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.