PROFILE: Anthony d’Offay
Until last week the retired London art dealer Anthony d’Offay was seldom painted in a flattering light. Now depicted with a halo after his selfless bequest to the nation of 725 works of modern art, he was once memorably described as “dark and pale with a vampire air”. The notion of a vampire donating blood has left many critics scratching their heads.
It was plain altruism, the 68-year-old declared, that motivated his gift to the Tate and National Galleries of Scotland of works by artists including Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst. Although this trove is valued at about £125m, he will be paid only £26.5m – the amount it originally cost him.
“A lot of things were painful to part with, but the jewel for me is walking into a museum and seeing a school party there,” d’Offay said. His “defining experience” as an art student at Edinburgh University had been wandering around the city’s galleries, and he wanted to pass on this thrill to the young. Spurning the kudos of plastering his name over the collection – which will be known simply as “Artists Rooms” – he will work as its unpaid curator.
For some it is hard to square this act of generosity, unparalleled since the early 20th century, with the remote and disconcerting figure who become Europe’s preeminent dealer over a 30-year period, amassing great wealth at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in Mayfair. He lorded it over the art world from his house in Regent’s Park – where he still lives with his wife Anne Seymour, an art historian and editor – until his retirement seven years ago.
Waldemar Januszczak, the Sunday Times art critic, remembers d’Offay as “this creepy guy who used to float around without making a sound at the back of the gallery. All those quips about him looking like the living dead were perfectly justified. But even though it was not welcoming or pleasant, I saw so many amazing shows at his place”.
On one occasion Januszczak was banned from the gallery by d’Offay after the critic’s review displeased Gilbert & George, the dealer’s protégés. By a twist of fate, the two performance artists later quit the gallery, describing d’Offay as a “fat c***”. Some art connoisseurs may have taken this as an oblique reference to Fat Chair, a wooden chair covered with a layer of fat by the German artist Joseph Beuys, whose work d’Offay has promoted and included in his donation. But they had miscounted the asterisks.
Dark rumours swirled around the gallery. One concerned regular sessions at which staff sat in a circle on the floor, conducting “mutual confessions of their deepest fantasies and fears” by one account, or transcendental meditation according to another. “He was a slightly quirky, eccentric, mysterious figure,” said an art dealer.
To his admirers, d’Offay is an exceptional man. Norman Rosenthal, the recently retired exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy, collaborated with him on a number of occasions since the 1970s. “Anthony did extraordinary things for art in London,” he said. “He was one of the great dealers of the period.”
Beneath d’Offay’s enigmatic carapace, Rosenthal observed, is “a poetic character” whose “genuine love of art” belies his dealer’s stereotype of being interested only in money. “He’s quite a shy and secret person. He’s not the best public speaker. He’s very interested in India and mysticism. He collects Indian sculpture and lingams.
“He has a vegetarian, homeopathic streak to him. I think he regards arts as a kind of societal homeopathy.” As a dealer, Rosenthal said, d’Offay was “unbelievably driven, never off an aeroplane. He appeared to be obsessed. For him it was almost like a religion”.
D’Offay’s recent remarks appeared to bear this out: “In a time when, for many people in this country, religion no longer fulfils the role that it did 50-100 years ago, what you believe in becomes very important. Art and creativity become something you can believe in.”
For the churlish, there is the question of £14m tax owed by d’Offay and written off by the government as part of the deal. D’Offay dismissed the matter as of no consequence: “I have no idea about tax. I’m interested in education and art.”
In Rosenthal’s opinion, d’Offay’s philanthropy is mutually beneficial and will not leave him out of pocket: “In terms of today’s art market, probably it’s a very advantageous deal.”
David Barrie, director of the Art Fund, which gave £1m towards the purchase, said d’Offay’s benefit would be to “have a say for as long as he is alive on where the collection is displayed. Anthony also wants to be seen now as Mr Nice Guy”.
Much of the praise for his donation, which also includes works by Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus and Ian Hamilton Finlay, centres on the belief that d’Offay has plugged a gap in the nation’s art collection. For decades, Britain’s gallery directors failed to buy works by the practitioners of contemporary and modern art, even when they were relatively affordable. Now the best are beyond the reach of our national collections. Britain has a few Picassos and no Matisses to speak of amid an embarrassing dearth of early 20th-century artists.
So shouldn’t we erect a plinth for d’Offay? A small one, says Januszczak: “The whole thing is being overhyped. It’s not a collection that will radically change the national holdings. There was such a collection – Charles Saatchi’s collection of modern British art from the Damien Hirst era – but the Tate let it slip through their fingers. Since Saatchi sold all his stuff, the Tate has been scrabbling around trying to make up for its mistake. This is second best. There are some interesting things in it, but it isn’t going to fill the chasm.”
Born in Sheffield in 1940, d’Offay grew up in Leicester, his father a surgeon and his mother an antiques dealer. Arriving in Scotland to study in the 1960s was a revelation. It was “the first time I’d been in a great city”, he recalled. Edinburgh was “a beautiful, romantic city, of a size that you can feel belongs to you”. He began collecting in 1962, buying a piece by the Scottish artist Martin Boyce. He started dealing in manuscripts and drawings after buying the books and poems of two obscure poets from Oscar Wilde’s circle, and in 1969 he moved to London’s Mayfair where he revived forgotten artistic figures from the Blooomsbury circle. Through the 1970s he held defining shows by the likes of Lucian Freud, Gilbert & George and Eduardo Paolozzi.
In 1977 he married Anne, then a curator at the Tate. Their son Timothy runs a tearoom where he offers exotic brews and exhibits historic postcards from his father’s collection. The Anthony D’Offay Gallery, opened in 1980, rapidly became one of the most important exhibition spaces in London, with landmark shows of contemporary artists. His participation in the Royal Academy’s New Spirit of Painting show in 1981 had led him – and Saatchi – to “utterly change their art agendas”, Rosenthal says.
Part of his talent was coaxing the best work from artists. He met Warhol in 1980, when the American artist’s reputation was suffering from claims that he had abandoned the avant-garde to become a society figure. “What he really needed to do was a significant new body of work,” d’Offay recalled. “I felt it was a responsibility for me to produce a successful show.”
It was not until five years later, while staying with Beuys and his family in Naples, that d’Offay saw a large portrait of his host by Warhol. “It was in that second I realised that, as a painter of portraits, Warhol had no equal in the second half of the 20th century, or perhaps all of the 20th century.” The resulting show in London was a sensation.
In the early 1990s he began representing young British artists such as Rachel Whiteread and Richard Patterson. Then the music abruptly stopped. In 2001 d’Offay announced he was closing the business, then turning over of £35m. It had the impact of an emperor’s abdication. Some said he had lost his spark, sensing that the punky, noisy circus surrounding Hirst made the elder statesman’s hallowed approach to art seem old-fashioned.
D’Offay’s explanation was elliptical: “I am 62 in January and not getting any younger. I would rather step down when the gallery is at its height.” He did not need a gallery to continue dealing, and went on collecting. The effort took him and his wife seven years.
His astonishing act of generosity has not only highlighted the lamentable gaps in our national collections, but has spurred two other collectors to pledge further donations. Among d’Offay’s regrets, it’s a fair bet that anonymity will elude him.
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