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.