Charles Saatchi and his art of patronage

It is like Simon Cowell announcing that he had discovered a talented singer called Mick Jagger

Philip Hensher
Wednesday, 26 January 2005

Charles Saatchi and his gallery have decided, it seems, that painting is where it is at. Painting - you remember it, surely? One artist, with a paintbrush and a selection of colours in tubes or on a palette, acrylic, oil or, who knows, even watercolour, putting it on a canvas until he reaches the edges and it looks like something. Or not. Until recently, an artist has been someone with the phone number of a good technical workshop and the ability to persuade investors to hand over a down payment. From now on, you may recognise an artist by the burnt sienna on his cuffs.

Charles Saatchi and his gallery have decided, it seems, that painting is where it is at. Painting - you remember it, surely? One artist, with a paintbrush and a selection of colours in tubes or on a palette, acrylic, oil or, who knows, even watercolour, putting it on a canvas until he reaches the edges and it looks like something. Or not. Until recently, an artist has been someone with the phone number of a good technical workshop and the ability to persuade investors to hand over a down payment. From now on, you may recognise an artist by the burnt sienna on his cuffs.

Anyway, that is what we are to infer from the title of the new exhibition at his gallery, The Triumph of Painting: Part One, a title as screamingly pompous as a 1974 album by Yes. Painting is back! Painting is exciting! Painting is happening again! And the proof is that Charles Saatchi is buying it, and - we may conclude - is propelling some new artists into the spotlight, just as he did years ago with Damien Hirst, Ron Mueck and what's-her-face off the telly. And to launch the whole thing, there's a party so enormous, even I've been invited.

Actually, I'm not going - there's quite a smart party the same night. And though the exhibition contains some very good painters, the whole enterprise is so tiresome in its tone that it may take some effort to shove past Mr Saatchi's army of bright-nosed acolytes in their spotty tabards accosting anyone walking north of Waterloo Station and visit the exhibition at all.

It reminds me terribly of those articles in Sunday newspapers written entirely for the amusement of Private Eye. Is poetry the new rock and roll? Is Rowetta X Factor the new Kiri Te Kanawa? Is cake-icing the new comedy? Is conceptual art the new sampler-making? Is embroidery the new pornography? Is Lego the new cocaine? Is opera the new football? Is painting the new Art? One could go on all day - it isn't very hard. But the truth is that all these activities, and any one can think of, carry on energetically whether the light of metropolitan fashion happens to be falling on them or not. This is particularly the case of painting. Anyone who seriously follows art will know that not only has painting never gone away, but over the last 20 years, a lot of seriously impressive work has gained a lot of popular support.

Even limiting yourself to this country, the names of Lucian Freud, Howard Hodgkin, Bridget Riley, Patrick Caulfield, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost and dozens of others leap to mind, all doing splendid, individual work. They are grand, established names, but among younger artists Gary Hume, Jenny Savile, Chris Ofili, Glenn Brown and Fiona Rae have put together substantial reputations at a time when it was supposed that nobody was interested in painting.

All that is being claimed here, surely, is the circular argument that painting has now triumphed because it is being given pride of place in the Saatchi Gallery: conversely, it is being given pride of place there because it has triumphed. It is a peculiar claim, suggesting that triumph can only be proclaimed from the old GLC building. It looks much more peculiar when you examine the painters included in Mr Saatchi's new show, who conspicuously don't need any kind of patronage from that direction.

I laughed my head off when I saw that one of Mr Saatchi's "discoveries" was Hermann Nitsch. Nitsch has been immensely famous since the early 1970s, and very busy before then; his "Orgien Mysterien Theater" were celebrated mid-70s art scandals, with their large numbers of slaughtered animals. No doubt Herr Nitsch is politely pleased that Saatchi has bought some of his works, but it doesn't seem likely that it will make much difference to an immensely famous career. It is a bit like Simon Cowell announcing that he has discovered a talented singer called Mick Jagger.

And the others are pretty much the same. Martin Kippenberger and Jorg Immendorff are two of the most famous German artists: Peter Doig has been around and admired for years; Luc Tuymans has just had a big show at Tate Modern, so isn't remotely unfamiliar even to insular London audiences.

Let's face it: we know all about these people. The Saatchi Gallery is not even leaping on a bandwagon; it is trying to further a creaky reputation by harnessing it to some already very solid ones, and pretending that it is leading the way. Saatchi is an influential collector, but not as vital a presence in the market of reputations as he likes to think. The artists in his collection who have made a substantial reputation are the good ones, who would have done all right anyway. The ones in the present exhibition need him even less, since their reputations are solidly made, and it is absurd to pretend that the Saatchi Gallery's change of heart has any general significance whatsoever.

Journalists are used to hard-bitten editors asking the question "What's the story here?" Well, what is the story? Charles Saatchi starts to like painting? Rich man buys works by already famous artists? Beats me. It looks very much like a man selling popcorn in a cinema lobby, under the impression that since the film starts after people stop buying popcorn, it couldn't begin without him.

Sensation! It's paint on canvas

From The Times

January 26, 2005

THE TRIUMPH OF PAINTING
Saatchi Gallery, SE1

The new Saatchi Gallery exhibition shows that reports of the death of painting were greatly exaggerated

Rachel Campbell-Johnson

The scorched-earth progress of conceptualism, supposedly, left the canvas a wasteland. Painting was declared dead. After all, what more could it contribute? We had seen Ad Reinhardt’s all-black works — “just the last paintings anyone could make”, he had called them. We had looked into Robert Ryman’s uninflected white squares. Surely there was nowhere to go after that.

Or was there? Nothing is ever black and white — and not least art history. The death of painting has been proclaimed repeatedly — with the advent of photography, for instance, or the rise of Duchamp — but rumours of its demise always proved premature. A miraculous resurrection was inevitably announced later.

Painting was not dead; it was just up against the wall and being shot at — and often by its own practitioners, who wanted to clear the ground so that they could reclaim it. Reinhardt might have seemed to be forecasting the end of an art form in the 1960s, but what he was actually doing was challenging it to break free from a prison of period rhetoric and find new possibilities. He was provoking the painter to change the rules of his game.

So, when painting was said to be dead in the 1980s, it was only one particular view of the medium that was passing. It was only the end of one game and the start of another. And this is the start that the latest Saatchi Gallery show now looks back to as it opens the first of a series of three shows — The Triumph of Painting — that will run over the year.

Part one, which opens today, represents the work of six painters who, while Damien Hirst was out shark fishing and Tracey Emin was lounging in bed, kept on working in a traditional medium — or at least, as in the case of the irrepressibly subversive (but prematurely deceased) Martin Kippenberger, looked for ways in which painting could still be relevant amid an oeuvre that included anything from the invention of a non-existent global subway system for which he installed fake entrances in cities the world over to the buying of a run-down petrol station in Brazil which he named after a Nazi war criminal.

But don’t expect dramatic new discoveries from this opening section of the show. Saatchi is not setting trends; he is catching up with them. These are artists who have been in the picture for at least 20 years. Their visions may have been forged in the fires of unfashionability, but now they are famous — or infamous in some cases. Their work sells for hundreds of thousands. It has been shown in major gallery spaces. Only last year Luc Tuymans was the subject of a major Tate Modern exhibition.

And don’t expect any coherent aesthetic — not even, necessarily, within the work of one artist. Kippenberger smashed the sacrosanct notion of the trademark style. He signs anything from a billboard poster that derides the enticements of advertising to a rubber-latex-skinned canvas that mocks sexual taboo. This is not a show that attempts to define a movement or shared aim. The artists come from anywhere. Marlene Dumas is South African-born and Amsterdam-based. Peter Doig was brought up in Canada but now lives in Trinidad. And their work goes everywhere. There are landscapes and figure paintings, still lifes and abstracts. There is anger and humour and politics and porn, satire and nostalgia, loveliness and ungainliness, reticence and overkill.

But what, broadly speaking, they share is the attempt to return to a traditional form (often after exploring other media) and reclaim it for a postmodern world in which fixed meanings and functions have been lost amid a swarm of competing references, implications and truths. Art-historical markers — allusions to anyone from Edouard Manet to Joseph Beuys — stick up like tide measures amid the swirling flood. They are swept away into surfaces in which reality can be based on the falsity of the photograph, in which authenticity has dissolved along with any romantic notions of artistic genius. These are savaged in paintings that are wilfully bad. Peter Doig’s lambent meditations on landscape may ease the spectator into this show, but after that prepare for the belligerently clumsy or the brutally tawdry, the brazen or the deliberately shabby.

If you hoped that the triumph of painting meant that old-fashioned craftsmanship was about to overtake new-fangled conceptualism, then think again. These painters are not backtracking on Post-Modernism’s progress. If anything they are pushing it further, testing ways in which painting can become relevant in its context. Their works should be approached in the same way as conceptual pieces. “A good artist has less time than ideas,” Kippenberger said.

Painting is dead! Long live the spectator! A critical faculty is as much a part of these works as their painterly surface. The visitor is entangled in the densely problematic vision of artists such as Dumas, whose declared aim is “to reveal not display”.

He soon finds himself tripping over his own thoughts as he struggles to make sense of meanings that are embedded as much in the medium as in his own mind.

The mistake of this show is the inclusion of works by the “Pope of Viennese Aktionism”, Hermann Nitsch, whose splatterfest abstracts are the spin-off of ludicrous performances involving buckets of blood and lashings of gore. His belief that art should break out from the canvas and incorporate the reality of visceral emotion and raw corporeal experience goes little further than Grand Guignol. And the catalogue (which includes all the images from future shows in this series) seems to presage the sort of splashy Expressionism that might make you start wishing that painting would indeed undergo a dramatic decline.

Saatchi clearly hasn’t completely abandoned his taste for publicity-hungry sensationalism. He also includes several works by the German Jörg Immendorf, whom he has been collecting for years. In these political rants, the polemics take precedence over the painting. The images tell, not show.

Perhaps this show relies too heavily on what was lying around in the stockroom — padded, to judge by a slant towards later works, by more recent purchases. There are several painters who could (and perhaps should) have been represented but aren’t. The visual puzzles of the freewheeling iconoclast Sigmar Polke, for one, would have made an informative addition. And for all the rebellious energy, the cultish flamboyance, the belligerent provocation of Kippenberger, for all his importance as the poster boy of Post-Modernism, a show of this sort should perhaps have left him out. Put into what is starting to seem like an art-historical box, his complex and prolific vision feels cramped.

But where Saatchi succeeds is in offering viewers the chance to recap or catch up with the careers of artists as pioneering as Dumas and Tuymans. These are artists whose works are as visually compelling as they are intellectually complex, who even as they discomfit also fascinate. They lure the spectator into a sort of symbiotic alliance with their work.

They do not, of course, prove that painting has definitively triumphed over other media. A good painter is as rare as a good artist of any sort. Nor does their painting spell a radical change in aesthetic outlook. They are still conceptual. But what they do show is that painting has continuing possibilities, that it can still effect that magical alchemy that has been practised since our prehistoric ancestors first turned muddy ochres into magical beasts.

They prove that painting is not dead. And it helped that some workmen were thumping away in the far-off bowels of the building. Their banging was like the pulse of some waking leviathan’s heartbeat.

BRITS AND PIECES...

1985 Charles Saatchi launches his gallery with heavyweight modern masters including Donald Judd and Andy Warhol.

1992 First of his Young British Artists shows. Perhaps the adman’s most successful brand label.

1994 Young British Artists III: “Our most voracious contemporary collector confounds all expectations . . . the hallowed business of mark-making on canvas is once again a focus for debate.” — Richard Cork in The Times.

1997 Saatchi’s masterstroke, Sensation at the Royal Academy in 1997. Paint and eggs are thrown, critics’ responses are mixed but the show boosts YBA market value and the ailing RA, with over 2,800 visitors daily.

1999 New Neurotic Realism, an attempt to move away from Brit Art, ends in critical disaster. In 2003, Saatchi moves his Brit Art greatest hits collection to County Hall.

2004 The fire at Momart storage hits the media mogul hardest. Tabloids cry divine justice, critics rally around the loss of the art, despairing at public philistinism.

Also 2004. . . Saatchi’s contentious status as art patron is highlighted when he claimed that Nicholas Serota had refused to accept his collection for the Tate. Serota said that Saatchi never made an offer, countering that for years Saatchi had refused to aid the Tate with purchasing key British artworks.

The triumph of painting? That's a pretty rich claim

You should be suspicious of Charles Saatchi's grandiose claims, especially since some artists in his new show are worthless. But the boldness of his vision deserves high praise, says Tom Lubbock

Tuesday, 25 January 2005

Art, like anything, lives on legends. The stories are told and retold and eventually turn into history. Of course you can believe them if you want to. It often makes things simpler. But not believing them can be fun too.

Art, like anything, lives on legends. The stories are told and retold and eventually turn into history. Of course you can believe them if you want to. It often makes things simpler. But not believing them can be fun too.

So how about this one? In the middle of last year it was widely reported that there were going to be some changes in the art world. The 1990s had seen the triumph of Britart. An art of rude, bright toys had made the running. The poor old art of painting was nowhere to be seen. It was certainly not the kind of thing to be found in that most fashionable art venue, the Saatchi Gallery, power base of Britart. And the news was that Charles Saatchi - setting the trend as ever - had changed his mind.

In 2005, the celebrated Iraqi/British collector would be reviving the cause of painting. He would be bringing a new batch of painters to the world's attention with a series of exhibitions called The Triumph of Painting. Part One opens tomorrow. Its title makes a clear bid for legend. It sounds like a chapter in a history book already. So, to start with, let's put the record straight. All the above story is untrue.

Whenever you hear about a revival of painting you should be suspicious. Modern painting is rather like modern religion. It is continually being declared dead and then suddenly it's reviving. Painting today is pretty well kept going by the question of its disputed mortality. Every few years, another twitch. But are these twitches signs of life? Or are they terminal spasms, or post-mortem effects, or even the symptoms of a strange, "undead", zombie half-life?

That's the big, ongoing, unanswerable question. (Personally I incline to the last option.)

And just at the moment painting is a highly fashionable art form. It's having a bout of serious twitches. In the past few years I can think of several major exhibitions that have identified a new spirit in painting (About Painting in Oxford, Examining Pictures at the Whitechapel Gallery, Hybrids in Tate Liverpool), and there have been many other smaller ones.

Or go round the trendy commercial galleries in London. Painting is currently so fashionable, it's on the verge of being unfashionable again.

What's more, the Saatchi Gallery itself - at both its former address in north London and its present address on the South Bank - has shown plenty of contemporary painting. And then, of the six painters showing in the Triumph of Painting: Part One, five are perfectly established names, widely shown elsewhere. One, Luc Tuymans, had a retrospective at Tate Modern last year.

As for the other half of the story, the alleged death of Britart, well, that's another bit of news that's been touted many times over the past 10 years. Does this mean the end of Britart?, someone urgently asks at the Turner Prize each year.

Depends what you mean, obviously. If Britart means an energetic bunch of work produced around the beginning of the 1990s, then obviously that has had its moment. But if you mean: will artists stop using found and fabricated objects and installations and video and all that stuff, and pick up their paintbrushes, then no they won't, not all of them.

To get a bit of perspective on the whole issue, consider this statistic. The 1997 Saatchi exhibition at the Royal Academy, Sensation, is generally taken as a kind of official monument to the Britart movement. In that show, more than a third of the artists were painters. Two-fifths. Confused? You must have been trying to believe the legends.

There is some real news here for the gallery-goer. The whole Saatchi Gallery is now given over to painting. This means that the centrepiece of its previous exhibitions, the crowd-pulling icons of Britart, the bed, the shark, the tent, the dead dad, the frozen blood head, the giant anatomical model, all these toys have been put away. (Damien Hirst's shark has been sold to America. Rachel Whiteread's plaster-cast room has left the collection too. Tracey Emin's tent - and it's still not clear how much else - was burnt in last year's warehouse fire.)

Since it moved to the old County Hall building two years ago, the Saatchi Gallery has been partly operating as a mausoleum to that eye-catching moment in British art. This role, presumably, it won't be playing any more.

If what you mean by the end of Britart is a waning of interest in Britart, I suppose not having its star-works in the same collection may well make a difference.

Meanwhile, throughout this year, all the ugly, wood-panelled, municipal spaces of the building are occupied by paintings. In fact the woodwork is a bit less visible than it was before. There's more white-walling, covering it over. (It was not so long ago that Saatchi was declaring the end of the white-walled contemporary art gallery. But that legend never quite took off.)

Each painting is given a good deal of space, sometimes a whole room to itself. The paintings are generally on the large side.

But are they any good? That's the real question of course. After all the soundings about painting generally, or Britart generally, it's always going to come down to something more specific.

You find yourself standing in front of a particular work by a particular artist. Will you be staying, or will you be moving rapidly on?

The six painters in the exhibition are the Austrian Hermann Nitsch, the Germans Jörg Immendorff and Martin Kippenberger, the South African-Dutch Marlene Dumas, the Belgian Luc Tuymans and the Canadian-Briton Peter Doig.

It's a funny kind of group show. The paintings don't really go together. In fact you might say they were extremely ill-assorted. And some of them are really pretty worthless.

Hermann Nitsch (born 1938), the Viennese Actionist, famous for his gory ritualistic performances, involving blood, nudity and dead animals, has produced (as a kind of by-product) a series of splatter paintings, canvasses drenched in violent washes and dribbles of red and brown paint, suggesting blood-letting. It looks like it means murder, but it turns out rather decorative, a succession of pretty messes, not paintings really, but you could put them on the wall and they'd settle down into a lively background.

Jörg Immendorff (born 1945) is another one for the scrapheap. He does these enormous, preposterously lurid and busy figurative paintings with neon colour-schemes. They look like much-magnified versions of the kind of illustration that would accompany a magazine article about mental illness.

The work of Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997) passes for humorous subversiveness in some parts of the art world. His paintings are immensely incompetent parodies of various different painting styles. His work is sustained by a jokey cult of personality, and I don't feel the pictures are even meant to be worth looking at. They're just a kind of adjunct to the act.

With Marlene Dumas (born 1953), things try to be more interesting. In these images of isolated human figures and faces, the painter is clearly up to something, after some sort of sensation, something painful, vulnerable, each paint mark feeling a little like a wound. And she gets it sometimes. The way she draws though, and you can't ignore it, is very slick and inert.

Luc Tuymans (born 1958) works a similar vein. Close-ups of barely emerging images, with the paint pale, weak, withdrawn, off-hand, half-hearted, they have - at their best - a captivating feebleness. One picture here has that. The down side, of course, is sheer feebleness (as in the vast still-life).

Peter Doig (born 1959) is the one solidly good painter here. His scenes are landscapes, woody or snowy, always partly obscured by the paint that pictures them. The paint is very dense and various and gorgeous, constantly changing tack, going thick and thin, weaving, blobbing, spraying. The colour world is extreme. The picture is an intense field of activity where every gesture is worth following.

Bizarre mix - but it's just what one person likes, isn't it. The Triumph of Painting? It makes the legendary title look silly, having such a flagrantly miscellaneous, capricious and uneven collection of work. But that's also what makes the show good. The Saatchi Gallery is a private gallery with more space and resources than many publicly funded galleries, but as a private gallery it's able to do the kind of bold, single-minded gesture that a Tate - with its duty to be representative and serious - can't do.

No self-respecting public gallery could put on a show like this, with no theme, no intellectual agenda, and a very rum load of stuff. But I wish curating went this way more often, out on a limb, not worrying about mockery, exposing the curator's taste nakedly to the world. It would take confidence, naturally. And I suppose nobody can ever feel quite as confident as a very, very rich man.

The Triumph of Painting: Part One - The Saatchi Gallery, County Hall, South Bank, London SE1; 26 January to 5 June. Open every day. Admission £9, with concessions.

The alleged triumph of painting

Tuesday, 25 January 2005

Charles Saatchi has brought us a new sensation. The godfather of modern British art has declared that formaldehyde sheep and unmade beds are passé. After years of neglect, "painting" is back in vogue. An exhibition called The Triumph of Painting, featuring the work of six artists, will open at Saatchi's County Hall Gallery tomorrow. Pieces by Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, works that defined a generation in British art, are being sold off or put into storage. The Medici of modern art has spoken - or so we are asked to believe.

Charles Saatchi has brought us a new sensation. The godfather of modern British art has declared that formaldehyde sheep and unmade beds are passé. After years of neglect, "painting" is back in vogue. An exhibition called The Triumph of Painting, featuring the work of six artists, will open at Saatchi's County Hall Gallery tomorrow. Pieces by Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, works that defined a generation in British art, are being sold off or put into storage. The Medici of modern art has spoken - or so we are asked to believe.

The truth is that painting never really lost any of its popularity, despite the ubiquity of sculpture and video installations in recent years. The enduring appeal of Lucian Freud, one of Britain's greatest living artists, is testament to that. So, too, is the popularity of the National Gallery's regular blockbuster exhibitions. Despite Mr Saatchi's formidable capacity to publicise his artists, we should be wary of accepting at face value the belief that this rather enigmatic figure somehow exerts control of the national taste in art.

But Mr Saatchi's influence should not be underestimated. As a result of his change of direction, British painters may find that dealers are more inclined to look favourably on their work in the wake of this new exhibition.

There are some in the art world who claim that Mr Saatchi is an entirely destructive force. They point to his tendency to collect an artist's work over many years and then sell it on, ruthlessly, in bulk and at inflated prices. This can have a damaging effect on an artist's career. Indeed, Mr Saatchi has been accused, more than once, of operating rather like one of Mr Hirst's famous sharks.

Yet to argue that Mr Saatchi has been a wholly malign influence on British art is unfair. He has bought and exhibited the work of British artists for more than 15 years, taking a keen interest in their development - and several are now figures of international importance. He deserves credit also for stimulating the public's interest in modern art and crafts, which has burgeoned since the early 1990s. That, in time, may well be recognised as the true "sensation" in the history of modern British art.

In the swim

Monday, 17 January 2005

And so farewell to Damien Hirst's shark, the 14-foot creature of the deep suspended in formaldehyde that introduced us to Britart. It was presumptuous to hope that its rightful last resting place would be the Tate Modern - a gallery that in scale and style somehow suited it. But we regret its departure. Charles Saatchi has made a pretty penny on his outlay. The consolation for the rest of us is that the shark has not been lost to the nation so much as translated into the global dimension. It is off to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Britart's proud ambassador to the big wide world. (PS. Please can we keep the sheep?)

And so farewell to Damien Hirst's shark, the 14-foot creature of the deep suspended in formaldehyde that introduced us to Britart. It was presumptuous to hope that its rightful last resting place would be the Tate Modern - a gallery that in scale and style somehow suited it. But we regret its departure. Charles Saatchi has made a pretty penny on his outlay. The consolation for the rest of us is that the shark has not been lost to the nation so much as translated into the global dimension. It is off to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Britart's proud ambassador to the big wide world. (PS. Please can we keep the sheep?)

What has become of the masterpieces of Britart?

Charles Saatchi is selling Damien Hirst's shark to an American collector for £7m. Chris Bunting and James Burleigh examine the fate of the works that defined the aesthetic of a movement

Monday, 17 January 2005

DAMIEN HIRST: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living: Created: 1991

DAMIEN HIRST: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living: Created: 1991

Present owner: Unknown New York collector

Where displayed: Expected to leave its home in the Saatchi Gallery, London, for the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Value: £6m to £7m

Damien Hirst's "pickled shark" launched the Britart movement. Hirst came to the notice of the art world in 1988 when he conceived and curated the Freeze exhibition in the Port of London Authority building but he became a tabloid celebrity in 1992 for his shocking preservation of a tiger shark in formaldehyde.

Charles Saatchi commissioned the work for £50,000. Its sale for between £6m and £7m to an unnamed American collector at the weekend brought speculation that Mr Saatchi might be abandoning his patronage of Britart. Charles Thompson, co-founder of the Stuckist art group and an opponent of Britart, said: "He is denying he is dumping it but how can the Saatchi Gallery exhibit Britart when the main exhibit is no longer there? It is like a court without a monarch, people will be asking, 'Where is the shark'?" Mr Thompson said: "Saatchi, because of the power he wields, can make something relatively worthless into something worth a huge amount.

It is the not-so-blind leading the blind. When it reaches the top of the market he can sell at a huge profit. It is a self-fulfilling, money-making scheme." Matthew Collings, author of a history of the London art scene, said the shark price tag was unlikely to mean a boom in Britart prices. "At present, Saatchi says he is interested in painting. The idea is that there is a big return to painting and it is a good time to get out of Hirst."

SARAH LUCAS: Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab: Created 1992

Present owner Charles Saatchi

Sarah Lucas studied art at Goldsmiths College and co-ran an art gallery, The Shop, in 1992 with fellow artist Tracey Emin. The same year, she displayed her most famous work, Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, the food nailed to a wooden table but symbolically a female nude. Charles Saatchi bought it for an unknown sum. Her work includes Au Naturel and Penis Nailed to a Board.

CORNELIA PARKER: Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View: When made: 1991

Current owner: The Tate collection

Where displayed: Tate Modern, London

Cornelia Parker convinced the Army to blow up a garden shed filled with domestic objects and then collected the debris. Fragments of the shed and its contents were then suspended, as if in mid-explosion, in the shape of a cube.

MARCUS HARVEY: Myra: When made 1995

Current owner Charles Saatchi

Where displayed Saatchi Gallery, County Hall, London

Marcus Harvey contributed an 11ft by 9ft portrait of the Moors murderer Myra Hindley to the aptly named "Sensation" exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1997. The work recreated in paint the famous picture of Hindley from the time of her trial but, on close inspection, appeared to be made up of a collage of children's hand-prints. Winnie Johnson, the mother of Keith Bennett, one of Hindley's victims, said she was "disgusted". Even Hindley condemned the work.

JAKE AND DINOS CHAPMAN: Tragic anatomies: When made 1996

Current owner Charles Saatchi

Where displayed On tour

For a solo exhibition at the ICA in London in 1996, Jake and Dinos Chapman used mutant child mannequins, naked except for Nike trainers and with genitalia sprouting from their faces, in their "Garden of Eden" tableaux. Saatchi bought their perverse playground for the Royal Academy's Sensation exhibition in 1997.

RACHEL WHITEREAD: House: When made: 1993

When destroyed: 1993

In 1993, Rachel Whiteread won the £20,000 Turner Prize for House, a concrete cast of the interior of a terraced home in the East End of London. She was also awarded £40,000 by the art/music collective K Foundation on the same night for being the worst artist of the year. Whiteread took eight weeks to produce the sculpture using 70 tons of concrete to fill the property. Production costs were estimated at £50,000. On the night Whiteread won the Turner Prize, she was told that Bow Council intended to knock down her artwork and build a children's playground. The council's leader, Eric Flounder, called the sculpture "utter rubbish".

MARC QUINN: Title Self

When made 1991

Current owner Charles Saatchi

Where displayed On tour

Quinn is best known for Self, in which he cast his head in nine pints of his own blood - the total amount of plasma in an average man's body. The blood was removed over five months. The piece was bought by Charles Saatchi in 1991 for a rumoured £13,000. It is said that the artist remoulds the piece every five years.

TRACEY EMIN: Everyone That I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995: Created: 1995

Current owner: Burned in Momart fire

The work was destroyed in last year's Momart warehouse fire, after which a specialist valued it at over £1m. The tent, embroidered with the names of everyone Emin had slept with, prompted derision from many quarters when first shown in 1995. Emin was criticised for philistinism and exhibitionism. After the fire, a newspaper claimed to have recreated the tent for £39.99. Emin condemned them for philistinism.

Hirst's shark is sold to America

From The Sunday Times

January 16, 2005

Richard Brooks, Arts Editor DAMIEN HIRST’s pickled shark, widely regarded as the most iconic work of British art of the past 15 years, has been sold to an American collector for nearly £7m and will be lost to Britain.

The work, created in 1991, has been sold by Charles Saatchi, leading patron of the Britart movement. It is now expected to be donated by its buyer to the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York.

The sale is a major blow to Tate Modern, run by Saatchi’s long-term rival Sir Nicholas Serota. The Tate had hoped one day to own the shark, but was shut out of the deal.

The price also brings Saatchi a huge return on the £50,000 he paid Hirst in 1991 for the work, officially known as The Physical Impossibility of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living. Hirst himself paid about £6,000 for the dead tiger shark and the cost of shipping it from Australia.

At Moma, which reopened in November after a £470m refurbishment, it will join other landmark works such as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, Cézanne’s The Bather and Matisse’s Dance. Moma already owns about 30 paintings and other works by Hirst, but they are comparatively minor.

The departure of the shark, which was placed in formaldehyde in a tank to help its preservation, is a big loss to Britain. It is understood that Serota, the Tate’s director, had hoped to buy or even be donated the work and that there were discussions about this some years ago. While Serota would not comment on the departure of the shark this weekend, he is believed to be disappointed not just for his gallery’s sake but for Britain.

However, it appears there is nothing that can be done to prevent the shark going to America. The government’s powers do not allow it to stop the export of a work that is not more than 50 years old.

Nor could the Tate or any other gallery appeal to the lottery to save it because the shark’s sale is a commercial deal, brokered on behalf of Saatchi by Larry Gagosian, a prominent American dealer and gallery owner. The ultimate buyer has not yet been disclosed.

Hirst, who has good relations with the Tate, would have been happy if the shark had gone to the gallery, which already owns several of his works, notably Pharmacy.

Last autumn, Hirst was one of a dozen leading British artists who promised to give a piece to the Tate, which is increasingly reliant on donations as it hardly has any money of its own for purchases.

However, Saatchi has strained relations with the gallery and with Serota in particular. In late November, there was a big disagreement between the two when Saatchi claimed he had offered the Tate his collection of works by the so-called Young British Artists (YBAs), such as Hirst, Tracey Emin and the Chapman brothers.

Serota denied the main thrust of Saatchi’s version of events, adding that there had simply been a suggestion in 2003 from Saatchi that his works might be loaned for display in an undeveloped area, known as the tank space, beside Tate Modern.

In the same article in The Art Newspaper, Saatchi said the Tate’s curators “lacked ambition and adventure” and that the gallery was “sadly disengaged from the young British art community”. He added that he was “now happy not to have to visit the Tate to look at my art”.

Saatchi spotted Hirst’s talent when the artist was just out of art college. His shark was the most famous of a string of controversial works by YBAs in the 1990s, including Emin’s unmade bed.

Saatchi singled out Hirst in his Art Newspaper article by arguing that the 39-year-old was the only living British artist who, in a decade’s time, would be considered by critics to have stood the test of time.

Even so, Saatchi has already sold several of his Hirsts. In autumn 2003, the artist himself bought back about 12 of his works. Hirst had earlier expressed disappointment about the display of his art in Saatchi’s new gallery in County Hall on the South Bank.

Saatchi kept some Hirsts, such as the shark, a spotted Mini car and Hymn, a bronze sculpture of a man, which was based on a £14.99 toy.

Even those who might have been expected to say good riddance were sad at the shark’s loss to America. David Lee, editor of The Jackdaw, a magazine that takes a sceptical view of much modern British art, said: “The shark ought to be in the Tate. Whether you like it or not, it’s the leitmotif work from the 1990s. I’m surprised Saatchi didn’t offer it to the Tate, say at a knock-down price.

“Saatchi owes Britain and the Tate something. It was the Tate’s Turner Prize and its promotion of the young British artists which helped Saatchi.”

Some believe Saatchi may have seen that conceptual art is on the wane. The shark’s appearance at Saatchi’s Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997 symbolised the triumph of Britart’s “shock” tactics. Now, with the YBAs approaching middle age, the fish’s sale may mark their movement’s demise.