Saatchi's opening buzz

From The Times

December 9, 2005

CHARLES SAATCHI is to open his new gallery with a macabre artwork of miniature skeletons and dead insects.

Swarm will hang in 110 parts from the ceiling at the Duke of York’s headquarters in Chelsea, West London. Tessa Farmer, 27, is the first installation artist confirmed to exhibit at the space when it opens next year. Her work appears to consist of tiny human skeletons with wings perched along the segmented thorax of a dead dragonfly. The Birmingham-born sculptor’s microscopically detailed sculptures include wasps, daddy- longlegs, flies and spiders.

Farmer, who lives in North London, used tree roots to make the skeletons of “evil fairies” with three fingers and four toes.

Saatchi has rocketed several young British artists to fame and fortune as a result of his patronage, including Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst.

Something smells funny at the Tate...

...and it's not just the elephant dung on a newly acquired £700,000 installation by Chris Ofili. Guy Adams reports on a scandal that has shaken Britain's modern art establishment

Tuesday, 29 November 2005

The crowds at Tate Britain last weekend were unlikely to have thought there was anything particularly strange about Christopher Ofili's work The Upper Room, except perhaps the fact that it was partly made using several dozen dollops of elephant dung.

But these are troubled times for the Tate. Behind the scenes, the critically-acclaimed series of 13 paintings, said to be Ofili's take on the Last Supper, is at the centre of a row that has engulfed some of the biggest names in Britain's artistic establishment.

At the heart of the affair is the fact that, when The Upper Room was purchased from him for £705,000 earlier this year, Ofili was himself a Tate trustee. This, critics say, represents a major conflict of interest. It also seems to contradict official guidelines, which say: "Even the perception of a conflict of interest in relation to a board member can be extremely damaging to the body's reputation."

The matter is so serious that, last week, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said it will investigate. Meanwhile, the Charities Commission is looking at whether the trustees breached its code of conduct. Pressure is mounting on the Tate's director, Sir Nicholas Serota, who was in charge of the Turner Prize when Ofili won it in 1998. A fortnight ago, he was forced to apologise for wrongly soliciting a charitable donation of £75,000 towards The Upper Room's asking price.

Sir Nicholas, 59, has made few enemies in his 17 years in office. He earns a modest salary of about £100,000, and even his critics acknowledge that he is open and approachable. However, he has attracted criticism as a champion of conceptual art.

And he is also facing flak after it emerged that he paid £3.3m to unnamed Balkan figures to secure the return of two stolen Turner works. Next Wednesday, when this year's Turner Prize winner is announced at the Tate, protesters will converge to call for Sir Nicholas's sacking.

Further investigations have prompted wider allegations of cronyism. Last week, it emerged that dozens of works associated with trustees - by Michael Craig-Martin, Peter Doig, Bill Woodrow, Christopher Le Brun, Michael Landy and Richard Deacon - have entered the gallery during the past 15 years. Originally, the Tate had defended the Ofili acquisition as a one-off "exception" to normal acquisition policy.

This is awkward for the great and the good who serve as Tate trustees. At present, they include the newscaster Jon Snow, the LSE director Sir Howard Davies, the HarperCollins chief executive Victoria Barnsley, the Guardian Media Group chairman Paul Myners and John Studzinski, the financier who secured Prince William's work experience stint at HSBC bank.

Meanwhile, the way the controversy unravelled has contributed to an aura of suspicion. The Tate at first refused to disclose the amount paid for The Upper Room, but it was forced to release a series of details under the Freedom of Information Act.

This precedent could have serious implications for Britain's major galleries, which may now have to release the costs of all new purchases and the identities of vendors, throwing the secretive, poorly regulated art market into turmoil.

None of these potential outcomes could have occurred to the Tate's trustees when they first met to discuss the purchase of The Upper Room in 2002. Then, it represented a unique opportunity for the Tate to get its hands on a work regarded as one of the most important pieces of British art of the past decade.

According to minutes of the meeting at which the purchase was agreed, the trustees were painfully aware of the potential conflict of interest. Ofili was required to leave the room when the potential sale was discussed, and it was agreed that the gallery would seek to minimise the cost by seeking additional funds from elsewhere.

In November 2003, Sir Nicholas "reminded trustees that... ordinarily it was the policy not to acquire work by serving trustees," but that there was a decision "to waive this rule on the basis that this was an exceptional group of works offered at an exceptional price".

The sale did not go entirely smoothly. Recently, confidential e-mails between Ofili's agent, Victoria Miro, and Sir Nicholas, sent in November 2002, have emerged. They show Miro pleading for the purchase to be speeded through because her client was getting married and might need the money. "I suspect he may be less willing than previously to wait for an extended period in terms of finance," she wrote. "Evidently, especially as Chris is a trustee, this is a sensitive situation, but if you could give me some indication as to which way to proceed, I will ensure that your decision is handled with discretion."

Eventually, Miro obtained more than £300,000 from private benefactors to ensure the sale went through at a price acceptable to the Tate. The total cost, at £600,000 (excluding VAT) was about 20 per cent lower than the original asking price.

At this point, the plot thickens. Less than half the money eventually paid for The Upper Room was actually secured by the Tate (£120,000 from its funds, £100,000 from members and £75,000 from the National Arts Collection fund). The remainder came from five unnamed private benefactors.

This raises awkward questions. The identities of Miro's benefactors remain secret, but Tate minutes from November 2003 note that several of the donors were both "purchasing a new painting by Ofili and contributing X to Tate". Could they have been making an investment in order to increase the value of the works they hoped to acquire? An acquisition by a national collection often leads to a rise in an artist's value. Indeed, The Upper Room is said to be worth twice its original asking price.

Certainly, there was a buzz about Ofili as news of the Tate purchase began to filter through the art world. From 1998 to 2004, his auction prices fell by 24 per cent, yet on 12 May this year, two months before the Tate deal was officially announced, Charles Saatchi sold an Ofili painting, Afrodizzia, in New York for £550,000, more than four times his previous record price.

A report on the purchase by Charles Thomson, co-founder of the Stuckist movement of artists, has been submitted to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It notes: "Mr Saatchi is a client of Ms Miro, and it should be established whether any privy information passed between them. It should also be established whether Mr Saatchi was involved at any time in the purchase procedures."

The department has also been asked by Thomson to instruct the Tate, in future, to include details of trustees' holdings of artworks in its Register of Trustees Interests. It is not at present known if any of the remaining 11 trustees own works by Ofili.

Ofili himself has not escaped criticism. News of The Upper Room's purchase came a few months after, writing in The Guardian, he urged artists to donate their works to the Tate for free. Coincidentally, he stood down as a trustee last week when his five-year term ended.

It doesn't end there. This newspaper's Pandora column recently obtained a report by the Tate's conservator Natasha Duff suggesting that Ofili's paintings are being damaged by the conditions in the gallery. It records that the special "do not touch" signs are badly situated and light levels in the room are five times higher than the recommended maximum, and concludes that the works may have to be removed from view for several years.

In defence of the Tate, most critics acknowledge that The Upper Room is an exceptional piece, and seems to have been bought within a tight budget, at a reasonable price. The gallery is co-operating with all enquiries into the purchase, and is confident that Ofili's temporary absence from trustee meetings when the sale was discussed will save them from further criticism.

Also, the Tate has a duty to acquire important items of new British art. As at least three of its trustees are working artists, the gallery could be seriously inconvenienced if it is required to boycott the work of any trustee.

"My view is that this has been a cock-up rather than a conspiracy," says Martin Bailey of The Art Newspaper. "The gallery should have been more open when questions were first asked about the purchase. The fact that they weren't has contributed to a feeling of suspicion.

"The sale was probably handled properly, but from a PR perspective they should have been open from the start, rather than allowing this drip, drip of revelations. Ofili has yet to give his side of the story, and it would be helpful for him to explain his views on the sale," Bailey says.

Either way, the art world is waiting for the next development in the Ofili affair with bated breath. Who can tell when the next piece of elephant dung might hit the fan?

Image of 'cocaine Kate' inspires art exhibition

By Ciar Byrne, Media Correspondent
Thursday, 24 November 2005

Tousled blonde tresses tumbling over a short black dress, Kate Moss leans over to prepare a line of cocaine. It is an image that has gained near-iconic status, marking the moment when the media turned against the supermodel from Croydon who had been its darling for so many years.

This time though, it is not a grainy camera-phone picture but the work of the artist Stella Vine who has used pictures of Moss apparently snorting cocaine as inspiration for a new exhibition.

Entitled The Beautiful and the Damned after an F Scott Fitzgerald novel - which was also the theme of Moss's 30th birthday party - the exhibition includes four paintings of the supermodel. Must Be The Season Of The Witch, which Vine only completed yesterday just in time for the opening night, is based on the Daily Mirror picture.

A second portrait, Kate Unfinished, depicts Moss as a doe-eyed Brigitte Bardot-style beauty, clutching a champagne glass. In a third, Moss is shown smoking a cigarette, paint dripping from the outline of her chin, with the accompanying text: "Holy water cannot help you now."

Vine has also painted Moss surrounded by a gaggle of celebrity friends at the Priory, where she spent six months in 1998 being treated for drink and drug problems.

Moss is seen waving her arms from a window, while her boyfriend, the Babyshambles singer Pete Doherty reaches out to her from another window. The scene features Moss's former boyfriend Johnny Depp with his current partner Vanessa Paradis, Jude Law and Sienna Miller and Law's ex-wife Sadie Frost.

Vine, who worked as a stripper to support herself until she came to prominence last year when Charles Saatchi bought two of her works, has painted Moss before, but has never met the model, working instead from photographs. She once painted a portrait of Moss, adorned with the words "I only make love to Jesus", which was bought by the fashion designer Alexander McQueen. Vine said: "I struggled for quite a long time to paint her. All last year I couldn't and then I got quite used to her and really enjoyed painting her. I feel quite compassionate about her.

"There's something in her eyes, a spirit that we're fascinated with. She's been in the business for so long. She's almost the most beautiful woman in the world, a Mona Lisa. She has that Catherine Deneuve mysterious thing. You can read her how you want to. We're fascinated by rock and roll wild culture, because most of us can't do that for whatever reason. It's nice to see people being hedonistic, decadent and glamorous."

Alongside the pictures of Moss, Vine has included a painting of the Rolling Stones in their younger days, to highlight the inconsistent attitudes towards hedonism in male and female celebrities.

She said: "If a woman has a child and has a really wild life, it all gets a bit more vindictive, she's a terrible person, whereas if a man has a wild life and a child, it's OK, because the mother's looking after it."

The artist feels particularly sympathetic towards Moss because she herself has just kicked a £600-a-week cocaine habit. Most of the pictures in the exhibition were painted during a four-month cocaine binge, which Vine blames on the pressure she came under to work non-stop.

Dossier sheds light on the Tate's £700,000 payment to Chris Ofili

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
Saturday, 29 October 2005

Critics of the Tate are piling on pressure over whether the gallery should have purchased works by a serving trustee, the Turner Prize-winning artist Chris Ofili.

Stuckism International, a group of artists critical of the conceptual work it claims the Tate favours, has submitted its own dossier about the affair to the Charity Commission. Charity commissioners have already asked the gallery to explain itself.

Questions were raised after documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act detailed exchanges between Nicholas Serota, director of Tate galleries, and Victoria Miro, Ofili's dealer, in which she emphasised that the artist was getting married and was unlikely to want to wait long to be paid.

The papers revealed that the Tate paid £600,000 for The Upper Room, a series of 13 paintings. The £600,000 price is without VAT, which brought it to £705,000.

The Tate and its members supplied £220,000, with the rest coming from benefactors. The Charity Commission has written to the Tate asking it to address issues raised by the row including the question of conflict of interest, although a spokeswoman stressed this was not - yet - an official investigation.

Charles Thomson, co-founder of the Stuckist movement, said in his submission to the commission that there were other questions that needed to be answered.

The Museums Association guidance on acquisitions states that the value of any potential purchase should be researched and at least one independent valuation sought. "There is no indication in the trustees' minutes that there has been any research to establish the value of the item," Mr Thomson said.

He also argued that there was a conflict of interest for Sir Nicholas Serota, who was appointed to his post by the trustees. "As his employment is in their remit, it creates a conflict of interest when he is involved in procedures which directly affect a trustee's interest," he claimed.

And he said the role of the private benefactors who contributed to the acquisition should be examined. All were private purchasers of Ofili's works from the Victoria Miro Gallery in London, who therefore stood to benefit from the boost to the artist's status and prices that would stem from the Tate acquisition, Mr Thomson said.

Two months before the announcement of the purchase of The Upper Room, Charles Saatchi, the art collector, sold another Ofili work at auction for more than £500,000, four times the previous highest price for an Ofili. "A leading question is whether the impending announcement by the Tate was known by others involved in the auction," Mr Thomson said.

However, a Tate spokeswoman defended the purchase. "Chris Ofili's The Upper Room was acquired because it is an exceptional work, marking a major development in Ofili's career.

"The Tate trustees felt strongly that to neglect to acquire this major group of paintings would represent a missed opportunity and it was acquired with support from the Art Fund, Tate Members and a group of individuals."

It was the gallery's policy only to purchase work by serving artists in exceptional circumstances, she said. Such cases were debated in full, in the absence of the artist in question.

Sentenced to the Saatchi

From The Times

October 25, 2005

By Derwent May SO CHARLES Saatchi’s gallery has finally been expelled from London’s old County Hall. It seems a pity, because the charm of the absurd permeates this gallery. The current exhibition consists of large, aggressive paintings — and these ferocious works hang, astoundingly, on the walls of little 1920s committee rooms, each still with its rusting coal fireplace and clock over the mantelpiece.

What is less charming is the commentary in the gallery’s Picture by Picture Guide and in panels beside the pictures. These comments are almost unintelligible, written in a mishmash of old Marxist sociology and fashionable media analysis, with curious glimmers of Walter Pater’s aesthetics and St Augustine’s theology thrown in.

There is a painting of a two crashed cars wrapped round poles. The guide’s comment is that “alluring in its sterile beauty . . . (it) promises nothing beyond our commodified conception of the infinite: a terrible fascination glimmering with airbrushed newness”. Of an untitled painting of what looks like an Oxford don in his mortar board, by Thomas Scheibitz, we learn that “in Scheibitz’s world of synthetic replication and commodity signifiers, even people are reduced to ideologically pragmatic form”. There are 64 paintings, and 64 explications.

There is, of course, nothing new in art critics using language as nobody else would. George Orwell remarked long ago that if one critic writes about the extraordinary blackness of a painting, while another praises its exquisite whiteness, we no longer think that they contradict each other.

But no one should write sentences such as those in the Saatchi guide. With considerable effort, you can prise some sort of sense out of some of the remarks, but even that seems to have an extremely tenuous connection with the pictures. Imagine a person who came here hoping that these paintings might give him some up-to-date insight. If he read the captions, he would go home scarred for life.

In very small print at the end of the guide the “text” is attributed to Patricia Ellis, without any indication of who she is. But the gallery’s owner must surely take responsibility for these verbal monstrosities. So move your works to Chelsea, Mr Saatchi, and good luck to you. But before you go — in the words of the shocked Dudley Moore in the old Dud and Pete sketches — “Wash your mouth with soapy water!”

'Young British Artist' rakes Momart's ashes

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
Monday, 17 October 2005

One of the "Sensation" generation of Young British Artists who lost paintings in last year's art warehouse fire in east London is to unveil new work modelled on those that were destroyed.

Just as Jake and Dinos Chapman, the former Turner Prize nominees, are working on recreating a new - if modified - version of their monumental sculpture Hell, Richard Patterson, 42, has returned to a giant series of paintings from the mid-90s known as Culture Stations. Four of his paintings, including three of the collage-based Culture Station works, all owned by the collector Charles Saatchi, were lost in the fire that swept through the Momart warehouse in May last year. Each painting took up to five months to complete.

"After the initial loss and getting over that, this is a good moment to think about them again, " Patterson said. "I had wanted to return to them for a while,

The new work in the series, Back at the Dealership Culture Station No. 5, will be unveiled to the public on Saturday as part of a new month-long show at the Timothy Taylor gallery in London entitled "Paintings from Dallas", referring to the city where Patterson now lives with his American wife.

And although only one Culture Station is included in the new exhibition, he said: "There will be more of them. They were quite major works that if I was to do a big museum show at some point, would represent an important part of my early career.

"Originally I wanted to literally remake some of them but then that seemed crazy. End to end, that's two whole years' work [from 1995 and 1996]."

Instead he has settled for creating new work in the same sequence and with the same title, taking similar inspiration from advertising, television and the internet.

But whereas his work of a decade ago involved painstakingly building up collage layers, with additional painting, advances in computers mean he can now work faster.

Patterson, like Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas and Fiona Rae, attended Goldsmiths College of Art in London and was in the enormously influential show, "Freeze", organised by Hirst.

But it was "Sensation" at the Royal Academy in 1997, that brought these artists to mainstream public attention. A selection of the work owned by Charles Saatchi, it featured many of the original "Freeze" stars.

Patterson said: "From 1993 to 1996 was a particularly exciting period in London and there was a tremendous amount of openness among artists working in London. My peer group were aware of each other but no one knew how many other people were making interesting work. You could sense it but no one had done 'Sensation' yet.

"The meaning of the work was locked up in that sense of possibility. It's hard to remember when you look back historically what the mood was like at the time, the optimism. You can see it in the music as well such as Blur - real optimism mixed up with slight cynicism. It was very knowing."

He had already moved to America when the fire broke out in the Momart warehouse, destroying hundreds of works including contemporary classics by Tracey Emin, Hirst and the Chapman brothers as well as key pieces by important older artists such as Patrick Heron.

"Now I'm really sad about it because ultimately they're just irreplaceable," said Patterson. "Artworks have an independent life and they're continually reassessed. What seemed profound and important in 1995 I might be embarrassed to see now. But maybe in five years' time they might seem good again. But they were the very best I could do at the time."

Many of the artists and owners of the destroyed works are due in court next year in a joint action against Momart. All parties are due to meet in December to decide on procedure for the claim which could cost the warehouse millions.

County Hall owners hit back at 'scurrilous' Saatchi in gallery dispute

By Cahal Milmo
Friday, 7 October 2005

Less than a fortnight after Charles Saatchi announced he was moving his London gallery because of a dispute with its "malevolent" landlord, it was claimed yesterday that he is not leaving the South Bank site after all.

Lawyers representing the family-owned Shirayama Shokusan corporation told the High Court that Mr Saatchi, 62, plans to open a museum of photography or work by new young artists at County Hall once he moves his flagship collection to Chelsea in 2007.

The claim comes after the former advertising magnate last month cemented his very public falling out with the building's landlord by alleging an "endless campaign of petty unpleasantness" by Makota Okamoto, head of Shirayama's European operation. Christopher Pymont QC, representing Mr Okamoto and Shirayama, yesterday called Mr Saatchi's remarks "scurrilous". The barrister told the High Court that despite Mr Saatchi's description of his lease as "untenable", the art collector has plans to use the gallery space as "either a low-cost museum of photography or a museum of very new young artists".

Last night representatives of Mr Saatchi refused to comment on whether he intended to continue his 30-year lease at County Hall.

Shirayama, a Japanese property investment company which bought the building opposite the Houses of Parliament for £60m in 1993, is seeking to end the lease immediately by claiming that the Saatchi Gallery repeatedly exceeded its rights in the building. This allegedly included placing art works and signs outside the space rented by the gallery and using a corridor that was not part of the lease as a cloakroom.

Shirayama is seeking to end the lease on the ground that the gallery breached a requirement to charge a minimum amount per ticket by arranging a "two for the price of one" offer with the magazineTime Out.

Relations between the two sides soured soon after the opening of the gallery in April 2003 when Mr Okamoto is claimed by Mr Saatchi to have sworn at gallery staff. The locks to a disabled lavatory that the gallery used were changed by Mr Okamoto, forcing disabled visitors to use lavatories in an adjoining hotel.

Mr Saatchi plans to move his collection to the Duke of York's Headquarters in King's Road, Chelsea.

The case continues.

Saatchi Gallery in eviction suit

From The Times

October 7, 2005

A dispute between Charles Saatchi and the landlord of the premises where he keeps his art collection moved to the High Court in London yesterday, where the Saatchi Gallery faced a barrage of claims over its occupation of the County Hall site on the South Bank of the Thames, including breach of its lease.

Since the gallery opened in April 2003, the family-owned Shirayama Shokusan corporation, owner of County Hall, has issued writs against Danovo Ltd, the gallery operator. The Japanese company wants to evict the gallery to stop it using parts of the building it says are not covered by a lease issued by Cadogan Leisure Investments.

Christopher Pymont, QC, for Shirayama and Cadogan, told the judge, Sir Donald Rattee: “Relations between the parties soon deteriorated.” Mr Saatchi made defamatory remarks to Shirayama’s European representative, Masakazu Okamoto, and his wife, Mr Pymont said. The hearing continues today.

Kapow! Pop goes the Tate Modern

Britain's biggest modern-art museum is doing the equivalent of changing the furniture around. But in this case, the items on the move are world-famous works of art. Louise Jury reports

Friday, 30 September 2005

When Tate Modern opened five years ago, the reaction to the building was wondrous admiration. The attitude to the art inside, which was hung in themed, rather than chronological, displays was not always as appreciative.

So the announcement yesterday of the first major rehang of the collection is set to spark a new round of debate over the best way to display the work in the former power station.

All 48 galleries devoted to the display of the Tate's permanent collection will be rehung - and 40 per cent of the art will be works never previously shown in Tate Modern. These will include one of Roy Lichtenstein's powerful pop-art paintings, Whaam! and Fernand Leger's The Acrobat and his Partner.

Around a fifth of the works will be new acquisitions including posters by the Guerrilla Girls, a group of feminists who disguise their identities with gorilla masks, and works by Tacita Dean and Anish Kapoor.

Another recent purchase is Video Quartet by Christian Marclay, a striking installation using hundreds of short-film excerpts of performers, first seen at the White Cube two years ago and more recently at the Barbican, which Frances Morris, the curator, said was set to be a contemporary classic. Louise Bourgeois has donated one of her own works, Mamelles.

The artworks will continue to be presented in themes but will essentially focus on key movements in 20th century art -Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism.

Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of theTate galleries, said: "I would be very surprised if there were not some criticism. Our purpose is not to deflect criticism but to present the collection in the strongest possible way." But he added that the rehang would probably answer one or two of the criticisms - such as whether the Tate was showing the strengths in its collection and whether it was presenting the works the public really wanted to see.

Ms Morris said the rehang was not a "a final solution" but she hoped it would shed new light, not least by continuing to pair artists of different generations she considers to have points in common, such as Martin Creed and Carl Andre or Anish Kapoor and Barnett Newman.

The rehang is being sponsored by UBS, which will also fund a programme of additional events and displays including bi-monthly live performance art events, building on the success of previous performances such as dance from the dance company DV8 and by Merce Cunningham. It will also offer the Tate access to its own corporate collection of 900 pieces to fill some of the well-documented gaps in the Tate's holdings.

A UBS spokesman, Jeremy Thompson, said: "We are delighted that works from the UBS Art Collection will be included in the display to augment areas of artistic practice which are not currently well represented in the Tate collection."

The rehang will be unveiled next May. Forthcoming temporary exhibitions, also announced yesterday, include the first major retrospective in the UK of Martin Kippenberger, the late German artist, a current passion of the collector Charles Saatchi who has already featured his work in the Saatchi Gallery.

Other shows will examine the early career of the Russian Wassily Kandinsky and the work of French artist Pierre Huyghe.

Tate Britain will present an exhibition of Constable landscapes, a major retrospective of Howard Hodgkin, one of Britain's greatest living painters, and a show examining the late 18th century and early 19th century taste for the Gothic.

Works no longer in the collection

* TONY CRAGG: Britain Seen from the North

* CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI: The Reserve of Dead Swiss

* ANSELM KIEFER: Parsifal I and Parsifal II

* MARK DION: Tate Thames Dig

* ANDRÉ FOUGERON: Atlantic Civilisation

* ARISTIDE MAILLOL: Torso of the Monument to Blanqui

* RACHEL WHITEREAD: Untitled (Nine Tables)

* BRUCE NAUMAN: Mapping the Studio

* HOWARD HODGKIN: Dinner at Smith Square

Saatchi gallery leaves South Bank

Tuesday, 27 September 2005 BBC

The Gallery opened on London's South Bank in spring 2003

Art collector Charles Saatchi is to move his gallery from London's South Bank to new premises in Chelsea.

The gallery, which opened its doors at County Hall near Waterloo in 2003, is to move into the Duke of York's HQ building near Sloane Square in 2007.

Building work on the new 50,000 square foot space will commence in April 2006.

"It's a magnificent building and the very high footfall on the Kings Road makes it a perfect location," said gallery director Nigel Hirst.

"Taking this entire building in Chelsea will give the gallery the opportunity to grow and develop in a way that we would like."

'Great success'

"We are very sad to be leaving County Hall because in many respects it's been a great success," said Mr Saatchi.

"The Duke of York's HQ Building, which will give us extremely large, well-proportioned rooms with very high ceilings, will create a perfect gallery to look at contemporary art."

The 62-year-old collector has blamed the behaviour of his current landlord, Makota Okamoto, for his decision to move premises.

Mr Okamoto and his representatives could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

Saatchi show ventures north for the first time

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
Saturday, 24 September 2005

The first major British exhibition outside London of Charles Saatchi's art collection is to be staged in Leeds next year.

Highlights of The Triumph of Painting show, which has drawn large crowds despite mixed reviews to his gallery on London's South Bank, will open at the Leeds City Art Gallery in January and run until March.

The move was a condition of a sponsorship deal between the Saatchi Gallery and Walker Morris, a Leeds-based law firm, which is supporting the third instalment of the show and a previously unplanned fourth round.

After attracting more than 360,000 visitors since opening in London in January, the show has been just extended to a six-part series running to next April.

It profiles painting, a genre Charles Saatchi said had been seen as "pitifully uncool and bourgeois" for the past 20 years but was now enjoying a revival.

The loan was welcomed by civic leaders in Leeds. John Proctor, the city council's executive board member for leisure, said: "This is a fantastic coup by Walker Morris and one that will be a significant boost to the city's national and international image."

Until now, British art-lovers have had the opportunity to see the Saatchi collection only at his own gallery or, once, in the Sensation show at the Royal Academy. This later transferred to New York where there was a row over a dung-encrusted painting of the Madonna by Chris Ofili.

The deal to take works outside the capital is a new venture for the advertising millionaire.

Nigel Walsh, curator of exhibitions for Leeds Museums and Galleries, said he was delighted. "The Saatchi Gallery has been very accommodating," he said. "The show isn't selected yet, but we'll be able to have a selection from all six parts so we might be showing things that haven't been seen [in London] yet."

He expected it would attract audiences from across the North to the Leeds gallery which usually receives around 250,000 visitors a year. It would have been very difficult for the gallery to raise the funds to mount such shows, he said, adding that it would be exciting to see the purchases of a major collector.

Charles Saatchi has admitted that he never thought the show would be a success. "It's good that the public are responding to painting so keenly," he said.

80: Charles Saatchi, 62

From Times Online

September 7, 2005

Collector

AFTER last year’s critical mauling of the County Hall gallery and the fire of Momart, SAATCHI’S stock has certainlyfallen since the days when he championed the Young British Artists, but you can’t count him out: his two Triumph of Painting exhibitions at County Hall showed a new direction, and his break with the YBAs - he is believed to have sold £16m worth of Hirsts -was impeccably timed. He continues to be a key figure for British arts. And he’s married to a domestic goddess, of course.

Field Guide to Judging a Show by Its Title

Angel Franco/The New York Times

At the Met putting up a sign for the name-brand "El Greco" show.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: September 4, 2005

THIS time of year, the titles of oncoming art exhibitions blare from magazine covers and museum posters, amplified by megawatt names, weighty epochal allusions, clever colloquialisms or restrained, status-reeking factuality. (Can you say "2006 Whitney Biennial"?)

"Dada," is the one-word title of a National Gallery exhibition.

"Style and Status," is a euphonious, before-the-colon title.

"Populence" is, well, made up.

An exhibition title is a harbinger, the first whiff of a brand whose apotheosis will be not only the show, but also assorted gift shop merchandise: the ties, scarves, umbrellas and totes on which it will be emblazoned. Or, looked at another way, the title is a flare fired from an ocean liner that has yet to crest the horizon; it lights up the night sky regardless of whether the vessel is sinking or there's a party onboard. Once the exhibition opens, the title becomes a mere handle, an appendage whose fate is forever tied to the impact of the show.

Some titles are almost drabbly self-evident. "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism" the plain-spoken title of one of Alfred H. Barr Jr.'s groundbreaking surveys at the fledgling Museum of Modern Art, may not roll off the tongue, but it is hallowed - if a bit dry, like Barr himself. But other titles seem calculated to enhance a show's mystique. The afterlife of the first museum show of Conceptual Art (Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, 1969) undoubtedly benefited from its poetic mantra of a title: "Live in Your Head: When Attitude Becomes Form." The risk, of course, is that at a certain point originality can simply seem weird. The Whitney Museum's current "Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing," for example, practically tells you not to look too closely at the art.

Occasionally titles fuse so vividly with their shows that they become a kind of code of their own. It's hard to believe the furor over the Brooklyn Museum exhibition of works belonging to the British adman Charles Saatchi would have reached quite the pitch that it did without the title "Sensation." On a far more sinister note, there is the pitch-perfect poison of Hitler's "Degenerate Art" exhibition of 1937. "Modernist Trends of Which the Führer Disapproves" would not have had the same effect.

And then there are the titles so lengthy they require internal punctuation: invariably, a colon. The protocol of the colon is complicated, if not unfathomable, involving rhythm (number of beats per side) and balance (the less, apparently, the better). The Modern's forthcoming "Safe: Design Takes on Risk" gets leverage up front from the Todd Haynes movie of the same one-word name, but can't quite go it alone. Anyway, the two dots lend a Hollywood cadence: "Vincent Van Gogh: The Drawings" meet "Superman: The Movie."

On the other extreme are brazen one-word titles. "Dada" at the National Gallery in Washington, for example, assumes - probably correctly - that the word is a part of the vernacular, even perhaps a brand. The Modern's "Pixar," opening in December, makes that bet somewhat more literally. "Frequency," which is being planned by Thelma Golden and Christine Y. Kim at the Studio Museum in Harlem, is a little unclear but has a certain buzz about it. It may also be a sign of an institutional tradition. Ms. Golden, who a decade ago organized "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art," remarked at the time of her last survey, organized with Ms. Kim and simply entitled "Post-Black," "I have no colon."

But punctuation doesn't always slow a title down. "Russia!," the immense survey of Russian culture opening on Sept. 16 at the Guggenheim, would certainly be dull without the Vreelandesque exclamation point.

No one messes much with solo shows of the quick or the world-famous (witness MoMA's "Elizabeth Murray" and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Fra Angelico"). But an added word or two provides focus. This year we have "Memling's Portraits" (did he paint anything else?), "Frank Stella 1958" (i.e., very early), "Robert Rauschenberg: Combines" (i.e., seminal) and "Gottlieb 1956" (huh?).

Over all, and perhaps unsurprisingly, there seems to be an inverse ratio between the prominence of the museum and the nerviness of its titles' forays into wordplay, popular culture references or general touchy-feely appeal. Prominent big-city museums favor straight-laced titles; the most playful one at the Met this season is "The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult," which doesn't exactly pander.

Smaller, out-of-the way museums in need of attention take more risks and liberties. This summer the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo appropriated one of marketing's most overused adjectives for "Extreme Abstraction," while the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston opted for sitcomese with "Getting Emotional." "Girls Night Out," a show organized last fall by the Orange County Museum of Art, sounds as though it might involve two-for-one daiquiri specials. And there's always the option of reshaping or simply inventing words. Look at "Populence," an exhibition about popular culture's influence on current art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland.

The league leader of contemporary-art titledom may be the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which segued from deconstructionist chic to rocker sinister to Sunset Boulevard suave in the late 1980's and the 90's with "A Forest of Signs," "Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990's" and "Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945." This year the museum is back on the charts with "Ecstasy: In and About Altered Space," a contemporary art survey that explores heightened consciousness and perception. Other indications of a trend toward the intergalactic include "Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology and the Paranormal" at the University of Maryland, and my fave, "Star Star: Toward the Center of Attention" at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.

Yet even at their most adventurous, museum exhibition titles rarely breach book-club acceptability. This is left to commercial galleries, which in New York alone offered, this summer, "Bridge Freezes Before Road," "Ribbed for Her Pleasure" and "Drunk vs. Stoned 2" - the bare-bones original of the "Ecstasy" exhibition in Los Angeles. These gallery shows may be the tiniest of boats, full of holes and taking on water, but their titles will stay afloat, tantalizing us from the pages of artists' bibliographies for years to come.

Vine's model vision informed by her own journey from strip club to artist's studio

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
Friday, 2 September 2005

Lucian Freud's portrait of the model Kate Moss sold earlier this year for £3.9m. Stella Vine has yet to put a price on her own version, finished just a day or so ago, but given the dramatic transformation in the life of the one-time stripper who got her big artistic break last year thanks to the acquisitive eye of collector Charles Saatchi, it is unlikely to stay propped up against a wall for long.

It was revealed this week that the pop star George Michael had paid £25,000 for one of Vine's paintings, a portrait of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, who was one of his friends. The two were introduced by Michael's boyfriend, Kenny Goss, who has a gallery in Dallas where she has exhibited.

It is a developing friendship through which Vine, 36, is now meeting celebrities such as the former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, whom she has previously painted only with the help of magazine and newspaper images.

Her picture of Kate Moss was also inspired by photographs. Vine has painted the blonde model, whose spirit she admires hugely, several times before but has not been satisfied with the results until now. "I'd done a few small ones before but never quite got her. But I've been working on this for a few days and I just stayed up all night and finished it yesterday morning or the day before," she said. "It's got the little Sid Vicious sneer she does. I'm pretty impressed by Kate. Although she does her job very well and very professionally, she doesn't seem commercial. She's got something, I suppose."

Despite media controversy about Moss's relationship with the pop singer Pete Doherty, a self-confessed drug addict, Vine said she was sure she was a good mother to Lila, the model's daughter by her ex-boyfriend Jefferson Hack. "The Sixties were very wild - with the Rolling Stones - and they all lived forever and had many children who are OK," Vine said.

Vine had been working as a stripper to support herself until just before Mr Saatchi snapped up two of her works last year, catapulting her to prominence. The first was a portrait of the dead heroin addict Rachel Whitear and the second was an earlier portrait of Diana, which portrayed the late princess with blood pouring from her mouth.

The artist's task now is to produce the work required for shows commissioned by galleries from London to New York.

俄羅斯成立第一個藝術基金

資料來源：2005年7月12日The Art Newspaper
摘譯：黃亞紀

倫敦報導。烏克蘭的油礦大亨、Vekselberg’s Link of Times藝術基金會的總裁Viktor Vekselberg，已經對外公佈他設立了第一個俄羅斯藝術基金：這個基金將設在瑞士的Thornton Fine Art Investment Fund SA之下、專門投資俄羅斯藝術、最初將以5年為投資單位。

　　Viktor Vekselberg是一位聖彼得堡出身的投資企業家，目前是俄羅斯的第3大首富，身價約61億美金。Viktor Vekselberg雖然拒絕透露此藝術基金的確切運作金額，但是指出上億的資本是必要的，並且信心滿滿的認為其必將獲益。
「在俄羅斯，藝術市場的發展至今為止落後於其他產業，但是現在正式開始成長的時機，並且帶進了更多的投資者參與其中」，Mark Schaffer，在紐約主持A La Vieille Russie的藝術經紀人說，「我相信從現在開始會有更多的俄羅斯藝術基金成立」。

　　同樣的信心也出現在Viktor Vekselberg身上，他相信這個基金機制將會非常活躍；他所創辦的這個基金將會在世界各地的拍賣中、以及向各地的經紀人購買俄羅斯藝術品。Viktor Vekselberg是在2004年開始對藝術市場有興趣，並且成立Vekselberg’s Link of Times藝術基金會，希望將在國際間的俄羅斯藝術品收藏回母國，像是他就將Forbes Faberge Collection中的俄羅斯藝術品以1億美金買回。這些藝術品現在正在歐洲舉行巡迴展。

Artist protests at Saatchi show

From The Times

July 6, 2005

An artist sneaked a painting into the Saatchi Gallery in London to protest against the absence of British artists in a show, The Triumph of Painting: Part Two, that opened yesterday. Stuart Semple, 24, installed his 29in x 29in (74cm x 74cm) canvas, right. A spokesman for Charles Saatchi said: “This is a one-off show in which (Mr Saatchi) focuses on a current favourite of his — German artists. That’s not to say that he is not deeply interested in the British art scene.”

So much for BritArt: Saatchi turns to Germans

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
Monday, 4 July 2005

Charles Saatchi has shunned British artists in favour of Germans in a new exhibition of paintings that opens tomorrow at his London gallery.

The show is the second of a trio of exhibitions under the title The Triumph of Painting, which began in the former County Hall building earlier this year.

The advertising millionaire surprised the art world when he set aside the installations and sculptures for which he is best known in favour of works on canvas. "For me, and for people with good eyes who actually enjoy looking at art, nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting, whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday," he told The Art Newspaper.

Although not necessarily known to a broad British public, many of the selected artists in part two are, like those in part one, firmly established in their own countries. Thomas Scheibitz, 37, for example, is representing Germany at the Venice Biennale, the long-standing international showcase of contemporary art.

The other artists are Albert Oehlen, 51, Franz Ackermann, 42, Dirk Skreber, 44, and Kai Althoff, 39, plus the Pole Wilhelm Sasnal, 33. Their subjects include the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, natural disasters and accidents.

The exhibition is the first curated by Mr Saatchi since the 1987 New York Now show to exclude British artists - though part one included the Brit Peter Doig and the final instalment, due in November, will exhibit work by Dexter Dalwood.

Mr Saatchi lost nearly 150 works, including Tracey Emin's tent embroidered with the names of everyone she had slept with, in the Momart warehouse fire in May last year.

But this has not deterred the determined art-lover from acquiring new works. He is an assiduous visitor to a vast network of small and up-and-coming galleries, as well as more established art venues.

Has Saatchi, patron of sharks and unmade beds, gone off Brit Art?

From The Times

July 4, 2005

By Sophie Kirkham CHARLES SAATCHI, the champion of modern British artists, has excluded homegrown talent from his new exhibition, which opens today.

The multimillionaire art collector will be displaying works by German and Polish painters in the show — the first time one of his exhibitions has not featured a British artist since 1987.

Mr Saatchi has been a collector and exhibitor of British artists for the past 15 years and is widely regarded as an influential force in the Brit Art movement of the 1990s through his acquisition of controversial works such as Tracey Emin’s unmade bed and Damien Hirst’s sharks in formaldehyde.

But not since his New York Now show at his old North London gallery 18 years ago has he opened the doors to a show that excludes British talent.

In a change of direction early last year he began selling off his more sensational pieces or relegating them to the storage rooms. Then came the fire at the Momart warehouse in the East End of London in May last year, which destroyed 144 works in the collection.

Although devastated by the fire, Mr Saatchi continued to offload many of his old favourites, including £16 million of Hirst, and started buying up about 150 paintings from mainly Europe and America. He also sold Marc Quinn’s Self, a cast of the artist’s head in nine pints of his frozen blood.

Mr Saatchi, 62, has now given his entire gallery over to painting and has reportedly told The Art Newspaper that the Young British Artists, who proved such crowd pleasers a decade ago, may be “nothing but footnotes” in art history. “Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting,” he declared.

The Triumph of Painting series is a showcase of different styles including abstract, figurative, landscape and Pop Art.

The Triumph of Painting: Part 2, which opens at the Saatchi Gallery, in London’s County Hall, concentrates on works by one Polish and five German artists and features natural disasters and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe as some of its themes.

The series began in January this year and will run until May 2007. The first collection to be shown featured one British painter, Peter Doig, and the next will feature the Londoner Dexter Dalwood. In the final part of The Triumph of Painting just three of the nineteen artists are British-born.

A spokeswoman for the Saatchi Gallery said: “This is not making a point about the state of British painting. The show just has a very international feel to it. At this stage it is northern European and these artists were particularly strong together.”

Can England's Most Artful Power Plant Turn Up the Juice?

By ALAN RIDING

Published: June 12, 2005

LONDON

THE vast brick-faced power plant standing across the Thames from St. Paul's Cathedral still seems like an implausible home for a major museum, but that no longer worries Londoners. In the five years since Tate Modern opened, it has become a phenomenon: social, economic, urban, even artistic. And here, it seems, success counts more than appearance.

True, the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron did an imaginative job converting the monolithic building. They left its 350-foot-high chimney, raised the "skirt" of its facade at ground level and added a new glass-fronted top floor. Inside, they created three floors of exhibition space and left its cavernous Turbine Hall as a challenge to artists and curators.

But the real alchemy occurred when the people arrived. From its first days, Tate Modern drew crowds, devoted as much to discovering London's first modern-art museum as to hanging out in its large bookstore, its cafes and its top-floor restaurant overlooking the river. Indeed, helped by free admission (except for temporary shows), it has become a genuine public space.

Little wonder, then, that for its fifth birthday, Tate Modern is blowing its own trumpet. Since May 2000, it boasts, it has received close to 22 million visitors. And between April 2004 and March 2005, the number was 4.15 million, surpassing, for instance, the 3.6 million visitors to the Pompidou Center in Paris during the same period. (It is too early to make a similar comparison to the "new" Museum of Modern Art in New York.) In 2004, 60 percent of Tate Modern's visitors were under 35, and 40 percent were repeat visitors.

So, yes, Sir Nicholas Serota, 59, the Tate's director since 1988 and the man who took the gamble of creating Tate Modern and dividing the Tate's collection into post-1900 international art and British art, has reason to feel vindicated.

Certainly, not everyone has been won over; not Matthew Collings, an independent art critic, who says that hip has become hype. As he recently told BBC Radio, "that the relationship of that museum to art is one of solemn pretentiousness coupled with a sort of inane silliness."

But to those who say people visit the museum mainly to socialize, Sir Nicholas can now afford a dry retort: "It's a kind of myth that, in the 1950's and 1960's, people came to museums only to look at art and now they come only to drink coffee."

The museum's timing was impeccable. From the early 1990's, thanks to the mischievous antics of the so-called Young British Artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, and the marketing skills of the collector Charles Saatchi, contemporary art became all the rage here. Even tabloid ridicule of the annual Turner Prize - is this art? - kept it in the news. And then Tate Modern appeared, wrapping new art in respectability.

Yet for all its popularity, Tate Modern is still a work in progress, starting with the building itself. "It always takes time for any institution to learn to manipulate the instrument it has created, and it has taken us time, and I think we haven't quite got hold of the building," Sir Nicholas said over coffee in his office in the old Tate Gallery near Westminster, now the Tate Britain. "Some things have worked well. Turbine Hall has been a startling success. But the layout of the galleries can create the sense that you are on a conveyor belt."

One solution is a new extension planned for the south side of the building, he said, to cost an estimated $300 million. Here, he went on, galleries would be designed more as destination spaces than as corridors, not least because they would be displaying less traditional art forms - installations, architecture, video and film - a diversification that, perchance, mirrors the broad mission of the Pompidou Center.

Yet what has really prompted the Tate's trustees to invite the firm of Herzog & de Meuron to design the new extension is, again, success. Sir Nicholas said he had originally imagined a need to seek new space around 2010, but the museum's large crowds - averaging 11,200 a day - made it necessary sooner. Further, the French utilities company Électricité de France Energy, which still occupies part of the building, is planning to upgrade its equipment and will soon be freeing new areas.

But there is another reason. Even more than Shakespeare's Globe Theater, which opened 100 yards away in 1997, Tate Modern has energized this long-neglected Southwark neighborhood. Art galleries and restaurants have sprung up, buildings are being renovated, and new ones are appearing. Nearby, for instance, the Iraqi-born British architect Zaha Hadid is building a new exhibition center for Britain's Architecture Foundation, her first project in London.

"We also have to develop a plan because our neighbors are beginning to come forward with plans for major office and residential buildings and, if all those are completed, they would probably restrict what we could do in the long term," Sir Nicholas said. "We have to tell Southwark what we're planning to do - and we're going to do so this year."

As it happens, the threat of unwanted neighbors is real. A development group has acquired a small property barely 30 yards from the ramp leading down to Turbine Hall, where it plans to build a high-rise that would soar above Tate Modern. Attempts by local residents - and by the Tate - to block the project have so far failed, but a residents' association has now taken the case to the European Court of Human Rights.

Still, for all the talk of real estate, what about the art? Sir Nicholas has long tired of conceding that Tate Modern's early-20th-century collection is weak, especially compared with the Modern's in New York and the Pompidou's in Paris. "We obviously can't fill these holes other than by a gift from an individual collection," he explained, "and in this country, at least, there are not big collectors. What we can do, however, is to try to acquire major works from the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's. Of course the market pushes up prices, particularly in the United States, but there are opportunities."

The Tate empire as a whole - Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St. Ives - has only about $8 million to spend each year on new acquisitions. Sir Nicholas has therefore looked for donations by leading British artists. So far, with pledges from 30 artists, 8 works have been delivered.

In the meantime, Tate Modern will rotate art from its permanent collection every six years, with the first new display scheduled for next year.

Vicente Todoli, the museum's director, said somewhat murkily: "It will be neither thematic nor chronological, although in some areas the public will sense time, and other areas may suggest themes. It will have a lot do with movements of art, confrontations, hubs, cross-sections. But it will start from the strengths of the collection, not from an idea."

When it comes to temporary exhibitions, Tate Modern has an advantage. It naturally counts on blockbusters to fill its cash box, and it is looking to its new Frida Kahlo retrospective, which was to open on June 9, to pull in the crowds. But with smaller shows, it is also introducing the art of non-Britons like Giorgio Morandi, Sigmar Polke, Luc Tuymans and Arte Povera artists, to the public here.

That these shows are also popular is a measure of the remarkable awakening to modern and contemporary art in Britain today. And in promoting this interest, Tate Modern is accompanied by the Whitechapel Gallery, the Serpentine Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts (which presented the infamous 1997 "Sensation!" show by Young British Artists from Mr. Saatchi's collection). But Tate Modern is the proof that modern art has come here to stay.

"The success of Tate Modern has been so complete and so far-reaching that it takes an effort to remember a time when it did not exist," Richard Dorment, the respected art critic of The Daily Telegraph of London, wrote in his anniversary tribute. "Today, London is acknowledged to be the center of the art world, a role that once belonged to Paris and then New York."

So, Sir Nicholas was asked, did he now intend to follow the Guggenheim Museum of New York and the Pompidou in expanding his empire abroad?

"The empire is built," he replied with a smile.

He sounded convincing. More or less.

Art, Money and Power

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: May 11, 2005

We had "Sensation" at the Brooklyn Museum, a gift to Charles Saatchi, whose collection it advertised, and shows at the Whitney of artists (Robert Rauschenberg and Agnes Martin come to mind) virtually packaged by the gallery that represents them. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has been renting its Monets to a casino in Las Vegas, while the Guggenheim, which gave us the atrocious "Armani," an even more egregious paid advertisement, is spending resources shopping itself around the globe while canceling shows here at home.

Every year, in one way or another, museums test the public's faith in their integrity. When P.S. 1 unveiled "Greater New York" some weeks back, the exhibition turned out to be a shallow affair in thrall to the booming art market. No one really should have expected otherwise from an event timed to coincide with the city's big contemporary-art fair. Meanwhile, P.S. 1's institutional parent, the Museum of Modern Art, the spanking new headquarters of Modernism Inc., inaugurated its exhibition program with an appalling paean to a corporate sponsor's blue-chip collection. This gave the financial services company, UBS, an excuse to plaster the city with advertisements that made MoMA seem like its tool and minor subsidiary. You can only imagine how that went over with another of the Modern's sponsors, J. P. Morgan, UBS's rival.

Now comes the Met with its current Chanel-sponsored Chanel show, a fawning trifle that resembles a fancy showroom. Sparsely outfitted with white cube display boxes and a bare minimum of meaningful text, this absurdly uncritical exhibition puts Coco's designs alongside work by the current monarch of the House of Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld.

A few years ago, a Chanel show was put off by the Met's director, Philippe de Montebello, because Mr. Lagerfeld wanted to interfere. It makes no difference whether he had a direct hand in it this time or, as the museum keeps insisting, was kept at arm's length from the curatorial process: the impression is the same, and impressions count when it comes to the reputation of a museum.

Museums deal in two kinds of currency, after all: the quality of their collections and public trust. Squander one, and the other suffers. People visit MoMA or the Met to see great art; they will even consider art that they don't know or don't like as great because the museum says so. But this delicate cultural ecosystem depends on the public's perception that museums make independent judgments - that they're not just shilling for trustees or politicians or sponsors.

Naturally, the public wonders whose pockets are greased by what a museum shows, because there's so much money involved in art. But this question can be subordinated if the museum proves that it's acting in the public's interest, and not someone else's. In turn, museums can call on the public. The New York Public Library is auctioning some American art, including a couple of Gilbert Stuarts and an Asher B. Durand that has been a civic landmark for many decades. Some New York museum ought to end up with the picture but will have to rally public enthusiasm swiftly - it will have to bank on public trust.

Of course, this is the real world. Museums need trustees to cover the bills. They depend on galleries and collectors and sponsors and artists for help. Last year, the Modigliani retrospective at the Jewish Museum had a ridiculous painting that turned out to belong to a trustee who insisted it be included. No exhibition of a living artist avoids some negotiation (read: compromise) with the artist or the artist's dealer. The artist or the dealer may demand that this picture, not that one, be shown; that new work be stressed; that a certain collector's holdings be favored; or that the show's catalog be written in a certain way. It's the cost of doing business.

But there are degrees of compromise. Some years back, the National Gallery in Washington presented a show of the collection put together by a Swiss industrialist, Emil Bührle, with a catalog overseen by his heirs that celebrated his "inner flame" for art but made no mention of the fact that his fortune came partly from dealing arms to the Nazis, or that his son, who owned many of the works, was convicted of illegal arms sales. Only the most scrupulous reader of the fine print would have noticed that a Renoir once belonged to Hermann Göring.

The show was about Bührle, so the public could expect to learn who he was. The Chanel show avoids mentioning her activities during the war, when she maintained a life in Paris as the lover of an SS officer and, according to her biographer, Janet Wallach, tried to exploit Nazi laws to wrest control of her perfume business from her Jewish partners. No doubt, the Bührle show would never have happened if the National Gallery had emphasized how Bührle sold arms to the Nazis, and I suspect Chanel would not have been very happy about sponsoring this show if the Met had been more forthcoming about its founder's wartime history.

Is such information irrelevant to what's on view? It depends.

The public should decide. The Caravaggio exhibition at the National Gallery in London makes clear that he was a murderer. His violent personality explains something about his later work. It would have been irresponsible for the exhibition not to mention it.

Trust us, museums say: the rules need to bend, and we know how much bending is enough and how much is too much. In a curious way, commercial galleries are in a better position. We see where they're coming from. Frank Lloyd Wright had a saying. At an early age he made a choice between "honest arrogance and hypocritical humility." He picked arrogance. Galleries are honest about wanting to sell you something. Museums often traffic in moral hypocrisy - and are then exploited for their presumptive lofty independence. Chanel couldn't have bought better publicity.

As for the Met, it says something that it would allow itself to play this role, just as it says something about the Modern that its first big exhibition seemed like a corporate payoff.

At least MoMA gets something. The museum will get art from UBS. Mr. Saatchi made millions recently selling Damien Hirst's shark, whose value was enhanced by the notoriety of "Sensation." All Brooklyn got was grief.

An Artist's Gallery of Ideas: Chris Ofili's Watercolors

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: May 5, 2005

There are no Madonnas in "Chris Ofili: Afro Muses 1995-2005," an exhibition of more than 180 watercolors. Nor is there any elephant dung.

Mr. Ofili's first one-man show in New York may surprise museumgoers who have not seen his work since 1999, when a painting of a black Madonna with a clump of elephant dung on one breast caused an uproar. Denouncing the Ofili work among others as "sick stuff," Rudolph W. Giuliani, then the mayor, threatened to cut off the city subsidy to the Brooklyn Museum, where the painting was featured in "Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection."

Chris Ofili/Courtesy of David Zwirner

One of Chris Ofili's imaginary portraits of women, featured in his show "Afro Muses 1995-2005," at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Chris Ofili

A part of "The Gardener."

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Chris Ofili at the Studio Museum in Harlem during the installation of "Afro Muses 1995-2005," his show of the watercolors he has been privately doing for years.

Mr. Ofili, 37, says he has put all that behind him. And since that imbroglio, his career has steadily risen: he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale two years ago, and his work has entered the permanent collections of museums like the Tate in London and the Museum of Modern Art.

Yet with "Afro Muses," at the Studio Museum in Harlem, viewers finally get a peek at the way he works and thinks.

For 10 years now, Mr. Ofili has been making watercolors, each about 9½ by 6½ inches and produced in a single sitting. Predominantly heads of men and women, as well as some studies of flowers and birds, they are his way of unlocking ideas that may eventually become full-blown paintings.

"I've always had this intimate relationship with drawing," Mr. Ofili said in an interview at the Studio Museum, surveying dozens of watercolors that were about to be hung on the gallery walls. "They're a springboard."

While his paintings can take anywhere from a few months to a few years to complete, watercolors, he says, are a form of "instant gratification."

Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum, called the exhibition "a curator's dream." Rather than having to approach dozens of different collectors and museums to put the show together, she secured all 181 works from a single source: the artist.

Over the years, Mr. Ofili steadily squirreled the watercolors away in a box in his studio, pulling out this one or that one whenever he was seeking inspiration.

Ms. Golden said nobody knew the collection existed until she went to Mr. Ofili's studio in London two years ago to interview him for a catalog essay on the work that was to be shown in Venice. While discussing the paintings, he began showing her some examples of their genesis - the watercolors.

"That's when my curator's radar went off," Ms. Golden said. "I never imagined he had this corpus of work. He had no plans for them because they had never left his studio."

The works, on view at the Studio Museum through July 3, now fill the main gallery. All the men and women depicted are whimsical in their expressions and their dress. The women, rendered mostly in three-quarter poses, are clad in colorful costumes with richly painted jewelry and somewhat fantastical hairdos. The men are generally shown in profile, some with ornate beards and decorative African-style garb.

As real as they seem, none of these people exist. They all grew out of Mr. Ofili's imagination. Some are inspired by images he spotted in magazines or on television or conjured up from subconscious impressions absorbed on the street or at a party.

Ms. Golden and Mr. Ofili have grouped many of the watercolors in an irregular grid across the gallery. "Since they're mostly people," Ms. Golden said, "we imagined them as a crowd."

The walls have been painted a tan shade Mr. Ofili chose for its calming effect. That hue is repeated in one of the mats in each frame.

On the side walls is a series of faces that Mr. Ofili calls "Harems." Each arrangement consists of one man with as many as four women on each side of him. Asked why he chose the configuration, he said, "They were destined to be together."

There is also a series of women with white lips that he calls "The Unkissed."

"I always loved the idea that lips would blush if kissed," he said. Hanging below the "Unkissed," are five suitors, all bearded and wearing what seems like regal garb. Each has the same face. "They're pretty much the same bearded guy," Mr. Ofili said.

One of the most unusual groups of watercolors in the show, titled "The Gardener," jointly depicts a man surrounded by five colorful birds perched on branches and three blooming flowers.

Asked whether the gardener exists, Mr. Ofili replied, "I'm sure somewhere."

Head made of blood sold by Saatchi for profit of £1,487,000

By Arifa Akbar
Thursday, 21 April 2005

Marc Quinn's famous sculpture moulded with eight pints of his own blood was regarded as one of the signature pieces of the Young British Artists when the new Saatchi Gallery opened less than two years ago.

Marc Quinn's famous sculpture moulded with eight pints of his own blood was regarded as one of the signature pieces of the Young British Artists when the new Saatchi Gallery opened less than two years ago.

Now Charles Saatchi, the gallery owner and one-time patron of the YBAs, has sold the work, Self, to an American collector for £1.5m, further fuelling rumours that his love affair with the movement is at an end.

Saatchi bought it in 1991 when Quinn was relatively unknown and its sale is thought to have earned him a profit of £1,487,000.

The sale follows a period of artistic overhaul for Saatchi. In January this year, the unmade beds and sharks in formaldehyde which had drawn visitors to his gallery in County Hall, London, were swapped for oil paintings owned by Saatchi, in a year-long exhibition called The Triumph of Painting.

While the gallery remains tight-lipped about the future of pieces which once heralded a new wave of daring, often shocking, British conceptual art, many works have already been sold.

Damien Hirst bought back several of his own works from Saatchi in 2003, for a reported £7.8m. These included a sliced pig in formaldehyde, This Little Piggy went to Market, which alone was valued at £1.5m. Hirst's seminal work, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a shark in formaldehyde which became emblematic of the YBA generation, was sold for a reported £6.25m in January this year.

Saatchi is thought to have parted with one of his favourite pieces by Hirst, a sheep in formaldehyde, entitled Away from the Flock, for £2.1m. He has also sold Rachel Whiteread's elegiac piece Ghost, as well as Ron Muerk's sculpture Dead Dad which appeared in the central space of Saatchi's gallery at County Hall.

Many art critics have taken Saatchi's reconfiguration of his gallery to signify the death of the YBA movement, which rose to such prominence a decade ago. Others have suggested that he is cashing in on the works that he helped to make famous to finance his latest passion for paintings.

But Anna Somers Cocks, editor-in-chief of The Art Newspaper, said that although Saatchi helped to make the work of the YBAs fashionable, his latest move would not sound the death knell for the conceptual art of that generation.

"If these artists are still fetching good prices, it means there are a whole variety of people buying them," she said. "I don't think we will find that just because Saatchi has sold a few pieces, that prices will fall. It does not depend on one art collector. The market for contemporary art is very wide in Europe and America and it is a well supported market. Damien Hirst is considered a YBA and his prices are going higher and higher. There are enough other buyers out there to prove there is interest."

Some art experts believe the sale of extraordinary works that Saatchi amassed in the 1990s will, on reflection, be a huge mistake.

Quinn's self portrait, Self, created in 1991, was made from blood taken from him over a period of five months. The blood was poured into a negative mould of the artist's head and frozen. This cast was exhibited in a glass container set on top of a refrigeration unit at the Saatchi Gallery from 1992 until last year.

The piece has subsequently become a touchstone for a particular brand of art of the body and is regarded as a sensitive meditation on mortality and the fragility of life. Rumours of it melting after workmenreportedly pulled the plug on a refrigerator have prolonged the notoriety and visibility of the work

A spokeswoman for the Saatchi Gallery confirmed that Quinn's sculpture had been sold. But a statement added: "Saatchi has been the biggest buyer of contemporary art over the last two years. He has set record prices for many artists in auction."

Saatchi's other sales

* Damien Hirst's shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, is believed to have been sold to a US collector, Steven Cohen, for a figure of between £6m and £7m. Saatchi bought it for £50,000 in 1991.

* Rachel Whiteread's Ghost, a sculpture from 1990, was a plaster cast of a living room modelled on a house in north London similar to the one she grew up in. It was sold for an unknown amount.

* Damien Hirst repurchased up to 12 of the works that Saatchi collected at the beginning of the artist's career for a rumoured £7.8m including This Little Piggy Went To Market, from 1996.

* Away From The Flock, also by Hirst, is believed to have been sold for £2.1m.

* Four works by Ron Muerk are believed to have been sold including Dead Dad, Angel, Mask and Pinocchio.

This Is Your Brain on Pause

Reuters Damien Hirst's "Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind"

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: April 3, 2005

Gagosian Gallery "Autopsy With Brain Out" by Damien Hirst, in a show at the Gagosian Gallery.

WITH his first New York show since 2000, Damien Hirst, abandoning his famous menagerie of dead sharks and pharmaceuticals and eight-foot-wide ashtrays and air-blown beach balls and humongous anatomical models, has unveiled at Larry Gagosian's Chelsea emporium 31 photorealist paintings, all heavily assistant-aided and tongue in cheek. The subjects include skulls, crystals, pills, a doctor proffering a brain, an empty hospital hallway, an emaciating crack addict, a bloody soccer hooligan, dissecting tables - campy shockers, aimed at Page Six and hedge fund speculators.

The show's opening galvanized the predictable mob of ebullient celebrities and tut-tutting rubberneckers. They cheerfully congregated before paintings of car bombings and of a monkey receiving an injection in the face. It isn't clear whether anyone noticed, amid the revelry, that a moment had passed.

That moment encompasses the laddish phase of Mr. Hirst's charmed pop-star trajectory, which first brought him widespread fame more than a decade ago as the clowning, precocious ringmaster of the Young British Artists. The Y.B.A.'s were, and are, a diverse group, their linkage really just a marketing ploy by their prime collector, Charles Saatchi. The term is now outmoded and, like Mr. Hirst, middle-aged. But in its day, Mr. Hirst was the group's natural front man. He had talent, and he had the act down. He was a buoyant and canny entrepreneur and impresario, a savvy scavenger of art history with a nose for fashion and publicity; and he concocted a big, shiny, brightly colored and easily accessible universe of giddy, winning naughtiness. The universe consisted of putrefying animals, gynecological equipment, dot and spin paintings, glass, mirror and stainless steel.

Mr. Hirst's recipe was a love-it-or-hate-it cocktail of death, celebrity, sex and technology, heavily spiked with comic self-promotion. The work was at heart about money, or about the love affair between art and money, Warhol's juicy subject. It openly trumpeted its own costly materialism and cheap thrills, in keeping with a certain upbeat and winking strain of pop culture.

Americans could recognize in Mr. Hirst a cross between Jeff Koons and Julian Schnabel, although he was always a British type - the pied piper of cheekiness. His vulgar, macabre delirium was awful, but almost endearing: Mr. Hirst had just enough panache to charm some fence sitters and keep detractors off balance. He also had a real knack for clinical materials that married Duchamp to Donald Judd. It became his signature mode.

So did his sense of fun. That he was part owner and designer of a short-lived London hot spot was in keeping. Like him, it succeeded spectacularly by failing in the end. The Pharmacy was a restaurant outfitted with pharmaceutical cabinets and a staff decked in Prada lab coats. Briefly, it captured the New Labor/Cool Brittania spirit of the late 90's. When it folded in 2003, after being sold, Mr. Hirst, who had shrewdly only leased its art, then bought its fixtures and fittings, auctioned the lot - which fetched $20 million at Sotheby's, souvenirs of style. Not long before the present show opened in New York, word got out, conveniently for Mr. Hirst and Mr. Gagosian, that a hedge fund billionaire named Stephen Cohen had paid the sensational price of $8 million (or possibly more) for Mr. Hirst's shark in formaldehyde. The seller was Mr. Saatchi, who has lately turned his attention instead to (surprise) paintings. Meanwhile, Mr. Hirst's new show has reportedly sold out. The paintings were said to be priced at up to $2 million apiece.

Promoting the exhibition, Mr. Hirst has burbled on about the joys and mysteries of painting and the deeper meanings of his spooky symbolism in ways surely calculated to sound naïve and cunning at the same time. Irony inoculates him against criticism, starting with the obvious criticism that his latest pictures are terrible. They are, Mr. Hirst can say.Warhol is his role model, but increasingly also his rebuke. Warhol got there first and did it all better, years ago, including the deadpan corporate routine and the death-obsessed imagery, which in Mr. Hirst's new paintings seems second-hand and off the mark. Photorealism in its original incarnation was a hit-and-miss offshoot of Pop and a response to Abstract Expressionism; it shared with Minimalism and Conceptualism a cool, detached faith in order; it gravitated toward banal, not outlandish, subjects so that people would focus more on its mechanical ethos. By comparison, Mr. Hirst's flat-footed pictures, blithely lacking finesse, ignore photorealism's first goals and aspire only to be passingly ghoulish.

And absent invention, they hang there like corpses. They also arrive amid a booming youth market, as shallow and money-obsessed as Mr. Hirst, and just as enamored of fashion, but with a higher premium placed on solo handicraft and earnestness or at least on the appearance of it. Other paintings abound in Chelsea for comparison - not universally good, but generally craftier about the medium, making more of paint's expressive potential and its physical allure. Just up the block from Gagosian, on 24th Street, are shows by Magnus von Plessen, Jules de Balincourt, Martin Kippenberger, Eric Fischl and Gary Hume that at least feature more painterly paintings.

Mr. Hirst proffers instead a grab bag of apparent allusions - to artists like Gerhard Richter and Bridget Riley and Luc Tuymans - as if to compensate for his carefree lack (or his assistants' lack) of formal skills and to flatter insiders. But the painter who leaps first to mind is Damian Loeb, America's Motel 6 version of a bad boy photorealist, who traffics in supposedly shocking subjects. It doesn't get worse than to say that Mr. Hirst looks as if he is following in the footsteps of Mr. Loeb, who had once followed in his, hoping for tabloid notoriety. The era of the giant strutting ego as the amusing subject of art at this moment seems wincingly passé, supplanted by all those insouciant 20-somethings proffering their monkish, shuffling sort of virtuosity.

So investors and glossy magazines keep Mr. Hirst's business and celebrity booming. But being gifted and savvy, he might want to return to the drawing board. His act has jumped the shark.

Hirst to open his own gallery on London's South Bank

By Anthony Barnes, Arts and Media Correspondent
Sunday, 6 February 2005

First he fell out with Charles Saatchi. Then he famously bought back his artistic works from the man who created him. Now Damien Hirst is planning to rival his one-time mentor by opening a gallery of his own.

First he fell out with Charles Saatchi. Then he famously bought back his artistic works from the man who created him. Now Damien Hirst is planning to rival his one-time mentor by opening a gallery of his own.

Hirst has earmarked a set of anonymous railway arches in Vauxhall, south London, as a forum for his own provocative works, as well as those of colleagues from his private collection.

He already runs the 2,500 sq ft site as a workshop and, when up and running, it would provide a new starting point for the contemporary art trawl along the south bank of the Thames, which take in the Saatchi Gallery and Tate Modern.

It would be the latest chapter in a feud between Hirst and Saatchi which saw the artist refuse to take part in a retrospective which Saatchi was mounting at his gallery in London's County Hall.

Hirst's gallery would be another major addition to the London scene, which saw one of the art world's best-connected figures, Larry Gagosian, open the city's largest private gallery in King's Cross last year. Gagosian is Hirst's international dealer and has premiered several recent works at his other London gallery.

Hirst is already believed to own a number of his own works. In 2003 he also bought back some of the pieces that had been collected by Saatchi, who championed and nurtured Hirst's talent early on.

Little is known about his own collection, but he is believed to have substantial holdings in artists such as Sarah Lucas, Rachel Whiteread and Angus Fairhurst.

A source close to Hirst said there were plans to develop the site as a "showing area", although the idea is still at a very early stage both in terms of planning permission and in commissioning architects.

A spokeswoman for Hirst's company Science Ltd said: "He certainly has an interest in a gallery."

Additional reporting by Helen McCormack

A Powerful Collector Changes Course

Saatchi Gallery A work by Peter Doig from "The Triumph of Painting."

By ALAN RIDING

Published: January 29, 2005

LONDON, Jan. 25 - If collecting is itself an art, Charles Saatchi remains Britain's most talked-about contemporary artist. A wealthy adman turned art lover, he spawned the 1990's fad for irreverent young British artists and brought contemporary art into the mainstream here. As a reluctant celebrity and unabashed power broker, he has also long been the target of speculation - and grumbling - about his taste and motivation.

Little wonder, then, that when the Saatchi Gallery opened the first installment of a three-part yearlong show called "The Triumph of Painting" here this week, interest in the London art world centered less on the handful of painters initially featured than on a question: Why has Mr. Saatchi turned his back on the conceptual art of his long-cosseted Y.B.A.'s, as young British artists are known here?

Not only has he cleared their works from his labyrinthine Thames-side gallery in the old Greater London Council building, but this month he also sold the most emblematic work of the Y.B.A. movement - Damien Hirst's "Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," better known as the pickled shark - to an American buyer for what press accounts said was $13 million. (He paid $93,000 for it in 1992.)

Now, showing off his latest purchases, Mr. Saatchi has proclaimed the rebirth of painting by presenting the first of an eventual 56 artists working in canvas and oil, among them the German cult figure Martin Kippenberger, who died in 1997; the leading Belgian minimalist Luc Tuymans; and the South African-born Dutch painter Marlene Dumas.

That painting is alive and well today may not be news in, say, New York or Berlin, but in British contemporary art circles it is a view that borders on the subversive. Over the last 10 years, only 5 of 40 nominees for the headline-grabbing annual Turner Prize have been painters. And for even longer, conceptual and video artists have reigned largely unchallenged here.

As it happens, Mr. Saatchi has changed directions before. In the 1980's he built up a major collection of postwar American and European art. He then sold it at great profit and channeled his resources into a new generation of British artists like Mr. Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Tracey Emin, the Chapman brothers, Sarah Lucas and Marc Quinn.

So now he has come back to painting.

But why? Some art critics have long accused Mr. Saatchi of being more dealer than collector, less art lover than marketing genius who exhibits his collection to increase its value. This was certainly charged in 1997 when London's Royal Academy of Arts put on "Sensation," a show of Y.B.A. works owned by Mr. Saatchi, which also traveled to the Brooklyn Museum. And almost inevitably, similar suspicions are again being aired.

In an article last weekend in The Sunday Telegraph of London, Andrew Graham-Dixon conceded that Mr. Saatchi could genuinely believe painting is now central to contemporary art. "It is also possible that, like a cannily contrarian fund-manager working in the equities market, he has simply decided that painting is currently an undervalued sector - and he has bet his portfolio on the proposition that it has a big recovery upside," Mr. Graham-Dixon wrote.

Mr. Saatchi, 61, who is married to the cooking celebrity Nigella Lawson, is as famous for avoiding the press as he is skilled at promoting his shows. But in a rare interview with The Art Newspaper last month, presumably timed to draw attention to "The Triumph of Painting," he explained his approach to collecting as well as his interest in painting.

"I buy art that I like," he was quoted as saying. "I buy it to show it off in exhibitions. Then, if I feel like it, I sell it and buy more art. As I have been doing this for 30 years, I think most people in the art world get the idea by now. It doesn't mean I've changed my mind about the art that I end up selling. It just means that I don't want to hoard everything forever."

Saatchi Gallery A work by Marlene Dumas from "The Triumph of Painting."

As for his new exhibition, Mr. Saatchi insisted that he had no "lofty" agenda. "People need to see some of the remarkable painting, produced and overlooked, in an age dominated by the attention given to video, installation and photographic art," he said. He added, "For me, and for people with good eyes who actually enjoy looking at art, nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday."

For "The Triumph of Painting," he has cast a wide net, with 6 painters in the first display, on view through June 5; 13 in the second, running through September; and 37 in the final installment, through December. All 350 or so paintings scheduled to be presented belong to Mr. Saatchi, who also directed the hanging of the first part of the exhibition.

Announcing that "we are in fact witnessing the vigorous reassertion of painting," a weighty catalog explains that the first group of painters was chosen as the most influential of their generation. Of these, only one, Peter Doig, is a Briton, although he now lives in Trinidad. The others are Europeans, with only Mr. Tuymans, who had a major show at the Tate Modern last year, already well known in Britain.

Yet the most striking difference between these artists and the Y.B.A.'s is not the medium in which they work. It is that, while the Y.B.A.'s liked to shock British tabloids with their sexual and existentialist installations, the European painters on show here are primarily engaged in social and political commentary. And in Britain, ideological art is still very much a novelty.

In the first group, Mr. Doig, 45, is the exception. His large, colorful landscapes inspired by photography are displayed first. But then the show darkens.

The painter chosen to introduce this mood is Mr. Kippenberger, a rebellious and often outrageous German artist who explored every art form, including music and writing, and whose following has grown since his death at 43 eight years ago.

In painting, as in everything he did, Mr. Kippenberger was stylistically eclectic. And Mr. Saatchi's paintings demonstrate this. They include one of the artist's many self-portraits, in this case showing him stripped to his underwear, his body fat and bloated and a balloon over his face. No less melancholic is "I Am Too Political," a painting of a hugely fat woman lying across six canvases. In other oils, his fascination with the degenerate is more disguised.

Jörg Immendorff, 59, the other German in the show, is more directly political, frequently echoing his generation's struggle with Germany's postwar legacy, with both Hitler and the swastika occasionally appearing in his crowded cartoonlike oils. Several of the paintings come from his "Café Deutschland" series. "All's Well That Ends Well," crowded with panic-stricken eagles, is described as an allegory of a divided Germany.

Mr. Tuymans, 46, whose work often addresses the Holocaust, has a painting here, "Maypole," that somehow suggests a Hitler Youth festival. "Within," with the bars of a cage cutting across a cloudy landscape, is less explicit.

By contrast, Ms. Dumas, 51, seeks out taboo subjects: "Young Boys" shows naked boys as if they are awaiting inspection; "Die Baba" depicts a sickly-looking baby with bruised lips and nose; "The Cover-Up" has a young girl lifting her dress over her head.

The oldest painter in the show is Hermann Nitsch, 66, an Austrian artist who gained fame in the 1960's through what he called "actions," in which animals were slaughtered and their blood used ritualistically to stage outdoor crucifixions. These performances provoked scandal and earned him three prison terms in Austria for blasphemy. All but one of his works shown here mirror his obsession with blood, among them several so-called splatter paintings.

How the public will respond to "The Triumph of Painting" has yet to be seen, although the critical response has been muted. Jackie Wullschlager wrote in The Financial Times that "not one picture here takes possession of you." Still, while Mr. Saatchi's pitch can be fairly judged only after all 56 listed artists have been seen, he already has reason to feel satisfied: for the first time in 20 years, contemporary painting is back on London's art agenda.