Frank Cohen's collection of contemporary art really isn't up there in the first rank
This week he opens Initial Access, a new gallery space on an industrial estate outside Wolverhampton, and in the summer he will finally unveil the gallery that he has dreamt of for years, Frank Cohen Museum of Contemporary Art (FC MoCA), in the Spinningfields area of Manchester, which will be a showcase for even fatter slices of his growing collection of contemporary and modern British art.
Cohen started out flogging wallpaper from the back of an ambulance, and he went on to build the DIY chain GlynWebb Home Improvements, which he sold at great profit in 1997. It is apt, therefore, that his first salvo at Initial Access, an exhibition of about 20 works, should be entitled Design for Living and should unite art and interiors.
Cohen wants things to start with a bang, and they will: the first installation to greet you will be Powerless Structures, by the Scandinavian duo Elmgreen and Dragset, a removal crate that appears to have crashed from the skies. Then there is Dexter Dalwood’s wood-cabin painting Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and an amusingly self-generating installation by Nathaniel Mellors entitled Car Park Cosmology, which shows footage of people emerging from DIY stores clutching purchases, and replicas of those same products lined up in the gallery.
To effect the intersection with interiors more powerfully there are also examples of contemporary design, including an undulating table by Zaha Hadid, a landscape sculpture/seating design by Ross Lovegrove and two of Fernando and Humberto Campana’s toy-covered chairs — one seat is a mass of slightly inviting, slightly repellent green alligators.
It all sounds rather entertaining, if not quite substantial or purposeful, and given that the leading independent curator David Thorp has been taken on to direct this and future shows for Cohen (including Initial Access’s next one, LA/Beijing, which will advance the curious thesis that there is a similarity between art in the American and Chinese cities), it ought to be.
However, is it enough to anoint Cohen officially as “the Charles Saatchi of the North”? Well, there are some parallels. They are the same age; both skipped higher education to go into business; and both started collecting early. Cohen began with cigarette cards, stamps and coins, and moved onto art when he bought L. S. Lowry’s My Family. Soon after, he started spending on Hepworth, Frink, Paolozzi and Spencer, and then, some time in the mid-1990s, he discovered Young British Art (he loved their down-home materials — the household paint, MDF, buckets and basins), and his enthusiasm for this touched off a spending spree on young Germans, Americans, Japanese and Chinese. Everyone, in short.
Seeing his collection grow, by the late 1990s Cohen was thinking of finding a home for it. Here, apparently, things became more frustrating. None among Manchester’s museums seems to have been seriously interested in exhibiting the work and so he was forced to venture out on his own with a handful of temporary exhibitions. Critics weren’t exactly gleeful. There were questions over whether Cohen really owned anything significant at all, or just a lot of incidentals. He is said to own work by Polke, Warhol, Prince, Hirst — but are any of these important and central works? A shark in a tank, maybe, an embroidered tent? Well, not really, though Cohen says he owns plenty that could well be future icons. Fair enough.
But there are other causes for worry. Collectors’ proclamations of how much they own are, of course, open to a little, shall we say, aspirational calculating, but in 2004 Cohen was telling people that he owned around 1,000 works; today he says he owns nearly 2,500. That would have required him to have bought nearly two artworks every day since then in order to arrive at this figure, which is, conveniently, about the number that Charles Saatchi owns. And, as everyone who shops knows, when you really go to town, you come home with some duds. Upon further inquiry I was told that the collection has not grown in quite the way it seems, but I’m really not sure.
Don’t get me wrong. Any collector who opens his private collection to the public is a laudable and valuable public asset, and we salute and thank Cohen for doing this, but some assets are worth more than others. Cohen seems to be in a terrible hurry, and rich men in a hurry to show their wealth will always attract an eager audience in the media. Cohen would like to be seen as a bit of a personality, a northern geezer, even, and that helps, too.
Since Britain’s other major collectors — such as Andrew Lloyd Webber, Sir Denis Mahon, Sir Peter Moores — collect older, less trendy art, and do so more quietly, there can be few to steal Cohen’s limelight. But let there be no confusion: Frank Cohen is not the Charles Saatchi of the North.
Design for Living is at Initial Access, Units 19 and 20 Calibre Industrial Park, Laches Close, off Enterprise Drive, Four Ashes, Wolverhampton (01902 798999); www.initialaccess.co.uk), from Friday until March 4
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