The rise and rise of Jay Jopling

Many in the art world aspire to be movers and shakers. But few have succeeded quite as spectacularly as the suave, self-assured and seriously sociable gallery owner Jay Jopling. As his White Cube empire expands once again, Louise Jury charts the life and times of the man who brought - and sold - Britart to the world

Thursday, 28 September 2006

It may not look like much. An unprepossessing grey building tucked away behind the London Library in the heart of London's "Establishment" quarter, St James's. But last night this unassuming building was playing host to one of the most eagerly anticipated gallery openings for years. Jay Jopling's White Cube Mason's Yard, the third addition to the empire of the Old Etonian dealer, had opened its doors.

The photographer Andreas Gursky flew in from Germany to mark the occasion, as did the painter Anselm Kiefer, who travelled from his home in France to join a clutch of former Turner Prize-winners, models, musicians, celebrities and collectors to celebrate Jopling's latest triumph.

White Cube Mason's Yard is destined to be one of the most talked-about new additions to the capital's cultural scene, a venue for exhibitions from the likes of Tracey Emin and the Chapman brothers, and the North Americans Chuck Close and Jeff Wall.

Thirteen years after he launched his first gallery - the original White Cube - in a tiny 13ft by 13ft room on the opposite side of Duke Street, and six years since he opened the doors to his second, in the grittier surroundings of Hoxton, east London, the sparkling £12m venue will run in parallel with White Cube Hoxton. "London is unarguably the pre-eminent city for contemporary art in Europe. White Cube Mason's Yard will allow us to showcase artists in the centre of the capital as well as continuing to present their work in... the East End. The new White Cube will more than double our gallery space and provide a broader platform for bringing world-class art to a world-class city," he said.

It is perhaps a mark of Jopling's ambition that in taking over a former electricity sub-station and creating in its place a cool emporium of culture, the project echoes nothing less than Tate Modern, the gallery that has contributed most to the huge expansion of public interest in art in Britain in the last decade.

And just as Hoxton Square played host to 2,000 people when Tracey Emin opened her last show there, Mason's Yard is set to be party central for the extraordinary collection of creatives that any reader of the society and gossip columns would recognise as the Jopling gang.

If there is one thing that defines Jopling, even more than the stable of Young British Artists whom he has known and nurtured since the early Nineties, it is parties. He is a man always willing to be tempted into moving on for a final nightcap. "He's got a zest for life and he doesn't want to miss out on anything," says Tim Marlow, the arts broadcaster who has been White Cube's director of exhibitions since 2002.

With his wife, the artist Sam Taylor-Wood, Jopling was among the handful of guests at the civil partnership ceremony for Sir Elton John and David Furnish. And at the select drinks hosted by Selfridge's when Taylor-Wood wrapped its store in the largest photograph ever seen, the couple joined fashion designer Stella McCartney and musicians such as Alex James .

For her project Crying Men, Taylor-Wood persuaded a galaxy of A-list actors including Robert Downey Jr, Jude Law, Paul Newman, Willem Dafoe and Laurence Fishburne to be pictured in tears. Though most were not friends, it was an idea which required the kind of networking skills at which the couple have proved adept.

And as the British contemporary art scene has blossomed in the last 15 years to become both lucrative and fashionable, Jopling, with his wife at his side, has ridden the wave of celebrity to the benefit of his stable of high-profile artists - and himself.

Jay Jopling was born in 1963, the son of Michael Jopling, a Yorkshire landowner better known as chief whip and Minister of Agriculture in Margaret Thatcher's government.

He grew up on the family farm but was sent to boarding school in Scarborough from the age of seven, and then on to Eton. In an early sign of his passion for art and business savvy, he persuaded Bridget Riley to create a cover for the school magazine. He bought his first work of art from the Anthony d'Offay Gallery at 14 - a limited-edition Gilbert and George book that cost £16. And while his father was working late at Westminster, he spent hours just down the road at the Tate.

By now convinced that he wanted to work in the art world, he decided to study art history at Edinburgh University, and it was there that he started dealing on a small scale.

In his final year, inspired by Band Aid, he and some friends organised a charity art auction - at a time when such events were comparatively uncommon - with a rare energy and drive. Jopling went to New York to persuade major names such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel and Keith Haring to donate their work. The auction raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for Africa.

After university, he moved to London where he became friends with the emerging Young British Artists - Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Marc Quinn - and began staging shows in warehouses.

He found the funds to enable the young Hirst to turn his paper dreams of a shark sculpture into reality, then sold the finished work to Charles Saatchi for £25,000. When he met Emin in a pub, she persuaded him to give her £10 in return for a series of letters that soon began arriving on his doorstep, containing the kind of personal confessions that later came to chracterise her art.

Then in 1993, he pulled off a coup. Pointing out that Christie's had at one time provided Constable with a studio, Jopling persuaded the auction house to allow him to have a tiny gallery space in Duke Street, rent-free. White Cube was born.

Here, Emin was one of the first to exhibit, with My Major Retrospective 1963-1993 (in case she never warranted a genuine retrospective) with the likes of Mona Hatoum, Gary Hume, Cerith Wyn Evans, Franz Ackermann, Luc Tuymans and Nan Goldin to follow. He showed no artist more than once, which made each show an unmissable - and severely overcrowded - event.

"It was very exciting for artists," recalls one art world insider. "He showed people who you only read about in magazines. It was the start of London becoming hip - it was like being in a provincial town that suddenly got exciting. It was good that someone was doing something that was adventurous without it looking all grungey and squat. It was a small room but it was quite grand because of where it was.

"And if you were an art collector/investor and you bought something each month from Jay Jopling in those days, that collection would be worth quite a lot of money. You wouldn't have been able to do that with most other galleries."

For several years, Jopling went out with an American designer Maia Norman, but with that relationship crumbling, he introduced her to Hirst whom she subsequently married. All three are now friends.

Jopling in turn had met Sam Taylor-Wood at her 1994 video installation, Killing Time. They fell in love and married in 1997. Their daughter Angelica was born the same year.

It has not all been easy. That same year, Taylor-Wood was diagnosed with cancer and on Christmas Eve 1997 surgeons removed several feet of her colon. She faced another cancer scare in 2000, and instead of attending the opening of his new gallery in Hoxton, Jopling was by her side in hospital in America.

Today, the couple live in a beautiful Robert Adam Georgian house not far from the BBC's Broadcasting House, with another home in Yorkshire and - miraculously - she is due to give birth to their second child any day soon.

"Here's a man who has spent five years on a £12m development and the amazing thing is that he's becoming a father for the second time and they're dealing with that, too," says Tim Marlow. "I [think] he will miss the opening of this [gallery] as well."

Despite being very visible as man about town, Jopling is loath to discuss himself in public. "He doesn't want to become the story," says Marlow. "He doesn't call the gallery Jay Jopling Fine Arts. It's White Cube, which is historically coded [from the art book Inside the White Cube, the Ideology of the Gallery Space by Brian O'Doherty] and smart. It's not about him, it's a broader, smarter vision."

Marlow regards the celebrity couple of the gossip pages as a natural consequence of success. "People pick up on the fact that he's glamorous and mixes with celebrities. It's an inevitable consequence of the connectedness of the creative community.

"If you are very successful at what you do, you meet other very successful people. Jay is one of the most successful people in his particular area, which has became an increasingly important and glamorous world in the last decade. The art world is unrecognisable from what it was 15 years ago."

But not all Jopling's friends are household names. Among those with whom he shares his passion for Leeds United and the poetry of John Cooper Clarke and Philip Larkin are the artist and writer Harland Miller, who would never register in the pages of Heat.

Antony Gormley, one of the artists he represents, says: "He's very loyal and a good friend and he's very generous with his friendship. With meeting Jay, you do meet a lot of people you wouldn't have met otherwise. They're all stimulating people. There's just a sense he enjoys people that are making the world a bit different."

Johnnie Shand Kydd, the society photographer who has known Jopling since his Edinburgh days, says: "He's one of the most loyal people I know. Once he decides he's behind you, he's behind you through thick and thin. And he's unbelievably fun, just lovely and naughty. He works hard and he plays hard."

So at a Jay Jopling party, Little Britain star David Walliams or any number of hardened Groucho Club party-people are likely to be found mingling with the many artists Jopling represents.

But not everyone has fallen under Jopling's spell. Rosie Millard, who examined the contemporary art scene in her book The Tastemakers, says: "His shameless courting of celebrities is, frankly, a bit naff. I don't think you can come across as particularly serious if you're so besotted with famous people. I suspect it might do him down in the long run, because he just comes across as shallow." But those close to him insist that it is the art that counts. "He's genuinely passionate about the work," Marlow says. "There are plenty of gallerists who cannot disguise the fact that all they are interested in is whether they can sell it or not. He's not a philanthropist. White Cube is a commercial gallery. But he's able to talk to artists about what they do and why they do it with genuine knowledge and enthusiasm."

And he thinks big. Anselm Kiefer could scarcely believe that White Cube was willing to bring to Hoxton the type of pavilion in which he shows his work at home in southern France, but it did last year.

He has also been inventive, with projects such as fig-1, a series of exhibitions and events that included writers such as Will Self and fashion designers such as Philip Treacy alongside artists. Yet there are others who are said to have fallen by the wayside when they responded to Jopling's interventionist suggestions on their work.

Most artists, though, defend him to the hilt. "He is supremely enthusiastic and he's very capable of communicating his passions in a way that makes you want to have the same experience that Jay seems to have in his relationship with art," says Antony Gormley.

"He's very exciting and it's exciting to be around whatever is happening around him. I think he wants you to take risks and wants you to be part of risk-taking. There's not a tired attitude of art as some kind of commodity but a relationship and an involvement."

So when Gormley needed feedback on the major retrospective of his work that is being planned at the Hayward Gallery, Jopling was on the phone brimming with ideas.

To his fans, Jopling is a charming, impeccably turned out workaholic. Johnnie Shand Kydd laughs at how pernickety he is over his clothes. "Sam gives me all his cast-offs. I don't mind a frayed cuff."

"The buildings he builds, his house, everything about him is beautifully judged. He's got very astute taste, a very refined sensibility," adds Marlow.

"Sam has a balance that may have something to do with her life experiences. She works incredibly hard because she's a mother and because women, on the whole, do balance life-work better. But Jay's a workaholic. He's working and thinking about his work all the time, he's absolutely driven that way."

If he has woken at 7am with a thought on a new project, he will think nothing of calling Marlow to talk about it. "He always says if he can't be the best at what he's doing, he doesn't want to do it. But he wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth as far as the art world is concerned." Jopling's Mason's Yard development was a massive investment. The electricity sub-station, a rare development opportunity in St James's, had been in Jopling's sight from before he opened his second gallery in Hoxton. But it had not been for sale. Then, out of the blue, he had a telephone call to say that sealed bids were being sought. He won.

For the new gallery, he has recruited more talent to his fold, including the Canadian Jeff Wall and the photographer Andreas Gursky, one of the most highly-sought after artists in the world at present.

Although some believe that Hauser and Wirth, nearby, is currently London's trendiest gallery and the New Yorker Larry Gagosian is a bigger hitter globally, White Cube Mason's Yard is already a landmark in the national art scene.

For Jopling's part, he says he is proud and excited to see the project come to fruition. "Coming back to St James's is a little bit like coming home," he says. "I've always missed this area, I have to say. I've always wanted to collide the avant-garde with the Establishment."

Saatchi's hire purpose lets the wealthy house his art

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
Tuesday, 26 September 2006

He owns more art than most people could ever dream of - a collection that includes work by almost every major contemporary British artist - but for those with neither the bank balance nor the eye of the advertising millionaire Charles Saatchi, a slightly cheaper alternative is now available.

In response to repeated requests from the corporate world to borrow works from Mr Saatchi's extensive stores, a formal rental scheme has been established.

He has published a catalogue of 600 works of art on offer for hire. Nearly 140 artists are included in the 393-page catalogue including many of the biggest names in contemporary British art.

According to The Art Newspaper, which was shown a copy by a recipient, these include 12 Chris Ofili watercolours, Tracey Emin's set of photographs I've Got It All, two Damien Hirst spot prints, the Exquisite Corpses etchings by Jake and Dinos Chapman and Woman Reading Possession Order by Tom Hunter. There are also pots by Grayson Perry, the Turner Prize winner, and Stella Vine's portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales, Hi Paul, Can You Come Over. The prices laid out in a brochure range from £7,000 a year for the loan of five works to £20,000 a year for 20.

The solicitors Walker Morris sponsored the display of Saatchi works at the Leeds City Art Gallery earlier this year, the first time his works had been seen outside London, while the Saatchi Gallery's corporate patrons include Coutts Bank and Deutsche Bank.

Mr Saatchi, who was forced out of his gallery home on the South Bank after a row with the owners, is due to open a new gallery in a former military headquarters in Chelsea next year.

Martin Bailey, of The Art Newspaper, estimated that if a third of the catalogued works were borrowed each year it might bring in about £150,000. "I think it's probably a pragmatic thing for him to do," he said. "It enables people to enjoy the art rather than it being locked away. His stores may well be bursting at the seams. And it's a useful way of getting some additional revenue to fund his public gallery which must need quite a lot of money."

Some of the works in the catalogue have not been exhibited or published as being in the Saatchi collection before and not all of them are well-known names. Nearly all of them have been produced in the past year. Most might be regarded as middle-ranking works rather than key museum pieces.

A spokesman for the Saatchi Gallery would not discuss details of the new loan scheme but said: "Our corporate sponsors regularly express interest in borrowing works from the gallery so we put together a book to make life easier for sponsors to see what they would be interested in displaying in the[ir] headquarters buildings."

Mr Saatchi is currently helping to curate an exhibition of American artists, USA Today, opening at the Royal Academy on 6 October.

'Prop idol' Pete begins hunt to fill Saatchi space

By Oliver Duff
Monday, 25 September 2006

* When the pop baron (and landlord) Pete Waterman evicted Charles Saatchi from his prestigious gallery at London's County Hall in 2003, it was assumed that Waterman would seek more conventional replacement tenants.

A difficult relationship had become fraught as Saatchi scattered nuisance modern art exhibits about the building - a bronze sleeping bag in a corridor corner; an unloaded builder's skip in the main entrance hall; a mini suddenly parked halfway down the stairs.

Waterman now wants to turn the 300,000 square feet he runs over to young artists and creative businesses, however, to create an "ideas village" championing upcoming home talent. The British Phonographic (record) Industry has already moved in.

"We will have recording studios, artists and people who want to make bars of soap," he tells me. "Estate agents are cynical and want us to rent it as office space to some boring IT departments. The agents think we have lost the plot because we turned them away and tore up the rules.

"But Britain is a small country on a world map and I want us to still have the best ideas in the future. We are looking for about 30 or 40 businesses."

Waterman credits Saatchi's "beautiful" gallery for drawing crowds to the South Bank of the Thames but says: "It was becoming a nightmare. You'd walk around the building scared to touch anything, because you're not sure if it is a crisp packet someone has left on the stairs or Charles's art."

* When Touching the Void mountaineer Joe Simpson was stranded on a peak in the Andes - starved, dehydrated, and alone with a broken leg - he prepared to die.

There was no bright light, soothing calm, or vision of his family. Instead, he found the cheddar-tastic 1978 song Brown Girl in the Ring flying around his mind on a loop. "I remember thinking," Simpson recalls, "Bloody hell. I'm going to die to Boney M."

So should the West End's Shaftesbury Theatre - where the Boney M musical Daddy Cool has finally premiered - plan to sell Kendal Mint Cake during the interval, alongside those funny little pots of ice cream?

"No!" exclaims a lady in Simpson's office when I call. "Absolutely no way is Joe going. He hates Boney M."

Apparently he never particularly liked the record in the first place, and would rather go back up the mountain.

* Giorgio Armani's £1.5m party, sponsored by Peroni, was the most lavish to have graced London Fashion Week. Guests included Leonardo DiCaprio, Beyoncé, Bono and Andrea Bocelli.

Bryan Ferry and Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes spoke earnestly to me about Aids in Africa. I loitered by Armani's table, but he doesn't speak English and "Dov'è la stazione?" seemed out of place. So it was funnier to embark on a mercy mission to our eclipsed C-list celebs.

Calum Best, son of George, first: what did he think of the genocide in Darfur, asked my colleague Johann Hari? A boggle-eyed Best squeaked: "It's all right."

It-girl Lady Victoria Hervey told us she arrived late and missed 50 Cent. "My Maltese Terrier had an accident everywhere. I spent ages clearing it up.

"That's not very glamorous, is it?" No.

* What secret might Lembit Opik have squirreled away? Pandora reported last week that when the amiable Lib Dem, engaged to weatherwoman temptress Sian Lloyd, was asked if he had hidden demons akin to those which destroyed the careers of three frontbench colleagues, he replied that he was "as flawed as the next person".

A reader writes: "I have got to know and to observe Lembit well. If there is a skeleton in his closet, it is that he was an inveterate charmer of young female researchers in a group, rather than individually, and got on reasonably well with the blokes too.

"He is highly (and successfully) sociable. His 'people skills' are definitely in the top quartile. I know of no concealed negative attributes whatever."

* Halt your mortgage repayments, buy a speedboat, and bulk buy tinned food, gin, tonic and lime: the end of our so-called civilisation may be nigh.

Montezuma's Aztecs had it coming when Hernan Cortés and his conquistadors rang the temple doorbell, while Rome's corrupt elite should have realised that their gluttony for banquets and young boys was fatal. For us, the warning sign is surely that the 2007 calendar starring Page 3 model Keeley (20, from Kent) has reached the top-10 bestsellers on Amazon's book chart.

Keeley does contribute "news in briefs" to the red-tops - for instance berating the "rush" of immigrants; or "soft-touch judges".

I have ordered a copy of the literature, in case I am rushing to judgement on this. Expect a review.

Saatchi show 'porn' angers the Academy

From The Sunday Times

September 24, 2006

Richard Brooks, Arts Editor

SENIOR members of the Royal Academy have complained that the organisers of a new exhibition of works owned by Charles Saatchi had misled them over the nature of “pornographic” items going on show.

The academicians were not told that works to be included in the show, USA Today, which opens on October 6, would be of an explicit sexual nature. They were informed only that some would be “cutting edge”.

Instead, there are a number of items depicting a range of sex acts, including one involving a girl who appears to be a young teenager. Another work consists of rows of religious statuettes with phallic symbols attached.

Some of the artists have admitted their works are pornographic. Some members of the academy are now demanding that a separate room be set aside for the “adult” works.

“We gave the show a cautious go-ahead,” said Ivor Abrahams, an academician and sculptor, who sits on the exhibitions committee and was present at a meeting last spring which, with some dissenters, approved USA Today. “Now we find that at least 10 or so of the works might cause offence. It’s schoolboy smut and a cynical ploy to get Saatchi even more noticed.”

Abrahams now believes that the show should not go ahead. “We’ve been hijacked by Saatchi,” he said. “It is hard to see any merit in this show.”

Leonard McComb, another academician, agreed. “Saatchi is using the academy for his own commercial benefit,” he said. “If we are to put on a show by young artists it should be of young British artists, not Americans.”

Saatchi, Britain’s leading art impresario, is relishing the row. “My impatience to show the works together with my fascination with the RA proved irresistible,” he said. “I also enjoy their passionate and noisy airing of views. They’re all as cracked as me.”

Works going on display include a girl painted by Gerald Davis performing a sex act on a man. Davis, whose other works on show include naked youngsters, penises and a woman defecating, admits that some of his art stems from his own fantasies from when he was 12.

Another artist, Terence Koh, who is gay, not only states that some of his exhibits incorporate “artist’s piss”, but also admits that they are “decadent and pornographic”. One of them, Untitled (Medusa), shows religious figures, including women, with prominent phalluses.

Some academicians are as worried about Saatchi using the academy for a publicity stunt as they are about the pornographic works. John Hoyland, the abstract painter, said the RA should not “be subsidising a dealer like Saatchi. It is not healthy that the Royal Academy is promoting bogus art for commercial reasons”.

Although the works owned by Saatchi on show at the RA will not be for sale, their display at such a prestigious establishment will increase their value.

Tom Phillips, the chairman of the exhibitions committee, said the show was justified. “It should be seen in the wider context of American art today. There are more serious and worrying things going on in the world than somebody having oral sex, which you can anyway see all the time on the internet,” he said.

Saatchi, whose last two exhibitions in County Hall, London, received poor reviews, warned: “Those who are in the business of being offended shouldn’t be too disappointed by the show.”

A new sensation: Saatchi's return to Royal Academy sparks pornography row

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
Friday, 22 September 2006

The last time Charles Saatchi showed his art at the Royal Academy, four Academicians resigned, protesters attacked a portrait of the child-murderer Myra Hindley and one room had an unprecedented "adults only" warning.

Bur judging by a first glimpse of his new exhibition, nine years after the groundbreaking Sensation show, Saatchi has made no efforts to censor his second venture into the distinguished 238-year-old institution.

His new show, USA Today, will feature more than 150 works by 40 young Americans, many never seen before in Britain.

Among the exhibits will be some guaranteed to upset those who previously took offence at Chris Ofili's dung-covered Virgin Mary or the Chapman brothers sculptures of children augmented by distorted genitalia.

Several works by Gerald Davis, a 32-year-old artist born in Pennsylvania, explore childhood fantasies in a way that may disturb while 37-year-old Lara Schnitger's "I want kids" sculpture, with its giant phallus invites controversy. Schnitger denies any suggestion of paedophilia and sees it as a "sort of fertility symbol".

But Davis admits paintings such as Monica, in which a young girl with pompoms on her socks is seen performing oral sex, stemmed from his own fantasies at the age of 12.

"I don't think I fully understood a lot of these things at the time and that's why it's interesting to meditate on them with an adult perspective. It's an adult telling a story from a kid's point of view," he said.

Asked whether he worried about how it might be regarded, he said: "I can't think too much about how people may interpret a work because that can lead to serious artist's block.

"I realise that childhood sexuality is a taboo subject and can offend some people and be exciting to others. But if someone has a particular fetish, they bring that to the image, not vice versa."

Norman Rosenthal, the exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy, admitted he was "a little fearful" when the show was first suggested. Some Academicians - the artists elected to run the Academy - quickly expressed concern about inviting Saatchi to return.

But Mr Rosenthal said: "I went to the States, met a lot of the artists and dealers and collectors and there's no question that what Charles is doing - rather as he did with Sensation - is epoch-making."

Now Mr Rosenthal is describing USA Today as "the next great show". He insists that the artists are engaging in topical aspects of the world, not setting out to shock.

"It doesn't mean any artists condone paedophilia, but it doesn't mean to say you shouldn't confront it, [just] as one confronts issues of the environment or global politics and so on."

Saatchi said:Although they are largely unknown outside a small group of enthusiasts in America, I think their work is going to grab people by the throat, and the fact that they're not household names anywhere yet only makes it more exciting."

Asked whether he expected to upset visitors, he said: "Well, there's no head made of George Bush's blood... there are no portraits of child-killers, but those who are in the business of being offended shouldn't be too disappointed."

USA Today runs from 6 October to 4 November at the Royal Academy, Burlington Gardens.

Saatchi's new sensation: the Peeing Madonna

By Anthony Barnes, Arts and Media Correspondent
Sunday, 17 September 2006

Charles Saatchi, the art collector who has exhibited works such as Tracey Emin's unmade bed and Damien Hirst's pickled shark, is to display one of his most outrageous works yet.

As the centrepiece of a new display of recent acquisitions he will unveil a sculpture in which more than a dozen religious icons of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary have been fitted with penises and gathered around a urinal.

The "offensive" artwork, Medusa by Terence Koh, will show at "USA Today", a new exhibition of young American artists due to open at the Royal Academy of Arts next month.

Mr Saatchi ranks Koh as one of the most gifted sculptors in the US, and many of Koh's works feature his own blood and semen.

Mr Saatchi said: "Terence Koh's work is as nasty as you like. He has the face of an angel but the soul of a sewer rat. He and Banks Violette are the two most exciting new sculptors in America." Violette is another artist featured in the month-long exhibition.

Chinese-born Koh, 29, lists his own urine as one of the components in Medusa, a steel urinal inside a water closet which also contains a shelf crowded with the religious figures, each with a crudely fashioned phallus.

This exhibition comes almost 10 years after Mr Saatchi's Royal Academy exhibition "Sensation" caused widespread outrage, featuring massive images of the child murderer Myra Hindley by Marcus Harvey as well as Chris Ofili's depiction of the Virgin Mary, which contained pornographic magazine images.

Nathan Paine Davey, secretary-general of the Society of Mary, which is devoted to honouring the Virgin, said: "If the artist has attached phalluses, I think most people would find that grossly offensive."

Racy Tracey

From The Sunday Times

September 17, 2006

She was the foul-mouthed hell-raiser of Britart. Now Tracey Emin’s originals hang in airport lounges. But can she still shock us? John-Paul Flintoff reports

Because I’m late, I’m walking as fast as I can through the labyrinthine streets off Brick Lane in east London to the studios of Britain’s best-loved and most reviled artist. As I draw near, a blank-faced woman wearing a raincoat approaches from the other direction. I introduce myself, tell her I’ve come to interview her. She smiles, presses a button and presents her face to the entry phone. Somebody inside buzzes her through. Then she shouts upstairs, in a girly voice but with unmistakable irritability: “Is that bloke here yet?” She beams at me as the reply comes back: “No!” Seconds later, my phone rings: it’s her assistant calling to hurry me along.

So Tracey Emin’s in a playful mood. Phew. Like many people, I got my first impression of her from a late-night TV chat show in which she appeared drunk, insulted fellow panellists, then stalked off. (She later blamed her behaviour on painkillers.) And a friend of mine interviewed her once. It may have been the pressure of work, but none of my friend’s questions interested her, and after a while she declared herself “f***ing bored”. In a lavishly illustrated new book devoted to her work, Emin expresses the wish that interviewers, rather than ask tiresome questions “about life, and meaning and feeling”, would say: “What did you do today?” or “What did you have for breakfast?” Anything more sensational, after all, would long ago have been covered by the interviewers who came before me – or, more likely, by Emin herself, in art works that mine every conceivable aspect of her life. Or in her newspaper columns, or her recent memoir, Strangeland, of which the novelist Jeanette Winterson wrote: “Her latest writings are painfully honest, and certainly some of it should have been edited out by someone who loves her.”

Emin has spoken with justifiable pride about her body. “Many artists have used female nudes in their work. I’ve got a good female nude I can use whenever I like and it’s mine.” In 1995 she did a sketch entitled My Beautiful Legs. Today those limbs are largely covered up, in a navy-blue tracksuit. She wears a pale blue shirt, unbuttoned fairly low. “I’ve got an amazing cleavage when I’m wearing the right bra,” she once said. “It knocks spots off the average cleavage.” Her pretty face is enlivened by a curiously wonky mouth, which lends her by turns a quizzical or irritated expression. (Or, as she has put it, “I’ve got a really crooked mouth and my teeth are aggressive-looking and quite scary.”) Her hair, tied in pigtails, has a bit more grey in it than I’ve seen in photos. But she looks healthier. Indeed, she says her face looks better than 10 years ago: “I’ve put so much weight on. I’m 15 kilos heavier.” With what strikes me later as devastating tactlessness, I agree with Emin that 15 kilos is indeed a lot of weight. I add that it’s just about how much my daughter weighs. (This compounds the gaffe horrifically, because Emin, who has had two abortions, famously regrets not having children. “Sometimes I imagine I’ll be an old lady surrounded by all my newspaper clippings,” she once said.) But she appears not to notice my slights. Tottering a little in her high-heeled espadrilles, she shows me round the studio, which she bought recently after years renting elsewhere. Upstairs in the office, on the wall, are 23 meticulous “to do” sheets. These do not include art projects, which are filed elsewhere, but a magazine story about celebrities and their cats, and a half-hour interview for Newsnight.

In the corridor she shows me yard after yard of archives. If anything leaves the studio, she says, it has to be accounted for. “If I decide to give a friend a birthday card, it has to be scanned and put into an inventory, so there is a provenance if they sell it.” I ask if it’s odd, even unpleasant, to think friends might sell cards she sends them. “If you give someone something, it is theirs,” she shrugs. “They can do what they like with it.”

Largely thanks to her extraordinary candour, Emin has succeeded in surpassing all the other Young British Artists, even including Damien Hirst, in terms of notoriety. But when Art Review published a list of the most powerful people in the art world, just one woman appeared in the top 30 – a collector and not an artist. This prompted Emin to make a documentary, broadcast in March, showing that work by male artists routinely fetches millions more than that of their female counterparts. Her best-known work, My Bed, which she entered for the Turner prize in 1999, was bought by Charles Saatchi for £150,000. Hirst’s pickled shark, by contrast, sold two years ago for £6.5m. Of course, it’s collectors who control the art market – and collectors tend to be wealthy white men with City backgrounds, according to Oliver Baker, the head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s London. These men pay macho sums for macho art that reflects their vision of themselves. Luckily for Emin, many collectors do appreciate her more feminine approach. I recently looked round the home of the well-known contemporary-art collector Judith Greer. Among her own collection are installations and drawings by Emin. “They’re very evocative,” Greer enthused.

“It’s very British not to talk about money,” Emin says, “and especially embarrassing to make a fuss if you’re quite well off. I’ve always thought, ‘I’m doing okay, I can’t complain,’ which is a very female attitude. I’ve never asked my gallerist why so many of his male artists sell their work for more, and I’ve never asked the Tate why they paid so much more for Chris Ofili’s work than they did for mine. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t win the Turner prize. But I was nominated. Or maybe it’s because I haven’t represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. But that begs the question: why haven’t I been asked?”

She has now. Days after our meeting, the British Council announced that Emin was to have a solo show at Venice next year – the art-world equivalent of being selected to captain England in the World Cup.

We wander into another studio. “This is my painting room,” she says. “I can do anything I like in here. It’s my space. I could f*** in here if I wanted. If anyone wants to come in, they have to knock.” Back downstairs, I notice the model for the delicate bird sculpture she erected on a metal post last year in Liverpool. Some critics said the BBC, which commissioned it, wasted £60,000 of licence-payers’ money. A bulkier, more traditionally masculine work might have attracted less controversy. She originally thought of putting the bird on a big plinth, like the ones in Trafalgar Square. “But then I thought that the plinth itself is actually quite enormous and ugly. You don’t need it – just the bird.” Beside the bird, on the workbench, she shows me photographs of items she’s going to cast in bronze. Once again, they’re not in the least macho. They are baby clothes she found here and there, plus a bootee knitted by her late grandmother. “It’s like really sad. I was thinking about lost moments, and about young women who have children and lose their youth but gain a child, whereas someone like me is eternally young.” And childless.

We sit down on antique chairs to enjoy a civilised pot of tea such as one might share with a twinkly great-aunt. Nearby, a vast canvas leans against the wall with what looks like the early stages of an image of herself, lying prone and vulnerable. The outline is wobbly, as it is in her drawings. She has two shows coming up, in Rome and Los Angeles. How’s the work going? She gestures towards the unfinished canvas. “I have not shown my paintings for years. So this is quite exciting for me. No one except me can make this painting for me. And if it doesn’t work then that’s my fault.” On the floor beside us, resting on a vast beanbag, is a piece of fabric with a needle and thread hanging out of it. “I’m not going to do all that myself. It would take me six months. Which is fine, but the price would be blown out of all proportion.” Instead she employs artists and seamstresses. This particular work will be carried out by several people. “If one person did it, they might become possessive about it.” While they sew, Emin paints. “And we chat, and dance, and so on.” I find this intriguing. In the movies, artists create their masterpieces in solitude. She grins. “You do still get that lonely macho thing – ‘I’m being creative!’ – but it’s more like Little Women in here.”

Emin was born in Croydon on July 3, 1963. Her father, a Turkish Cypriot, was married to a woman other than her mother and divided his time between his two families. Her mother had intended to have an abortion, and even booked into the clinic before deciding against it. In the event she had twins: Tracey was born after her brother, Paul. Their father owned a hotel in Margate, where Tracey grew up, but when the business failed the family suffered a severe decline. “For many years I was like a nomadic bag lady, carrying my things from place to place.” At one time she lived in a bed-and-breakfast, eating Pot Noodles and washing by boiling a kettle and standing in a bowl.

Around the age of 13 she was raped. In the year or so after that, no longer going to school, she regularly had sex with older men: on the beach, down an alley, in parks and hotels. “I had sex with so many people that I wasn’t in love with. Sex with people I shouldn’t have had sex with. And I think, what was I doing there?” In her book she makes it clear that the exploitation continued for a long time afterwards. In 1990 she had an abortion. (“When I came round in the recovery room I couldn’t believe what I had done. I had killed the thing which I could love most.”) The procedure caused horrific complications, and after a few days she was hospitalised again. Carl Freedman, an ex-boyfriend who remains close to her, and wrote the words for the new book, says she has alchemised “a lot of ordinary stuff as well as many of the shitty things” in her life into gold.

The words can be understood quite literally. Many of her most successful early works were created out of blankets and other materials she’d owned as a child, treasured possessions rich in association – a sense of security and shelter, as well as nomadism and homelessness. She often cried when the finished works were sold. Moving from the old studio, she says, she got rid of 70 dustbin bags of fabrics. “I only kept a few that I really wanted, like Carl’s shirts, or my dad’s best, or a calico that was really thin, or something that had been misprinted in an interesting way.” Did she miss the stuff she binned? “No, it was fantastic, because I chose to get rid of it. I have friends with really small houses, two-up two-down, and they’re always trying to make them bigger, and I say, ‘You can’t do it. Just throw some stuff out.’” Clearly, being wealthy has changed her. “It’s not about possessions. It’s freedom. When you have been really, really poor, earning money is such a liberating thing. If I’m ill, I have a private doctor, and if I miss a flight I can catch another. And being able to eat the food I want to eat is brilliant.”

After some years alone, she has a boyfriend again. But she doesn’t talk about him, apart from mentioning him as the other party involved in a discussion about interior decoration. The effect is unbalanced because she talks fondly about Freedman and another ex-boyfriend, the artist Matt Collishaw. “Carl and Matt are my best friends. I love them a lot and they know me inside out and upside down and they can take the piss out of me and they’re enduring and warm friends to me.” In 1995, Freedman curated a show and encouraged Emin to contribute something ambitious. The result was the patchwork tent entitled Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995. Often seen as a shameless exhibition of her sexual conquests – a misinterpretation the title seems to invite – it was really about more general kinds of intimacy: the names appliquéd inside included not only sexual partners but relatives she slept with as a child, her twin brother, and her two aborted children. Another work inspired by Freedman was the beach hut they shared in Whitstable, which she uprooted and turned into art in 1999 as The Last Thing I Said to You Is Don’t Leave Me Here. But in 2004 a fire in a Momart storage warehouse destroyed many works from the Saatchi collection, including the hut and the tent.

Thankfully, she hasn’t lost Freedman. Before each show she discusses her work with him and Collishaw. “They’re really honest with me, but I might disagree with them and fight my corner.” Their biggest argument was about putting her bed up for the Turner. “Everyone said, ‘No.’ They thought it was too theatrical or too personal.” But she went ahead anyway. Consisting of her own unmade, dirty bed, presented as it had been when she had stayed in it for several days, feeling suicidal – with used condoms, bloodstained underwear and other detritus – it caused a furore. It didn’t win, but as she says herself, “It became an icon, a seminal piece of art. Isn’t that incredible? My bed now exists in the national psyche.” In the new book, she seems worried about parodying herself. “It is something to be aware of,” she tells me. “For example, the thing that people love is my quilts. People all around the world are waiting for them. But if I made more, that would be making money, not art. A lot of artists do that: they make hay while the sun shines. But I don’t want to.” One thing she’s keen to do with the money she has made is buy back her art. She’s done that before occasionally, when things came up at auction. What would she buy if she could? “I would quite like to get my hut back, and the tent, but they burnt in the fire. And I’d like to get back some of my paintings that I destroyed.” I note that she hasn’t mentioned anything she actually could buy. But perhaps if she named a particular piece, the owner would offer it back at a vastly swollen price.” I can still go and look at things,” she says cheerfully, “in private collections, and so on. I might ring a collector and say I would really like to see something. They might be quite chuffed.”

Sometimes she finds her art in surprising places, such as the British Airways business lounge at Istanbul airport. “I didn’t know they were there. I jumped up and down. And I wrote in their book, ‘That’s me. It’s my drawings on the wall!’ It’s a bit childish but I was really chuffed. You’d think I could be more grown up about it.”

Has she got better as an artist? “I put it like this. It’s like, do you get better in bed? You sink into it a bit more. And it’s like that with art. It has more control. A good driver is someone who has more control, not someone who drives fast.” But then she seems to change her mind. “Technically, you have a chance of getting a lot more crap. The first blanket I made, the stitches were quite big and neurotic. And that might be considered to be better than stitches that are really controlled. Today, if I wanted to, I could get a piece of material and cut out a letter R right in front of you. I used to have to draw it really carefully. But now every bloody R is the same.”

Her confessional work takes forms that appear rudimentary, improvised, unmediated. Her videos have the scratchy quality of home movies. Installations appear alongside handwritten explanations, in pencil, with crossings-out. And her misspellings add to the effect that Freedman describes as “like watching a car crash in slow motion”. “People used to knock on the windows and point out the spelling mistakes,” Emin says. “So I unpicked it. But it looked shit when I put it right, so I put it back.” I wonder whether the improvised, casual appearance of her work explains why some people think it won’t endure. “They did a vote on this radio programme,” she says. “They asked the audience if they thought Tracey Emin’s work would have longevity.” Many didn’t. “I thought, ‘F*** you, c***s.’ One minute I’m happily working away in my studio listening to the radio, the next it felt like I was on a witch’s dunking stool and my head was being submerged deep in a cold river.”

By Emin’s standards, our meeting has been largely uneventful. She’s sworn a fair bit, in her charmingly girly voice, but not insulted me or stalked out. But before I leave, I manage to save one of her works from destruction. It’s a canvas lying on the floor, covered in writing. It’s upside down, but I pick out the words “Terrence Higgins Trust”. I ask what it is. Emin says it was her “Christmas tree” for the Tate. “I don’t know what to do with it. I was going to paint over it.” I’m astonished, particularly after her lecture about birthday cards, and her fury over that radio audience consigning her to oblivion. Her uncertainty over this canvas seems to betray a fundamental, and attractive, lack of self-importance. Why not offer it to the Terrence Higgins Trust, I suggest. Putting her cup down, she ponders the idea. “I wonder if they might want it for their office. They might not have enough space for it… I must ask them.”

Tracey Emin, by Carl Freedman, is published by Rizzoli next month. It is available for the Sunday Times BooksFirst price of £35.99, including postage and packing. Tel: 0870 165 8585

What Charles did next

He is the most voracious collector of contemporary art, the man who made a whole generation of Young British Artists rich and famous. Now, with an ambitious new website, a major show at the Royal Academy and a gallery opening in Chelsea, he's back. He speaks exclusively to Stuart Jeffries Wednesday September 6, 2006 The Guardian 'I don't ever think about money, so obviously in that sense I'm fantastically rich ...' Charles Saatchi, photographed by Nigella Lawson There is a tradesmen's entrance to the Saatchis' Belgravia home. What comes in through there - Charles's acquisitions, Nigella's white truffles? Is a journalist a tradesman? I'm not sure, so I trot up the stairs to the intimidating main entrance and ring the bell. A young assistant opens the door, and whisks me through the hall. In a blur, I see Magritte's signature beneath a moonlit scene (Was it a bungalow? Did Magritte do bungalows?). Opposite, there is a naked old retainer sitting on a bench who, when I look back down from the stairs, turns out to be Duane Hanson's Man on a Bench. On the landing, there is a huge framed photograph of Nigella looking quite the pip. But there's no time to study the picture properly because her husband is already shaking my hand and offering me some chilled, cloudy lemonade. "It's from Waitrose," he says, confidingly. "I can really recommend it." We move to a vast room and sit behind a huge desk before an outsized computer. It's hard not to feel insignificant. Even Saatchi seems an outsized version of himself. He wears a baggy blue, short-sleeved shirt and has eyes that meet yours with sidelong, sad puppyish glances - a premonition of what David Schwimmer will look like at 63. I have been warned that Charles would prefer it if I didn't write about how messy his house is. I'm quite prepared to adhere to this stricture, chiefly because it isn't. Saatchi disagrees: "It's a toilet here. In the dining room, all there is on the walls is chains where pictures once were, and every morning Nigella says, 'When are you going to put a bloody picture up here?'" Given the size of Saatchi's collection, she has a point. Today, she is nowhere in evidence. Saatchi is a famously reluctant interviewee. Baghdad-born, Hampstead-raised, one half of the Saatchi & Saatchi ad agency who helped make Thatcher electable, he is generally portrayed as a furtive, latter-day Citizen Kane. The most voracious of contemporary art collectors, he hardly ever makes public appearances and rarely speaks to the press. Asked by readers of the Art Newspaper in 2005 why he doesn't attend even his own openings, he replied: "I don't go to other people's openings, so I extend the same courtesy to my own." He doesn't give interviews, he says, because "I come over as shifty. One thing that makes my flesh crawl is reading about myself." Nigella, on the other hand, a former journalist, is more comfortable with the press and frequently attends openings on her husband's behalf. "She's very, very charming, very clever, and she's very open so she'll just gab on about anything. With me, as you can see, I'm very shifty and very nervous - that's why I keep my gob shut." Shifty or not, today Saatchi wants to talk about three things: the website he set up earlier this year that allows artists to show their work direct to the public; his new gallery in Chelsea, which, when it opens next year, he hopes will erase unhappy memories of his time at County Hall; and his life as an art collector. I ask if the website, which displays works by 10,000-plus artists from around the world, was his idea. "Is it that bad?" he asks. "Is that what you're saying?" I'm not - but he seems to be joking, and goes on to explain that he set it up because "like any religious convert I have discovered the internet terribly late. The more interested I got in the site, the more I thought it could be a useful outlet - showcase, whatever - for artists who don't have dealers. Let them deal directly with collectors. Scanning a website to see work by an artist halfway across the world is the lazy way to do it, but probably the only effective way. "My little dream is that this can develop into an artists' community, where artists can load up their own work, visitors can browse. You don't have to pay a dealer 50% commission. Dealers tend to buy artists that other artists they already show recommend. If you're not in the loop, if you didn't go to the right art school, if you don't know the right people who have the right dealers, it's very hard to break in." Of course, looking at images online is not how Saatchi became one of the world's great collectors. In the 1990s, instead of downloading images on to his computer, he visited makeshift galleries in empty hairdressing salons and warehouses, and succeeded in unearthing possibly the most thrilling, certainly the most media-friendly, art Britain has ever produced. He bought up a great deal of what he saw and made a generation of artists - Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, the Chapman brothers, Marc Quinn - rich and famous. "Most of the art that ended up in Sensation [the 1997 touring exhibition of his collection of BritArt] I first saw put on by artists in alternative spaces. They couldn't spend their whole lives waiting for Anthony d'Offay or Leslie Waddington or any of the other big dealers to come around to look." Saatchi has described himself as "a gorger of the briefly new", and he tells me that even in his 60s he is "just a sad kid who wants to find a new sweetie". He still spends every weekend in remote parts of south and east London hunting for art. "I wander round the most disagreeable, grotty parts of London - I've become very fond of them - to see shows that have literally been put up in an empty shop or yard." Saatchi's critics, including artists who have benefitted from his patronage, argue that his buying power, his appetite for "the briefly new", has distorted values on the art market; others say that he has brought his ad agency values to the art world. "It is perhaps inevitable," argues art writer Louisa Buck, "that a man who is himself so adept at visual communication should feel an affinity with artists such as Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas, whose work relies on a similar ability to distil complex ideas into a powerful and accessible messsage." Naturally, Saatchi disagrees: "That's a facile take on what I do." It was while Saatchi was working in advertising that he began to establish himself in the international art market, bankrolling his collection from his booming ad agency. He bought his first picture on a trip to Paris with his first wife, Doris Lockhart, an American- born art writer, in 1973. It was a depiction of suburban houses by British artist David Hepher, but Saatchi's taste evolved and he built up a world-class collection of mostly American contemporary art. "There was absolutely no interest here at all. So I spent most of my time going to America - and I was also very interested in Japanese and German art." In 1985, he opened a gallery in St John's Wood and started exhibiting his collection in a bid to improve the nation's "unhealthy" attitude to contemporary art. At his prototypical white cube in the suburbs, Saatchi staged the first wholesale shows in Britain of artists such as Andy Warhol, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Naumann, Richard Serra and Jeff Koons. In the 1990s, Saatchi started offloading a lot of his collection of postwar American art and buying contemporary British art. The first work was Damien Hirst's A Thousand Years, a glass vitrine containing a cow's rotting head, along with maggots and flies. He also bought Tracey Emin's Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, an embroidered tent that he picked up for £150,000. He paid £13,000 for Marc Quinn's Self, a cast of the artist's head in nine pints of his own frozen blood. Later, there were lovely rumours that builders, hired to refit Saatchi's kitchen after his marriage to Nigella, accidentally melted Quinn's work by unplugging its electric supply. Unfortunately, they weren't true: he sold Self to an American collector in 2005 for £1.5m. Selling the Quinn at a massive profit is typical Saatchi. He would argue that by offloading it and other works from his collection he has enabled himself to buy new art, thus encouraging new artists and keeping his collection as fresh as frozen blood. Some artists would disagree, or at least fail to see that Saatchi acts in anyone's interest other than his own. The painter Peter Blake has argued that "he has become a malign influence by building up some artists and leaving others as victims". Blake's implicit point is that Saatchi will buy up an artist's works wholesale and then dump them, thereby ruining a career. There was even a theory that Saatchi had contracted with an arsonist to burn the Momart warehouse in 2004, a fire that destroyed much of his collection - the ultimate, cynical dumping of art that some said was past its sell-by date. "It wasn't terrifically amusing the first time people came up with this," he told the Art Newspaper when this was put to him by a reader. "Now it's the 100th time." But what does he think of Blake's criticism? "I never did buy a Peter Blake," he says wryly, offering me a puppyish glance. But Blake is hardly Saatchi's only critic. Damien Hirst turned on his patron a few years ago, witheringly describing Saatchi as "a shopaholic". It was a criticism that chimed with Kay Hartenstein's (Saatchi's second wife) description of her ex as "a man of crushes: cars, clothes, artists". (She didn't add "wives".) "Obviously, if you do what I do you are going to end up making people sometimes happy and sometimes unhappy," Saatchi says. "I cannot, nor would I want to, buy everything I see, so I have to make decisions about what I like. I like to keep my collecting fresh, and I think people have got the message." Why does he collect? "I like to show off. I always buy art with the idea that I'm going to show it." Interestingly, he thinks his influence over the art world has been clobbered recently by all the hedge-fund billionaires muscling in. "Before, I was always mouthing off about how there aren't enough collectors. Now there are just too many. They're all very young and very rich, and they all like to collect art the way they buy their funds. "I met one the other day, an American guy who was so young, and somebody told me he had made $500m last year - $500m cold for himself! I wanted to kill him. And he said to me, 'Yeah, well I've got 212 Kippenbergers.' I said, 'Ooh.' Now I know a little about Kippenberger. And I know where all the good ones are. He was very prolific, but he made 60 or 70 really good pieces. He made things every single day, he was one of the artists who had to, but most of it was so-so. So this guy's got 212! "So we end up laughing at him, and think this is not a real collector. But he's going to wind up looking like the smart one in financial terms, because he's taken the hedge-fund attitude. Kippenberger is going to be big. This guy's got his own art adviser. They all have their own art advisers - ladies dressed in black from head to toe, very chic, very, very thin - and they will have told him about the latest hip artist. So whatever his motivation, he will, in four or five years' time, have made a fortune on Kippenberger. And we will think, 'Why didn't we do that?'" Because he's not in it for the money? "No, of course I'm not in it for the money. I make a lot of money from the stuff I sell, but then I pay incredibly high prices for the things I want. That's how I get what I like. The market is so insane. What I do when I collect is one of two things: I buy very new people, then I can do what I like. Or, if it's somebody where I haven't got there first - which is the majority of cases because I don't travel - I make a list of my favourite works by that artist and I will try to get those pieces. And if that means I pay 10 times the market price, I don't mind doing it. The important thing is getting the pieces that are going to make the best show. So in that sense, it's best not to think about money." Does the way he collects distort the market? "I am a strange distortion," he giggles. "I think it comes from a desire to show the artist at their best. Some people are reluctant to let them go unless you pay them a very, very high premium. So I do. That's how you get them." He says he can't even ballpark his personal fortune. "I've got no idea. I think it's fair to say I don't ever think about money, so obviously in that sense I'm fantastically rich. I'm only rich in that I'm better off than most people. I don't feature on rich lists or anything." Since the late 1990s Saatchi's problem has not been buying art, but knowing what art to buy. Like many people, he has struggled to identify the YBAs' successors. In 1998, Saatchi announced the coming of a new generation of British artists he called the New Neurotic Realists. Among the "NewNus" (the acronym didn't catch on) brought together for two shows at Saatchi's north London gallery were Ron Mueck, Cecily Brown (whose painting Puce Moment was described by one critic as "an aggressive explosion of sex organs"), and David Falconer, whose Vermin Death Stack was a 10ft pile of dead mice made of cast resin. But was it a genuine movement, or just the former ad man's handle? More recently Saatchi announced the return of painting, but his two County Hall exhibitions, the Triumph of Painting parts one and two, suffered a critical mauling. In the London Evening Standard, Brian Sewell wrote that the theme was welcome, but it was a pity that he had chosen the wrong artists. The Observer's Laura Cumming, more devastatingly, suggested that Saatchi was now following taste rather than trying to form it. The stars of the British art scene, he admits, are less obvious than they were 10 years ago. "I haven't walked into a space and seen a glass vitrine emitting a very foul smell with a dead cow rotting and flies buzzing. I haven't seen anything like that for a long, long time. The era of Damien, the Chapmans and Sarah Lucas has had its golden age. Although those artists are still doing really good art, the next generation - as all generations do - go for a completely different look and take." He says he sees no coherence in today's artists. Perhaps, I suggest, this was as true of the YBAs: he gave those artists a coherence by buying them up. "That really isn't true. I think that something conspired to make British art suddenly probably the most exciting in the world. I think the art schools were particularly strong at that period, and a group of young artists were particularly strong at that point. "For the last five or six years the art schools have been very weak, and I see much less good art coming out of England. That's not to say that there isn't good art coming out, it's just less thrilling." What's changed? "Budgets have been slashed and more emphasis is placed on getting paying students. When Michael Craig-Martin was there [as professor at Goldsmiths College in London], they had about four really good teachers. It makes an incredible difference. I speak to many artists who teach there, and they say their audience is there because they think it's a nice, easy gig. They're not interested, they don't see the shows, they couldn't name more than 10 artists." Even so, Saatchi continues to visit the art schools and tiny galleries in south and east London. "I used to buy lots, but in the past five years I haven't. This year I've bought one artist out of Goldsmiths, nothing from Chelsea. It's not for want of trying." Instead, he has been buying on the other side of the Atlantic. In October, recent fire damage permitting, the Royal Academy will mount an exhibition called USA Today, which will consist of the best of his recent purchases of American art. "America has been in the doldrums for 15 years, and for me is now as exciting as Britain was in the early 90s." Why? "I have no idea. Probably because there's been a lull, and I think after all lulls the reverse happens." The USA Today show will feature Dana Schutz, Josephine Meckseper and Barnaby Furnas - none of them familiar names in this country. "If you were to scratch your average very hip dealer in New York, they would know half the names, and another dealer would know the other half," Saatchi says. "Over here, they're completely unknown." Will it cause a sensation, like his last Academy show? "It won't scandalise the Daily Mail. I guess I could tell [Mail editor] Paul Dacre it has a willy or two in it. That would get a headline, wouldn't it?" If USA Today sounds like just the kind of crowd-pleasing contemporary show you would expect Saatchi to open his new Chelsea gallery with, that's because it is supposed to be. "It's a sensational building, and I've been going potty to try and get in there quickly," he says. But "the builders approached me about a month ago and said, 'Really good news. There's no asbestos. You'll be in by June [2007]. I said, 'Excuse me, but on my [web]site I'm saying early 2007.' They said, 'No, June, and if you want to see why, come round.' So I went round. And it's a huge building site." In 2003, when part of the former GLC building on London's South Bank came up for grabs, Saatchi swooped. "It had immense foot traffic outside," he says. "It's just like Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon. So our numbers were really good." But many critics didn't like the new gallery, and the public balked at the £8 charge, particularly when Tate Modern's permanent collection, just a short stroll away, was free. "The art world was tuned to the idea that art galleries were big white spaces," says Saatchi. "So when they saw wood-pannelled corridors and rooms it didn't suit the art world's perception." That perception was hardly Saatchi's biggest problem. "We had an incredibly hostile relationship with the landlord. Everybody who worked there was utterly miserable, morale was terrible and I was spending my whole time with lawyers, which I really don't like doing, to no avail." Does he have any happy memories? "My best memories of County Hall are that we were very popular with schools. We must have had 1,200 to 1,300 schools come. I know I sound like some ghastly creep, but there is something enchanting about seeing groups of children sitting round a Chapman brothers piece with penises coming out of girls' eyes, drawing it very neatly to take back to their teachers." At one point during those dismal years, Saatchi thought of offering his £200m collection to the Tate. "I thought, 'Wouldn't it be much easier to give the headache of showing my collection to someone else?'" That was when he phoned his old chum Nick Serota and started up one of the great British art world rows. "I rang up Nick and said, 'Remember when we first walked around the new Tate and you said we have the opportunity to extend it another 50%? Well I'm miserable here, I'm thinking of leaving all my stuff to the Tate.' He said, 'Those spaces are already committed.' I said, 'Oh,' and that was the end of the conversation." Of course, this wasn't how the story was reported. Instead, Serota's refusal was seen as the latest round in a long-running feud between the two most powerful men in the British art world. Saatchi had reportedly criticised the Tate-run Turner Prize. The London Evening Standard claimed that, in 1997, the Tate approached Saatchi about acquiring work to mark Tate Modern's opening, and that the following year he offered Serota 86 works by 57 British artists - including Langland and Bell, Turner prize-winner Martin Creed, and Glenn Brown - none of which were accepted. Saatchi denies that the abrupt phone call to Serota was the latest instalment of a row fuelled by mutual loathing. "I'm mad about Nick. Genuinely, I think he's a sensational man. So the last thing I want to do is create some friction between us. But it obviously turned into a story." Saatchi is now pleased, at least publicly, that Serota didn't accept his offer. "I think it would have been a great shame - I can do things Nick can't. I think London does need to have somewhere where very new art can be showcased." Doesn't that leave the Tate's collection of British contemporary art looking pretty weak? "The Tate's got a lot of good stuff." That said, he is hardly a cheerleader. "I'm never going to be happy with any museum's collection because they all get their stuff in mysterious ways. They rely on gifts, which can often be of second or third rate quality, or they wait so long to get behind an artist that all the best works have ended up with people like me." Saatchi says he has taken a self-denying ordinance to buy nothing from his Your Gallery website for six months. "I didn't want there to be any confusion about what the site was there for. I wasn't intending the site to be used for artists to present their work to any one individual. So I thought I won't stick my oar in until it has a life of its own. I've made a note of all the artists on there that I think are very good - it's a surprisingly long list." He says he will probably launch his new gallery with an exhibition of Chinese art. "I've always been very sneery about Chinese art because it looks terribly kitsch, and a lot of it looks very derivative. But there's enough stuff to put on a good show. So far I've found six artists who I think are good on any stage. My rule is: if you can put this in the Whitney Biennial and nobody is going to say, 'Oh that's very good for a Chinese artist,' then that will be fine." He didn't visit China to find his artists. "I don't travel. I'm very, very, very lazy. I'm going to be like one of those people who get fatter and fatter and become one with the chair, and they're found years later." Later in 2007, he plans to stage the third in his series the Triumph of Painting, as well as what remains of his BritArt collection. It is unusual for someone to retain such enthusiasm for new art, I suggest. "Barking mad, I think is what you're trying to say. It is true, I worry about my sanity. I still take a childish pleasure in doing the same things I have been doing for a very long time. Artists are always producing new, interesting things. I don't believe this argument that everything's been done. Artists break the rules all the time. Artists make art that doesn't look like art. Nobody could foresee that someone could make art out of a cow's head and flies, a sheep in a tank of formaldehyde, or a row of girls in brand-new Nikes with penises coming out of their heads. Nobody could foresee that this was the direction art was going to take and that it would be great art." But Charles Saatchi possessed two things nearly as rare as that foresight: the wit to realise, 16 years ago, that something extraordinary was happening in the British art world, and the savvy to buy it up fast. He got the jump on the art market once. Has he the wit to do it again? Will his exhibitions of new American and Chinese art show that Saatchi has still got it, and can flaunt it to the despair of rival collectors, disaffected artists and press critics? It seems unlikely that there is a new Damien, Jake, Dinos, Tracey or Sarah awaiting those who are keen to see what Charles bought next. Unlikely, but not impossible. Over the next few months, we will find out for sure. · USA Today starts at the Royal Academy, London W1, on October 6. The new Saatchi Gallery is due to open next June. Your Gallery is at Saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery

Portrait of an ex-husband's revenge

The vicious feud between artists Charles Thomson and his former wife, Stella Vine, has spilled over on to canvas. Anthony Barnes reports

Sunday, 3 September 2006

As an act of naked revenge, it is a work of art. The artist Stella Vine, who found fame when Charles Saatchi took her under his wing, is laid bare by her former husband in a series of explicit, humiliating nude portraits at a major exhibition.

The artworks will reignite a simmering feud between Vine and Charles Thomson, which has seen them trading verbal salvos in media interviews without actually exchanging a word with each other. Thomson - co-founder of anti-conceptual art movement the Stuckists - himself concedes the works will leave her "pissed off" and "angry".

His paintings, to be exhibited at the Stuckists' first major central London exhibition, are titled simply Stripper and Strip Club, though it is clear who inspired them. The publicity material for the show, which opens next month, even spells out that they are "explicit images of his ex-wife".

They will be seen by many as an act of revenge for the brevity of their marriage. Thomson, 53, said the works were not intended as a public attack, more a way of privately dealing with his own emotions through his art after their relationship crumbled.

Vine, 37, who formerly worked as a stripper, found notoriety when her painting of Diana, Princess of Wales, daubed with the words "Hi Paul, can you come over I'm really frightened", was exhibited by Saatchi.

As a former member of the Stuckists, her association with the collector infuriated her former compatriots who claimed she had taken their ideas and sidled up to the enemy. She achieved further notoriety when she created a work depicting Rachel Whitear, who had died of a heroin overdose, to the anger of the dead girl's parents.

Vine, who opens her own solo show at the Modern Art Oxford gallery next month, developed her skills attending classes at Hampstead School of Art, and after falling in with the Stuckists exhibited her work for the first time at a small display in Brixton, south London, in 2001. Within weeks she had married Thomson at a ceremony in New York's City Hall, but they separated within two months.

Thomson told The Independent on Sunday: "I did these paintings after we broke up - the sort of consolidation period. For me it was a way of working through the emotional after-effects. Basically she had told me a lot of stories about her time in the sex industry and really they were quite gutting. It wasn't very nice hearing them and it left a bit of an emotional scar on me. It was a way of getting them out of my system. I found it quite gruelling to do them."

The Stuckists emerged from a group of artistic friends who once counted Tracey Emin and her then boyfriend Billy Childish among their number. Their devotion to painting as an art form, instead of moving into other experimental areas, led to Emin condemning Childish as "stuck, stuck, stuck", hence the group's name.

Thomson, who stood for Parliament in 2001 against the then Culture secretary Chris Smith, has not spoken to his former wife for four years, although they have traded vicious barbs in newspaper interviews. She has claimed he "exploited" her and is "full of shit", while he has branded her "a mercurial character who thinks nothing about he pain she puts others through".

Thomson said it was the gallery that chose to exhibit the nudes, but he was unapologetic about showing them in public. "She will probably be very pissed off. She'll be angry and very upset because it is one rule for her and another for everyone else. She expects people to understand when she does it. She does Diana with blood coming out of her mouth and looking traumatised and it's fine, but that woman is a mother and her children are still alive.

"She claims it comes from deep within her and it is the same with my pictures. It comes from deep within me and it is important. If she does feel upset, it can't be half as upset as the parents of Rachel Whitear or Diana's sons."

Vine was keeping her counsel about the exhibition when she was informed by The Independent on Sunday. She said: "I have no comment. I've had my dealings with them [the Stuckists] over the past couple of years and I don't want to say anything more."