Another Round for Saatchi vs. Tate

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: November 27, 2004


Jonathan Player for The New York Times "Hymn," by Damien Hirst, at Charles Saatchi's gallery, a short walk from the Tate.

ONDON, Nov. 26 - The longstanding rivalry between Charles Saatchi, the British advertising magnate and art collector, and Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate here, is heating up again. Mr. Saatchi says Sir Nicholas turned down his offer to give the Tate his entire collection, while Sir Nicholas says no such offer was made.

In April 2003, Mr. Saatchi, one of Britain's biggest contemporary-art collectors, opened a 40,000-square-foot exhibition space in County Hall, once home to London's local government, on the South Bank next to the London Eye, the slow-motion Ferris wheel overlooking the Thames. The gallery is just a 15-minute walk from the four-year-old Tate Modern.

When the space opened, contemporary-art experts said Mr. Saatchi had purposely chosen a space near the Tate Modern to compete with it. He has given little to the Tate. In 1992, he donated works by many young British artists, a gift estimated then to be worth about $170,000.

Unlike the Tate, which is free, the Saatchi Gallery charges $16.50 for admission. It has not attracted the large number of visitors Mr. Saatchi had hoped, experts said. They also said Mr. Saatchi was looking at spaces in central London, where he would like to move the gallery in an effort to draw more of the art world, rather than the tourist crowd that goes to the London Eye.

Since the space at County Hall opened, it has attracted 800,000 visitors, said Ben Rawlingson Plant, a spokesman for Mr. Saatchi. Mr. Saatchi declined to be interviewed for this article, but in a question-and-answer piece scheduled to appear in The Daily Telegraph tomorrow and in The Art Newspaper next week, Mr. Saatchi says that Sir Nicholas rejected a recent offer of his collection of hundreds of contemporary artworks, largely by young British artists like Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, the Chapman brothers, Rachel Whiteread, Marc Quinn, Peter Doig and Chris Ofili. Sir Nicholas denies such an offer was made.

"Last year Charles Saatchi, then having difficulties with his landlord at County Hall, approached me about moving his exhibition program from County Hall to the derelict oil tank spaces at the Tate Modern," Sir Nicholas said in a telephone interview Friday, referring to raw space off Turbine Hall in the museum, a converted power station. "I explained that it would cost tens of millions of pounds to make the space usable, and in the long term the Tate wanted to use that space for its permanent collection. At no point did he offer to give his collection to the Tate."

Mr. Saatchi's collection is well known to American museumgoers. The exhibition "Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection" opened at the Royal Academy here in 1997 and then traveled to the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and finally to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where Rudolph W. Giuliani, mayor of New York City at the time, called the exhibition "sick stuff" and threatened to cut off city subsidies because Mr. Ofili's painting of the Virgin Mary included clumps of elephant dung.

Over the years Mr. Saatchi has gained an international reputation for going on wild shopping sprees, spending millions of dollars on the works of contemporary artists and then selling them in bulk, sending the prices for some of these artists on a roller-coaster ride. He bought dozens of works by the Italian artist Sandro Chia, then turned around and sold them, thus depressing Mr. Chia's market.

A year ago Mr. Saatchi sold about a dozen works by Mr. Hirst back to the artist and his dealer, Jay Jopling, in a deal that people familiar with the negotiations said was worth around $15 million. Over the years Mr. Saatchi has also sold dozens of artworks at a time at Sotheby's and Christie's in auctions in New York and London.

Sir Nicholas pointed out that if Mr. Saatchi was so eager to give his collection to the Tate, he could have offered to donate "Ghost," a seminal sculpture by Ms. Whiteread that art lovers say should stay in Britain. Instead, last month, the National Gallery of Art in Washington announced that Mitchell P. Rales, a Washington collector, had bought "Ghost," a 1990 plaster cast of a living room modeled after the one from Ms. Whiteread's childhood home in North London, for the gallery. "Ghost," in which window frames, light sockets, a fireplace and grooves left by doors are etched in plaster, had been on view at the Gagosian Gallery in London. Contemporary-art experts said it was worth about $2 million. "I saw it at Gagosian," Sir Nicholas said, "and was told it was not for sale."