaze broke out, police said yesterday.

A warehouse that burned to the ground in east London, destroying priceless works of modern art, was burgled shortly before the blaze broke out, police said yesterday.

One of the smaller units at the complex, which included the specialist art storage company Momart, was raided some time before the blaze took hold at 3.40am on 24 May.

The unit, thought to have contained watches, computers and mobile phones, was broken into and has been pinpointed as the seat of the fire. Although the burgled unit did not contain the prized pieces of art, it was part of the overall complex in Leyton razed by the fire.

About 100 "irreplaceable" works belonging to collector Charles Saatchi including pieces by Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Chris Ofili and Jake and Dinos Chapman were reduced to ashes. It took several days for the fire to be completely extinguished and police could not investigate the scene until it was deemed safe on 29 May.

A Scotland Yard spokeswoman said: "It is now believed that the fire began in a particular unit. The warehouse had 34 units in total - two main ones and 32 smaller ones.

"One of the smaller units where the fire actually began appears to have suffered a burglary but it is yet to be established if the fire was deliberately started."

The spokeswoman said that arson remained an option as to the cause of the fire and police are continuing to investigate - working closely with forensic teams at the site.