IT'S ART
by A A Gill
Why call it The Triumph of Painting? Charles Saatchi and I are sitting in the half-hung Saatchi gallery, looking at the newly minted catalogue for his mammoth show. Actually, it's for three separate but connected exhibitions of contemporary painting that will run throughout this year. "Don't you think it's a good title?" Yes, but triumph over what? "Adversity. It's better than calling it Rescuing Painting from the Dead. A bit more positive."
Painting has been the corpse fought over by the fashionably modern and the unapologetically traditional. Canvas is the foxhunting of culture, raising splenetic fury on both sides. It has become a totem of much more than itself. It's about who owns the direction and content and the look of our times. People who begin personal aesthetic statements with, "I may not know much about art, but I know what I like," see painting as their passport to the visual arts. Without paint in frames, they're barred entry, refugees in their own culture, a culture that has always been accessible to them but has now been stolen in a coup by an oligarchy of intellectually elite con men. The intellectual elite smugly believes much the same thing, but from the other side. Painting is a defunct medium that has just too much kitsch, summer-show, amateur baggage to be contemporarily viable, and it detracts from new media. "Painting has been out of favour with international curators for some time," says Saatchi. "They've been obsessively peddling video, photography and installation art. Their eyes dull over when they see painting. It's categorised as bourgeois. They're fashion victims, beyond help."
Doesn't this rather raise questions about what you've been doing for the past decade with all those fashionable installations and photographs? "If you look back at my exhibitions, they're at least 50% painting. Even Sensation had a lot of paintings in it." (Its most notorious image was the painting of Myra Hindley.) For the past five years, he has been acquiring pictures at a gluttonous rate. If nothing else, this trilogy of exhibitions (see page 31) is a banquet of cultural acquisitiveness. They are linked and need to be seen in order. The first show features the main influences on the younger artists in the following two. I should admit here that Charles Saatchi is a friend and I've been out with him on the art pull. It really is like going on a crawl in search of totty. The taxi's left ticking over outside as we dodge into tiny studios, converted garages, dripping warehouses and squats. Saatchi shimmies in with his characteristically Chaplinesque mien, races round the walls, sizing up the nubility without appearing to stare, and then he's off.
I get to a picture in the catalogue that we saw together in a room above a pub. I didn't like it. I still don't like it. Actually, Saatchi didn't like it. "Didn't I?" he laughs. "That's odd. I bought it that night." The process of acquiring things is convoluted and contradictory. "I often begin by hating something. But it will stay in my head, get fixed to the back of the retina, so then I've got to have it. Though sometimes I talk myself out of work that I really wish I'd bought. I change my mind all the time." It's this flexibility and openness that makes the Saatchi collection so broad, varied and exciting. Or, alternatively, if you're an anal art curator — and which curator isn't? — infuriatingly dilettantish, unfocused and greedy. Saatchi won't be hemmed in to an "ism" or school or medium for the sake of a neat index. "I've done that. I looked only at minimalism until everything that wasn't white-on-white or a grid was hideously sentimental and messy."
The Triumph of Painting is unlikely to please either the "I know what I like" traditionalists or the art-world spivs. It's a collection of artists, few of whom are publicly well known here. Their work is personal, aggressive and neurotic. It isn't what the pro-painters mean by painting, although much of it is very painterly and quite beautiful. "This first show," says Saatchi, "is for the artists I most often see admired and ripped off when I go round art schools."
The most notoriously "of the moment" is the prematurely deceased Martin Kippenberger, an artist admired by the young, not least because he refused to have a style or a defining look. Every image could be by someone else. This is, quite simply, the most subversive thing you can do to the art world. If a Kippenberger doesn't look like a Kippenberger, how do we know it's a Kippenberger? The recognition of branding and slow, organic style change is the gold standard of art connoisseurship. He's a bit of a hero.
Luc Tuymans paints strange, washed-out images of things that might be something, but then might be nothing. Like riffs from forgotten tunes, they stay in your head and burrow. Marlene Dumas is a South African who lives in the Netherlands and paints pictures of children that are so silently, unobtrusively distressing, it's difficult to be in a room with them. And who's Hermann Nitsch? "Oh, I used to see this stuff in obscure magazines. They were weird performances that always seemed to involve carcasses and blood and guts, and some poor sod being crucified. Very German. I forgot about them, and then I saw these fantastic pictures and they were by Nitsch."
None of the artists here comes from a self-defined school or a federation. They wouldn't necessarily identify each other as fellow travellers. But Charles Saatchi has collated them into a coherent and comprehensive statement, not just about painting, but about what painting is for and what it should say. There is a common theme of alienation, of politics, anger, an interest in the fetish of religion and cultural symbols. There are images of nihilism and voyeurism, frames taken from films and photography.
Peter Doig, perhaps the most widely known artist here, paints scenes from movies, piggybacking on the sense that something is about to happen. The video and the photograph, which were supposed to have killed painting, have actually freed it from the drudgery of recording likeness, and given it a new freedom and a new vernacular to explore its abiding interest in existentialism.
Seeing as the conceptual art of the past 100 years has been mostly about found and borrowed objects, couldn't you see the collector as an artist, arranging pictures to make an installation or collage? Saatchi isn't having any of that. "No, I just really want to see these paintings all hanging in a gallery." Okay, but are you a choreographer or a producer? "Oh, f*** knows. I'm Bernard Delfont." Did the fire at Momart (in May 2004) have anything to do with this change and the move away from the Young British Artists? (Saatchi lost a huge amount of work, including the Chapman brothers' Hell, and Tracey Emin's tent.) "Oh yes, I think it drew a line. It was so awful. Such an appalling loss. I'd been buying paintings before then, but it made me want to do this show, start something new."
The argument about painting is really an irrelevance. It's not about artists being able to draw like Raphael or not. Loads of people can draw like Raphael, and they're all doing portraits in the street. This is really a tug of war about who chooses the direction of contemporary art, and that's as much about a market and retail as aesthetics. Painting never went away. It's just easier to own than a circle of twigs and rocks. "What I like about these pictures," says Saatchi, "is that they're paintings with amnesia." A lot of them could be what used to be called "outsider art": pictures that have spent so long with their noses pressed up against a gallery window, they've grown radical and dangerous. For many collectors, owning art is an intensely private, solitary pleasure — just you, the Monet and a pint of baby oil. But for Charles Saatchi it's very public. He puts on shows.
Do you see the dichotomy in that, being a severely private, even secretive man? He laughs. "Yes, yes, you're right." So? "So what can I say? You know lots of people could take these paintings and other paintings and put on a coherent show that said something completely different, pointed in another direction." But they don't. "No, they don't. It's a pity." And you promise you didn't choose them because all their names look like anagrams from a game of Scrabble? "No." And have all of these Germans got anything to do with you being Jewish or an Iraqi? "No, but it would be an interesting way of advertising it."
IS IT?
by Waldemar Januszczak
Charles Saatchi, I've noticed, changes his taste in art when he changes wives. His first wife, Doris, introduced him to minimalism and championed the new conceptual art that was blossoming in the US and London in the 1980s. His next wife, Kay Hartenstein, was around in the 1990s when Saatchi made a song and dance about a new movement he claimed to have discovered in London's East End, which he christened, awfully, "new neurotic realism". It turned out to be a complete dud.
Saatchi's present phase is, of course, his Nigella epoch. As we know, Nigella Lawson is a goddess: curvaceous, vivacious, loquacious and juicy. Unfortunately, so are the paintings that Saatchi's been busily acquiring. He's been to Germany. He's been to Denmark. And everywhere he's gone he's discovered painters who throw their ingredients about like pizza chefs.
Is there really a wild new movement in painting out there? Has Saatchi really fingered it? Or should we be wary of swallowing this guff from a man who proved himself to be the greatest adman in art several wives ago? After decades of experience of the art world's hustles and delusions, I have devised a simple, fail-safe test for all new movements. If the artists in the so-called new movement know each other, and come from more or less the same place, the chances are it is the real thing. But if they don't, and are only being lumped together because some collector or dealer or curator says they should be, then it isn't an ism. It's an uct. As in "construct". Isms are good. Ucts are bad.
Turning to the gaggle of artists that Saatchi is unveiling for us this season, we can see that they come from everywhere except the same place. Martin Kippenberger, who was German, is dead; the Canadian Peter Doig, is living in Trinidad; Marlene Dumas is from South Africa; Luc Tuymans is Belgian; Hermann Nitsch is an ancient Austrian; and Jorg Immendorff is also German, but alive. Not only are these artists not from the same place, they are not even from the same era. Nitsch first appeared in the 1970s as an infamous action painter who worked with his own blood. Immendorff was one of the original artists that Saatchi began collecting more than 20 years ago when he appeared in a famous show at the Royal Academy called A New Spirit in Painting.
Most of the artists in Saatchi's show are already well known in the art world. Tuymans has just had a huge exhibition at Tate Modern. Dumas is constantly setting new auction records. Doig's things have been going for hundreds of thousands since the mid-1990s. So for this display, Saatchi, who is usually a trendsetter, has become a trend follower. And that is new.
The one area where there does seem to be the semblance of a shared urge is among the younger German painters. Saatchi has always had a taste for lashings of sex and gore; so have young German painters. The rantings of Meese and Oehlen, of Richter and Schutz, have the air about them of an id let off the leash. Saatchi has often enjoyed this in others. In his Nigella years, it seems actually to have happened to him as well. She's rewound him to his toddler stage, and got him playing with his poo again. What primordial primitivism. What a woman.
THE ART DEALER'S VERDICT: Victoria Miro
Has painting triumphed? I would answer it has never gone away. Even in the early years of the YBAs and the growing public awareness of conceptual art, Polke, Richter, Kiefer and Baselitz were important figures, though the rise of new media was making some regard painting as old-fashioned. I found myself affected by that mood, showed mostly minimal and conceptual art, and was made to feel a traitor to the cause when I showed painting.
Having trained as a painter, I was still actively searching for a new direction in it. But I showed little until I saw the work of Peter Doig in the early 1990s. The significant painters of the 1980s had strongly defined styles and often dealt with big issues. Peter's work, though, was lyrical and moody, evidently influenced by film, photography, art history and artists like Sigmar Polke — timeless but contemporary. Peter's painterly values, the very surfaces of his canvases and his subject matter were to be hugely influential on a younger generation including Daniel Richter, Tal R and Chantal Joffe.
This exhibition looks interesting and it is certainly an international show, but from a London perspective. I think Charles is heavily influenced by what is exhibited in London, and he is receptive to artists shown locally. However, he does appear to have missed out painters who are referencing non-western cultures — Chris Ofili, for example, and Raquib Shaw — and that is surprising, considering what's happening here.
I believe painting has emerged vibrant and strong from its outmoded status. It is taking its rightful place alongside photography, sculpture, video and installation art.
Victoria Miro is one of London's leading art dealers.
THE CURATOR'S VERDICT: Robert Storr
It is long past the time when anyone could speak of Charles Saatchi as a collector. Judgments on art collections worthy of the name are based on the discernment with which artists and works are selected, and the aesthetic and historic value they retain or acquire with the years. They are the combined creation of aesthetic sensibility, historic intuition and stubborn commitment. It is not for nothing that we talk of "building" collections, or of the "holdings" of the Courtauld in London or the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.
By contrast, Saatchi buys in bulk, and flips large portions of what he amasses in the short term. In sum, he is a speculator — though a very gifted one. Had he been generous as a patron of institutions — he seems to have missed his chance with Tate Modern, for example — or founded one of his own that had any aesthetic integrity and stability, his collection circa 1984 or 1994 could have formed the core of a grand contemporary museum in Britain or elsewhere. Alas, that has not happened and, it appears, will not happen. From Philip Guston to Rachel Whiteread, much of the best of what he once had has been sold in order to keep playing the game. The only remaining issue is whether, as a market handicapper, Saatchi's bets on new artists have been well placed.
Judging from the list of those included in The Triumph of Painting, the answer is that he has been hedging more than usual. That is a sign that he himself is no longer sure of what's really going on. Placing the "old masters" Alex Katz and Martin Kippenberger and established younger "stars" like Luc Tuymans alongside exemplars of the "young and the restless" such as Franz Ackermann, and the lesser-knowns Dana Schutz and Dexter Dalwood makes the whole exercise look like a casting call for a drawing-room comedy of manners — or rather a White Cube comedy of mannerisms. Moreover, the fact that so many of the better artists in the group are represented by weak works makes the project resemble a low-budget showcase movie for a failing studio that has cashed in on the expiring contracts of its older actors in order to launch cheaper new talents.
Perhaps the most glaring indicator of how out of touch Saatchi may be is the desperately heroic title of the show itself. For all its flaws, the New Spirit of Painting show in 1981 did announce a resurgence of work in the medium after a decade of video, performance and installation art. No longer at the edges of the art system, those modes are now ensconced at its core, and are busily developing their own academies and traditions. Painting will never "triumph" over them as Saatchi's polemical conceit suggests. Nor will painting be "vanquished" by them as avant-gardists sometimes still claim. Yet good painting, like good modern art of any kind, must do more than generate clever pictures, individual careers or the next season's look: it must critically address the fundamental problems and conditions of image-making in its specific time. Very little of this work even attempts this. That is why this exhibition can't possibly predict the future. But, while confusing the public about modern painting, it may guide art investors like Saatchi who sell almost as fast as they buy.
Formerly senior curator of painting and sculpture at Moma, Robert Storr is now Rosalie Solow professor of modern art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
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