Big really does mean beautiful

Jenny Saville talks to Charles Darwent about her giant nudes

Monday, 17 April 2000

There's a lot to look at in Jenny Saville's new painting, Fulcrum, on show at the Saatchi Gallery's exhibition "Ant Noises". For one thing, Fulcrum is the kind of billboard-sized work that cruel critics maintain appeals to Charles Saatchi's ad-man's eye. At five metres by three, it is about bigness. Which is fair, given that the picture's subject is a trio of enormously fat women, tied together naked on what looks like a mortuary slab. Vast breasts shear across the canvas like tectonic plates, an effect made more powerful by Saville's planar brushwork. Her palette - a mottling foxblood, cellulite yellows and subaqueous blues - suggests dead meat. At Fulcrum's centre, the thighs of the two lower women lock like clasped fingers. So dense is the painting that the figures become a single, illegible mass: a cumulo-nimbus of flesh that floats out at you with that lightness-on-its-feet of the very fat.

There's a lot to look at in Jenny Saville's new painting, Fulcrum, on show at the Saatchi Gallery's exhibition "Ant Noises". For one thing, Fulcrum is the kind of billboard-sized work that cruel critics maintain appeals to Charles Saatchi's ad-man's eye. At five metres by three, it is about bigness. Which is fair, given that the picture's subject is a trio of enormously fat women, tied together naked on what looks like a mortuary slab. Vast breasts shear across the canvas like tectonic plates, an effect made more powerful by Saville's planar brushwork. Her palette - a mottling foxblood, cellulite yellows and subaqueous blues - suggests dead meat. At Fulcrum's centre, the thighs of the two lower women lock like clasped fingers. So dense is the painting that the figures become a single, illegible mass: a cumulo-nimbus of flesh that floats out at you with that lightness-on-its-feet of the very fat.

And it is beautiful. The thing that strikes you about Fulcrum is its delicacy, that same perverse juggling with massiveness that allows you to see a two-ton Richard Serra as fragile or a wall-sized Rothko as frail. On the one hand, the painting's construction makes you worried that it is about to collapse under its own weight, thundering out of the picture-space in an avalanche of avoirdupois. Saville, who appears as the top figure in the picture, says that she had to paint it from polaroids because "you just can't ask people to lie on top of each other like that for long." There are delicacies in Fulcrum's narrative as well. A mother and daughter feature: "The mother's sixty and they'd never seen each other naked before," says Saville.

But is the picture intentionally grotesque? Had Fulcrum been painted by Lucian Freud - comparisons of the two artists' styles are made more frequently than Saville likes - you would have felt that its premise was unkind. As it is, Saville has placed her subjects in a pose that is plainly painful on account of their weight, tied them together with ligatures that cut into their arms and splattered them with a clotted red pigment that reads ambiguously as either shadow or blood. The echo is less of Freud than of Francis Bacon, humanity on the butcher's hook.

Saville's answer is uncompromising. "I don't think Bacon pushed it as far as he could have done," she says, drawing on the compulsory Britpack Marlboro. "His mark-making retained an interest in the subject, that's what gave it its charge. I want a different pivot: areas of painting where you lose yourself and only see what they are when you step back."

So there are more pivots at work in Fulcrum than meet the eye. Saville admits that she is fascinated by "bodies that are extreme, bodies that are transgressive, narrative.

"You see someone really huge and you think, 'heart attack'," she says. "You see a pregnant woman and you think, 'life'." Her taste for fat lies in its story of change. So huge is Fulcrum's canvas, so mountainous the figures on it, that they can't be taken in in a single glance. "To read it, your eye has to move across it, like a landscape", says Saville.

Bound up in this is a double self-portrait, of Saville as both feminist and painter. The idea of the female body as a landscape of sexual sites (as opposed to the phallocentricism of the male) owes itself to the writings of Luce Irigaray and Seventies Ecriture Féminin. The oddness of Saville's bodies forces you to see them as a narrative in time. Best of all, Saville likes plastic surgery. "When the surgeons talk about moving flesh - donor sites, mattresses - it's a recipe for how to paint. I sometimes feel I have this tin of liquid flesh in my studio, and that surgery manuals are kind of how-to-do books."

Which makes the title of one of her other works in the show, Ruben's Flap, intriguing. Critics have seen it as a reference to Saville's feminist repossession of the female nude, a quick jab at Rubens and his phallus-bearing kind. It is actually a clinical term for the incision made in a thigh before a skin-graft. What this suggests is a movement away from Irigaray towards a more visceral understanding of painting. Saville's blood-splashes, her hills of flesh, don't just tell the story of her subjects: they also tell her own. "People say my work is less feminist," muses Saville, in front of another new work, called Hyphen. "I don't know. I do know that I can pinpoint the moment I made this or that particular mark, how it tied the surface down, whether it was a nightmare day or not. I'm a lot more open to paint now, it really used to freak me out. I've got this suspicion that painting's kind of over, but I like it too much to stop doing it."

'Ant Noises', Saatchi Gallery, NW8 (020 7328 8299), from Thursday to 20 August

A Possible Conflict By Museums In Art Sales

By JUDITH H. DOBRZYNSKI

Published: February 21, 2000

Taken aback by the disclosure that some museums, like dealers, request a commission when art they are exhibiting is sold, museums around the country scrambled last week to plead innocence, profess ignorance or say that they had stopped doing it. Only one of some two dozen museums surveyed -- the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which is widely known for exhibiting the work of new artists -- admitted to the practice.

The museum world has been in turmoil over financing since the fall when the the Brooklyn Museum of Art got into a fight with Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani over ''Sensation,'' the exhibition of art that is owned and was largely supported by the British collector Charles Saatchi. The latest commotion was set off on Feb. 12.

At a University of Chicago conference on the arts in the wake of ''Sensation,'' Gilbert S. Edelson, administrative vice president of the Art Dealers Association of America, revealed that some museums ask for sales fees. Requiring such a commission could create a conflict of interest, perhaps tempting curators to show work because it would sell rather than because of its artistic merits alone.

Mr. Edelson declined to cite names, but Thelma Golden, who had been a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art for 10 years until 1998, said that the Whitney had such a provision in its loan agreement while she was there. Interviewed after the conference, several lawyers who review museum loan agreements for collectors confirmed that other museums also had the provision, usually asking for a 5 percent fee. They also declined to name the institutions.

But calls to several museums confirmed that the Whitney was not alone. At one time or another, the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, both in Manhattan; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Seattle Art Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego all asked for a commission from the buyer if a work on view was sold. As recently as last year, the Museum of Modern Art requested a ''handling charge'' for works sold in the loan forms it used.

All those museums said that they have changed their loan agreements. Maxwell L. Anderson, the director of the Whitney, said that he eliminated that provision of the museum's loan agreement last fall after learning of it in a review of the museum's policies, which he began after joining the Whitney in September 1998. ''We caught what struck me as a peculiar provision of the loan agreement, and we changed it,'' he said. ''I thought it was very outdated.''

The Whitney stopped collecting the fees years ago, Mr. Anderson said. ''In the 1990's, there were no commissions that we know of.''

Most of the other museums with the provision also said that they received little, if any, money from it. ''We have never collected a commission,'' said Lisa Dennison, deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim. ''In an old version of our loan form we asked for a commission of 10 percent, but we dropped the provision about 10 years ago. It's a very difficult thing to enforce.''

Besides, many collectors, or their lawyers, balked at the practice. ''I've always crossed it out,'' said one arts lawyer who declined to be identified, ''and no one has ever objected.''

So, sometime during the last few decades, these museums discontinued the practice or forgot about it. As soon as he read about Mr. Edelson's remarks, said John R. Lane, who has been director of the Dallas Museum of Art for about a year, he reviewed the institution's loan agreement for the first time. ''And I'm happy to say we don't have any clauses on that subject,'' he said. Other museums said they did not know what their policy was.

Among the museums that said they had never asked for a commission are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

The museums that once asked for commissions seemed to have reached that position from two perspectives. The Whitney started asking for a commission during the 1930's, when there was virtually no contemporary art market, Mr. Anderson said. The money generated was put into the museum's acquisition fund. Mr. Lane of the Dallas Museum said that the provision was a fairly common part of the loan form until at least the 1970's because many museums grew out of artists' associations.

''But by the 1980's,'' Mr. Lane said, ''interest in contemporary art had grown so that there were other ways of finding support for contemporary art exhibits and, at the same time, the gallery system had also grown strong by then.''

At about that time another group of museums began requesting commissions for that very reason. ''We'd put on an exhibition and a big collector would come in and discover an artist,'' said Hugh Davies, director of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. ''The artist's gallery would make a lot of money and the museum had done all the work. There was a sense that museums were being cut out of the validating process.''

''And at that time,'' Mr. Davies added, ''a lot of people thought that museums should be more entrepreneurial.'' So, several museums started asking for commissions in the late 1980's. Mr. Davies said that museums like his had changed their loan forms simply because the system did not produce anything. ''I'd like to tell you we took it out because we realized it was a conflict of interest and might jeopardize our tax-exempt status, but it was really because nothing was happening with it,'' he said.

Like those museums, the Walker was being entrepreneurial -- out of necessity, it said. David Galligan, the museum's administrative director, said the Walker initiated a commission system in 1995, when federal money for the arts had been cut and other sources of money also dried up. Whenever an artwork was sold during an exhibition or while on any subsequent tours, the museum was to be paid 5 percent of the sale price.

''I see the appearance of a conflict exists,'' Mr. Galligan added, ''but no curatorial decision here has ever been influenced by the potential for gain. It is now part of a review of our practices we're undertaking in light of 'Sensation.' It's my judgment that the likelihood of its continuance is very small.''

Mr. Galligan said the policy was enforced for only one show, ''Brilliant! New Art from London,'' which coincidentally included some of the same artists as ''Sensation.'' The Walker collected less than $4,000 from ''Brilliant,'' Mr. Galligan said. ''We never felt comfortable with it, but it's still on the loan forms,'' he added.

Mr. Davies, a former president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, said the provision was more widespread than people realized. ''I guarantee that after they read your article, a lot of places will discover that they have it,'' he said.

Neither that association nor the Association of American Museums mention commissions in their ethics codes, but both are reviewing their policies and their officials said that the new codes would probably address the subject. ''All museums are properly looking at their conduct to see if it matches a standard, and the standards are changing,'' said Mr. Anderson of the Whitney. ''We're more accountable, and that's a good thing.''

'Sensation,' Gone but Still Provocative

By JUDITH H. DOBRZYNSKI

Published: February 14, 2000

''Sensation'' may have closed last month, but the reverberations linger.

The exhibition of cutting-edge British art owned by the collector Charles Saatchi, ''Sensation'' was meant to increase the audience at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and ended up getting the museum into a court battle with Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani over city financing. Now it has had a new life in a different context: nearly 400 academics, arts administrators, students and others convened here on Saturday to examine the relationship between the arts and society in the wake of the show.

''The whole controversy has been high entertainment and good instruction,'' said W. T. J. Mitchell, an art historian at the University of Chicago, whose fledgling cultural policy program organized the one-day conference in the ornate maroon-and-gold ballroom of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. ''One thing I liked about the show is that it burst open the relationship between art and commerce. We even got to read e-mails. The role of big capital in the art world was made visible.''

Even more was revealed at the conference. Gilbert S. Edelson, administrative vice president of the Art Dealers Association of America, surprised many participants with the statement that some museums take a commission on sales of new art exhibited on their walls, just as dealers do.

James Cuno, the director of the Harvard University Art Museums, said he was shocked and called the practice inappropriate. Mr. Edelson declined to name names, but when asked, Thelma Golden, who was a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art for 10 years, said that the Whitney did it. ''It was in the loan agreement,'' said Ms. Golden, who is now the deputy director for exhibitions and programs at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Mr. Edelson also cited other museum practices that muddied the distinctions between museums and dealers. Some, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sell original prints, crafts and other unique works of art.

At least one, he said, sells original prints on consignment from dealers. And several regional museums, like the Nevada Museum of Art, hold special exhibitions and sales of works by artists in their communities, he added.

''We are pleased to welcome many museums to the ranks of art dealers,'' Mr. Edelson said to laughter. ''We await their application to join the Art Dealers Association of America.''

This being academia, there were few conclusions at the end of eight hours of sometimes humorous debate, discussion that include the modest suggestion from Professor Mitchell, who is also the editor of Critical Inquiry, for a blockbuster show of ''offending images'' where those offended could hurl stones, eggs, paint and dirt as therapy.

The most sobering comments came from David Strauss, a University of Chicago law professor. Although the courts ruled that Mr. Giuliani's threat to withdraw financing from the museum for showing art he thought was offensive was unconstitutional, Professor Strauss warned against relying on the ''false promise'' of the First Amendment for protection against such attacks.

''The message of the controversy to government officials is to be careful about getting into this business of arts funding, because once you get in you may not be able to get out,'' he said. ''The more often there are First Amendment decisions in court, the more powerfully the message goes out to legislators to be careful.''

''This is not a battle that can be won in court,'' Professor Strauss added. ''People who think that there is an important role for the government to play in funding the arts have to win in the court of public opinion.''

Mr. Giuliani declined an invitation to participate in the conference.

So did Arnold L. Lehman, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, who is under fire for allowing Mr. Saatchi to take control of the exhibition and for seeking financing from Mr. Saatchi, Christie's and others with a commercial interest in the art. In a letter to the organizers, with a copy to the museum's lawyer, Dr. Lehman objected to the conference title, ''Taking Funds, Giving Offense, Making Money,'' as inflammatory and judgmental.

Carroll Joynes, the executive director of the university's cultural policy program, said Dr. Lehman had asked that the title be changed, without success. ''In part it was meant to be inflammatory,'' Mr. Joynes said. ''It was meant to start a debate.''

The title, he added, was hardly provocative when viewed in the context of the advertisements Dr. Lehman had chosen for ''Sensation.''

''The bag I got with the catalog had words like vomit, shock and confusion,'' Mr. Joynes said.

But Dr. Lehman was not on trial here, and neither was Mr. Giuliani. Both took some criticism, and both had support (less for the mayor). The program focused far more on issues of public and private financing for museums and the impact on public trust, topics that Richard Epstein, the University of Chicago law professor who helped set the scene, called ''art and the grubby engines that are necessary to drive it.''

The participants' wishful thinking aside, hardly any of them foresaw an increase in government money for the arts. That left the discussion centering on private financing, usually from people like Mr. Saatchi who have an interest in the art. Though museums have long pursued collectors, they rarely discuss details like potential conflicts of interest, and there are no written rules that museums must follow. As a result, whether to show a collection and what arrangements should surround it are decisions usually made case by case basis; the consensus here held that was rightly so.

''Whether a museum should exhibit a private collection depends on whether the collection is important enough to merit a museum show,'' Mr. Edelson said. This time Dr. Cuno agreed with him and asked, ''What kind of collector is Mr. Saatchi?'' Dr. Cuno went on to characterize Mr. Saatchi as someone who bought large quantities of art, showed it in his own galleries, sold some of it (including works by artists in ''Sensation'' after its showing in London) and announced his intention to open restaurants called Sensation that would exhibit his artworks (which has not happened).

''Showing private collections and taking support from private collectors, indeed even from commercial concerns like auction houses and art galleries, are not in themselves opposed to the public mission of a museum,'' Dr. Cuno said. ''It all depends on the character and reputation of the collector.''

In other words, he and Mr. Edelson agreed, Paul Mellon, yes; Mr. Saatchi, probably not.

Mr. Saatchi and Dr. Lehman had a defender or two, notably Professor Mitchell, who suggested that it was late in the game to be outraged when museums pander to the rich to survive. But many more conference participants thought that the Brooklyn Museum violated the public trust.

''The appearance of impropriety is absolutely crucial,'' Dr. Cuno argued. ''Once one loses respect, it takes a long time to recover.''

He suggested that although with ''Sensation'' Dr. Lehman set out to expand his audience to those who felt no connection to the museum, he ended up reinforcing the appearance that the museum is a bastion of the elite united in the collusion of self-interest.

Correction: February 17, 2000, Thursday An article on Monday about a conference in Chicago examining the relationship between arts and society in light of the outcry over the ''Sensation'' show at the Brooklyn Museum reversed the initials of a University of Chicago art professor whose program organized the conference. He is W. J. T. Mitchell, not W. T. J.

The Times : Another Dupe in Charles Saatchi's Con Game

by Hilton Kramer | November 14, 1999

| Tags:

• Brooklyn Museum
• Charles Saatchi
• Glenn Lowry
• Philippe de Montebello

As expected, a Federal judge has rejected Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's attempt to withhold funds from the Brooklyn Museum of Art for exhibiting the odious Sensation exhibition. Once again, First Amendment fundamentalist Floyd Abrams has made the world a safer place for the market in the foulest varieties of obscene expression, and he was duly rewarded with a segment on National Public Radio's "All Thing Considered" (Saturday, Nov. 6) that featured an 8-year-old girl attacking the Mayor for attempting to shut down a show she had very much enjoyed seeing. With friends like that, the fiercest antisocial elements in our decadent culture are certain to enjoy a prosperous future.

What was not to be expected, however, was that the Mayor would be so promptly vindicated in his further charge that the Brooklyn Museum had conspired with Charles Saatchi and other vested interests–as The Times belatedly reported on Oct. 31–to "inflate the value of the works on display" in the Sensation show. Whether any laws have been violated as a result of these hugger-mugger financial machinations remains unclear. What is now beyond question is that the entire project of bringing this shabby inventory from the Saatchi Collection to Brooklyn has from the outset been what even The Times , after publishing some 60 or more news stories, editorials and reviews in ardent defense of the exhibition, has finally been obliged to concede is "an ethically dubious enterprise."

That from the outset the Sensation exhibition has also been an esthetically barren enterprise is not something The Times will probably ever bring itself to concede. But that no longer matters. No one not directly involved in the trade–the trade, that is, in contemporary art futures–gives much of a damn anymore about the critical judgments of Michael Kimmelman or Roberta Smith, the newspaper's chief critics. About events like the Sensation exhibition, these critics now enjoy the same level of credibility as Joe Lockhart's daily "spin" game at the Clinton White House. Mr. Kimmelman's everybody-does-it defense of the Brooklyn Museum's financial deceptions is itself a vivid example of Clintonesque ethics. About the only thing missing from that ethically dubious defense was the Al Gore mantra of "no controlling legal authority."

As for Ms. Smith's equally pathetic attempt to defend the Sensation show on the grounds that it brings New York "up to speed" on the great things happening on the London art scene, that is neither accurate reporting nor sound criticism. For what the Sensation show brings us "up to speed" on is simply Mr. Saatchi's latest venture in the art-futures market. Because of the Sensation scandal, all the world now knows exactly how this market-manipulation venture works. Mr. Saatchi first commissions work that is guaranteed to cause outrage, then promotes it as his latest "discoveries," then importunes once-respectable institutions like the Royal Academy of Art or the Tate Gallery to endorse it, and then makes a killing in the art-auction market. This is what now passes for "avant-garde" art in London–and, of course, in New York–and it has proved to be a highly successful business enterprise.

What gets marketed, however, isn't so much the art as the buzz, to which critics like Ms. Smith are always eager to contribute their support. And if the buzz is sufficiently repellent–if it delivers on its promise to offend decency, promote perversity and celebrate violence–there will be no shortage of well-heeled fools eager to write checks for the privilege of acquiring a piece of the action. That they, too, may stand to profit in the auction market is a further incentive, of course, but meanwhile they collect kudos for being so "advanced" in their artistic tastes.

To the extent that the uproar over the Sensation exhibition has now laid bare the essentially commercial character of such "avant-garde" events, the show itself may someday be seen to have served some redeeming social purpose, after all. Thanks to the total lack of conscience, tact and taste which Arnold L. Lehman, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, brought to the organization, the financing and the promotion of the Sensation show, all art museums that traffic in this particular vein of "cutting-edge" hucksterism have also suffered a significant loss in public confidence. The sheer quantity of cynical hokum that it has long been standard practice for our art institutions to invoke in defense of whatever horror or inanities the art traders are currently promoting as avant-garde is no longer as persuasive as it once was for anyone not involved in the market. We haven't witnessed the death throes of this phenomenon yet, but some of the other institutional defenses of Sensation have shown signs of moral fatigue and a distinct diminution of mental acuity.

Consider, for an egregious example, the obtuse contribution of Glenn D. Lowry, the current director of the Museum of Modern Art, to this scandal. Writing on the Op-Ed page of The Times on Oct. 13, Mr. Lowry warned: "If Americans wish to continue to be a major cultural force well into the next century, then we must recognize that the arts–and contemporary art, in particular–are not just important to our society, but also our collective responsibility." He called for "engaging in an open debate" about exhibitions like the Sensation show, yet his own contribution to the controversy was clearly designed to sidetrack the debate that was already in progress by invoking the names of Manet and Cézanne and Picasso and Pollock. And when was the last time that MoMA invited public debate about its own policies on contemporary art?

Now if the future of the United States as "a major cultural force" really does depend on accommodating the commercial interests of Mr. Saatchi, then the whole question of American cultural influence in the world needs to be radically reconsidered. But that is not where America's future cultural interests lie, of course. Much may depend, indeed, on our ability to resist such accommodations to current sensations.

What made Mr. Lowry's remarks especially alarming is the fact that MoMA's own current expansion plans call for an even greater concentration on contemporary art than in the past. If the Sensation show is to be taken as a model for the kind of "daring" art that can now be expected to fill MoMA's vast new exhibition spaces on W54th Street, then we are in for even greater disasters in the next century.

Mr. Lowry was responding, of course, to the remarkable article which Philippe de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had contributed to the Times Op-Ed page on Oct. 5. "We are meant to view the art in this show, or most of it," wrote Mr. de Montebello, "as visual pronouncements, even statements of a higher order, aimed at making us pause, think and reconsider our surroundings, our beliefs.… Well, here is where I part company, at the risk of apostasy, with many colleagues and critics alike. I have seen the exhibition, and I think the emperor has no clothes."

And further: "In the end, what remains terribly disturbing to me is that so many people, serious and sensitive individuals, are so cowed by the art establishment or so frightened at being labeled philistines that they dare not speak out and express their dislike for works that they find either repulsive or unesthetic or both." Mr. de Montebello even characterized Kiki Smith's Tale , in the current show of The American Century at the Whitney Museum of Art, as "simply disgusting and devoid of any craft or esthetic merit."

This really was an important contribution to the current debate about contemporary art, or at least the aspects of contemporary art that are designed to make headlines and controversy, and because of it Mr. de Montebello was the only member of the New York art establishment to acquit himself with professional honor in this dismal episode. It was a reminder, too, of why the Metropolitan Museum is now so often the most important of the few New York art museums where considerations of esthetic quality remain the top priority.

As to why The New York Times mounted its blitzkrieg coverage in defense of the Sensation exhibition, that is not much of a mystery. As soon as Mr. Giuliani took action against the Brooklyn Museum, The Times clearly seized upon the event as a means of inflicting significant damage on the Mayor's campaign for a U.S. Senate seat. As they did twice with Bill Clinton, The Times ' top brass is preparing to hold its collective nose while endorsing Hillary Clinton for the Senate, and the Sensation controversy offered the paper a handy weapon for that purpose.

My own guess is that the Times blitzkrieg has backfired, politically and otherwise. It has damaged the paper's credibility, it has damaged the credibility of the city's art establishment, it has made the paper's critics look ridiculous, and it has probably won the Mayor some friends he didn't have before. As for the Brooklyn Museum's credibility on artistic matters, that will not be repaired until the time comes to appoint Mr. Lehman's successor.

INSIDE ART; Saatchi Sells; Students Benefit

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: October 23, 1998

It has been a few years since Charles Saatchi has surfaced as a seller at an auction. But this week, Christie's in London announced that Mr. Saatchi, the advertising magnate who is also one of Britain's biggest contemporary art collectors, would be selling 130 works by 97 artists, together valued at $1.6 million, on Dec. 8.

The proceeds will be used, in part, to set up a scholarship program to help pay for students' projects and commissions at four London art schools: Chelsea, Goldsmiths', the Royal College and the Slade. The money will also help finance the projects of young British artists who have left college. Members of this older group will show their work at Mr. Saatchi's London gallery on Boundary Road in the East End.

Works being sold are by leading exponents of what contemporary art lovers call the ''Y.B.A.'s,'' or Young British Artists. They include Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread and Jenny Saville. Also for sale will be art by contemporary Americans like Cindy Sherman, Charles Long, Sean Landers and Kiki Smith. Christie's estimates that the works will sell for $1,600 to $160,000 each. They will be on view from Dec. 1 through 7 at the Clerkenwell Warehouse, in the London financial district.

Over the years, Mr. Saatchi has bought and sold the work of young artists in bulk, causing the prices of other works by these artists to rise quickly when he was buying and fall as quickly when he was selling. As a master of advertising, he has also helped heighten the public's awareness of many of the artists.

For example, he lent 120 works by young British artists for ''Sensation,'' a show last year at the Royal Academy in London. (On Sept. 30, ''Sensation'' opened at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, where it will be up until Jan. 17. The Brooklyn Museum of Art has been having discussions with Mr. Saatchi's representatives about getting the show across the Atlantic, though museum officials declined to comment on this.)

Experts at Christie's were quick to say that Mr. Saatchi was not dumping art on the market because he was tired of it.

''It was difficult for Mr. Saatchi to decide what to sell because these artists are still heavily represented in his collection,'' said Graham Southern, who heads Christie's contemporary art department in London. ''They are all artists whose work he is still buying.''

In the early 1990's, Mr. Saatchi was one of Sotheby's biggest sellers, sending scores of major works by artists like Malcolm Morley, Robert Rauschenberg and Jackson Pollock to New York for sale. But Christie's has been aggressively trying to get the business. In fact, Christie's was the major sponsor of ''Sensation.''

''At the time, we didn't know there would be a direct connection,'' Mr. Southern said. ''But anybody involved in the contemporary art world is interested in Mr. Saatchi.''

Mr. Southern did not seem concerned by the poor results of a Christie's sale earlier this month that featured some of the same artists.

''That was a financial thing,'' he said. ''We hit the worst six hours in the market. But it's gotten a lot better since then.''

Shirts Speak

His paintings may be abstract, but Sean Scully's political opinions are clear. This week, every United States senator and representative received a white T-shirt that reads ''Starr McCarthy'' in a black box, and underneath in red, ''Two Great Americans.''

''I wanted to make an image with words that would help Kenneth Starr have the right place in history,'' said Mr. Scully, a New York-based artist.

He said that he also planned to put the same message on the sides of buses in Washington, and that he had been looking for a billboard to rent in New York or Washington.

''Empty billboards are hard to find,'' he said. ''So far, I haven't had any luck.''

Pink Slips

Sotheby's has laid off 20 people in its London office.

''That will be the absolute maximum,'' said Luke Rittner, senior director and head of communications for Sotheby's in Europe. ''We're in the process of a reorganization of some departments which have resulted in redundancies.''

Mr. Rittner said the cuts had nothing to do with the shrinking London art market resulting from a rising two-year-old European Union import tax.

''Business in Europe has changed, and our structure has not changed with it,'' he said, adding that Sotheby's was in the middle of expansion in Amsterdam and Zurich.

Happy Dealers

The rising stock market helped make this year's International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show in Manhattan, which closed yesterday, far more successful than anyone expected.

While not every dealer did as well as hoped, many did. Among the hottest categories: furniture as well as decorative and fine art.

''So far, I sold five pictures, among them a Vuillard, a Bonnard and a Calder, and I'm still waiting for answers on several others,'' said Waring Hopkins, the French dealer.

Art Deco and French furniture fared well, too. Patrick Perrin, the French furniture dealer, said he had sold 35 pieces, including three commodes, five tables, several consoles, sconces and candlesticks. The buyers were mostly American collectors.

''We know American taste,'' he said. ''Nothing too large because of the proportions of New York City apartments.''

Museums were also buyers. The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., bought an important pair of French Empire porcelain vases with maritime scenes for $246,500. A similar pair is in the White House.

''We've done better than we have at any fair, which we didn't expect,'' said John Hill, one of the directors of Jeremy Ltd., the London furniture and decorative arts dealers. ''These days, it's the highest quality goods that have the largest market.''

At the Wire, Auction Fans, It's, It's . . . Christie's!

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: February 11, 1997

Swords will forever be drawn between Hertz and Avis, between Coke and Pepsi and, in the rarefied world of art, between Sotheby's and Christie's. The rival auction houses have been battling for two centuries to corner as much of the art business as they can.

Sotheby's, the bigger of the two, has long come out ahead. But when Sotheby's announced its 1996 sales totals on Thursday, it had lost the lead for the first time since 1954. As both houses raced to expand from their London and New York bases, gentlemanly Christie's, trying harder, perhaps, since Christopher Davidge became chief executive four years ago, had inched ahead.

''The auction business is a monopoly shared by two firms," said Donald B. Marron, chairman of Paine Webber and a passionate collector of art. ''These are two global brand names in a business where everything is growing: the demand, the breadth of the market and the prices. It's an exciting time.''

But every big business has big pitfalls. In London last week, Sotheby's found itself at the center of an embarrassing scandal when the company suspended two employees after a British television show, timed to the publication of a book about the company, reported that two Sotheby's experts in Milan had helped smuggle an $11,000, 18th-century painting out of Italy.

Last night, Sotheby's said it was forming a committee of independent directors to review its practices, adding more fuel to an expose that is the talk of international art circles. With the glamorous aura that now surrounds art auctions, though, sensational allegations can also be advertising.

Sotheby's auction sales totaled $1.599 billion last year, down 5 percent from $1.67 billion in 1995. Christie's sales totaled $1.602 billion, up 9 percent from $1.47 billion in 1995.

Both houses are still posting sales below the records set in the late 80's, before a recession devastated the art market. But as the numbers recover, Sotheby's and Christie's are waging refined war on new continents and in new markets, opening or expanding operations on the West Coast, in Paris and in Asia and aggressively buying up dealers and galleries.

Both increasingly offer their wealthy clients a range of services, from financing and luxury apartment sales to furniture restoration and high-security storage, while also reaching out to popularize the market. They hold evening classes to teach the uninitiated how to bid at auction without feeling intimidated, and they have increased their art education programs.

But in the fight to divide the spoils of the rich and famous, the competition to represent important collections and clients is also intensifying. Sotheby's appears to have won the celebrity sweepstakes in 1996, when thousands of people lined York Avenue to view the contents of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's houses and jewelry boxes, making Christie's two-part sale of Rudolf Nureyev memorabilia seem like a minor event.

But Christie's has slowly been creeping up. Although Sotheby's recently secured $15 million worth of German and Austrian Expressionist art from the estate of the art dealer Serge Sabarsky, Christie's is about to announce that it will be selling a third round of property from the heirs of the German businessman and collector Jacques Koerfer. The early modern paintings, valued at about $17 million, include a Rose-period Picasso, a 1929 Mondrian, a Gauguin self-portrait and a Giacometti sculpture.

Still in play are estate property of the conductor Leonard Bernstein, the billionaire Doris Duke, the financier John Loeb and the collector and philanthropist Sally Ganz. Those auctions could tip this year's sales figures in either house's favor.

That the two companies are neck and neck is not surprising. Christie's growth has been slow but steady since 1989, when it had 42 percent of the auction market. But Christie's became more aggressive about buying up companies and getting business with Mr. Davidge's appointment in 1993.

Mr. Davidge, whose father was a porter at Christie's, started out in the company's printing division and worked his way up. Last fall he moved from London to New York, a sign that he wanted to take a hands-on role at the biggest profit center.

In the meantime, Christie's has increased its Asian operations, is opening large premises in Beverly Hills and, like Sotheby's, is expanding its operations in Paris, where European Union rules will allow both London-based houses to hold sales for the first time beginning in 1998.

Though founded in 1774, just two years before Christie's, Sotheby's is quick to call its rival a newcomer to the New York art scene. Sotheby's entered the United States in 1964 with its purchase of Parke-Bernet Galleries, the Madison Avenue auction house. Christie's held its first American sale 13 years later.

Sotheby's experts also like to point out that the company's profits generally run higher than Christie's. Sotheby's 1996 profit was $62.8 million, up 26 percent from $54.3 million in 1995. Financial analysts predict that Christie's will report a 1996 profit of around $50 million, up from $32 million in 1995.

''Yes, I'd like us to be ahead, but it's just as important that the company report healthy profits,'' said Diana D. Brooks, Sotheby's chief executive officer worldwide. ''I'm more concerned with the overall business. We're more than just an auction house.'' Sotheby's also operates a successful real estate firm that just celebrated its 20th anniversary, and since the 1980's has offered clients one-stop shopping for services ranging from financing to furniture restoration.

Sotheby's has also begun forging close ties with dealers, setting aside a large portion of its assets to buy up their businesses. In 1990, Sotheby's and the Manhattan dealer William Acquavella founded Acquavella Modern Art when they bought the contents of the Pierre Matisse Gallery, 2,300 works by artists like Miro, Dubuffet and Chagall. Sotheby's, which invested $142 million, and Mr. Acquavella have been selling off the art at auction and privately.

In June, Sotheby's entered into an agreement with Andre Emmerich, the 57th Street gallery. While Sotheby's doesn't own the inventory, it does own the gallery, which is now Emmerich/Sotheby's, and Mr. Emmerich and his employees are on the Sotheby's payroll.

So is Roger Horchow, the king of the mail-order business, who is working as a consultant. And while Sotheby's won't confirm it, there is talk that it may take over Leslie Hindman Auctioneers in Chicago. Discussions have also taken place between Sotheby's and Butterfield & Butterfield, the San Francisco auctioneers.

Christie's has also done its share of shopping. Four years ago it paid $10.9 million for the London gallery Spink & Sons, which specializes in Oriental art and British paintings and is next door to Christie's on King Street.

In September, Spink bought the Leger Gallery, a Bond Street operation dealing in British paintings, watercolors and drawings, giving Christie's a presence perilously near Sotheby's Bond Street headquarters.

To make itself competitive with Sotheby's in real estate, two years ago Christie's bought Great Estates, the largest network of independent real estate brokers in North American, changing its name to Christie's Great Estates.

''We're all taking advantage of the fact that we are a global business with an international clientele,'' said Patricia G. Hambrecht, Christie's managing director in New York. ''We see ourselves as an art business and we are constantly looking for areas of expansion that are related to the core of our business.''

Both houses are secretive about another important area of growth: their private treaty sales, in which they act very much like the dealers they are buying up, finding a buyer for an artwork without putting it on the block.

Neither Sotheby's nor Christie's will say how big its private treaty sales have become, but officials at both houses admit that in this era of inconspicuous consumption, it is an important part of their business. This fall Christie's even bought a town house on East 59th Street as a separate gallery where experts can show clients art in complete privacy.

Both companies are also about to move to bigger quarters in New York. Sotheby's is working with developers on a plan for the Coliseum site at Columbus Circle that would provide enough space to put all its operations under one roof. Christie's, similarly, is about to move to a 300,000-square-foot complex at Rockefeller Center.

But even with new salesrooms and luxurious offices, the two companies will forever have different images. While Mr. Davidge is successfully bringing a savvy, businesslike image to Christie's and gaining a reputation as a clever deal-maker, their personalities, to many who do business with both houses, are very different.

''The old adage is still true, Christie's are gentlemen trying to be businessmen and Sotheby's are businessmen trying to be gentlemen,'' said Eugene V. Thaw, the collector and retired Manhattan dealer. ''Sotheby's is more hard-driving and tougher and Christie's is more accommodating and softer. Maybe that's part of Sotheby's problem these days: they've chased away their clients.''

The difference in styles may be a result of differences in management teams. Sotheby's top executives all began their careers in the business world. Mrs. Brooks joined the company from Citibank, and Kevin Bousquette, its chief operating officer worldwide, was a limited partner at Kohlberg, Kravis & Roberts. (Henry Kravis, the leveraged buyout king, was just named to Sotheby's board.)

Christie's, on the other hand, is run by people with backgrounds in art. Most of their directors are experts who have worked their way up the auction house ladder.

Sotheby's was primarily a book auctioneer at its founding, while Christie's began by selling fine art and furniture. Christie's remains an English company, but Sotheby's is now throughly American. It's chairman, A. Alfred Taubman, the shopping center magnate, bought the business with a group of investors in 1983 and vastly increased its financial muscle and visibility.

Correction: February 13, 1997, Thursday

An article on Tuesday about the rivalry between Sotheby's and Christie's auction houses understated the 1996 profits reported by Sotheby's. They were $68.2 million, not $62.8 million.

The Art Market

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: March 12, 1993

Saatchi's Clean Sweep

Charles Saatchi's art-buying habits are similar to an eating disorder: he binges; then he purges. Last week the British advertising magnate went on a shopping spree. The day before an exhibition opened at the Anderson O'Day Gallery in West London, Mr. Saatchi bought out the entire show, five abstract paintings by an unknown 32-year-old British artist named Simon Callery. The works were priced at $:4,000 and $:5,000 each, and Prue O'Day, an owner of the gallery, said Mr. Saatchi spent $:20,000, or about $29,000. Mr. Saatchi first saw Mr. Callery's work a month before, at a new artist's space near King's Cross in London called Cubitt Street Studios, where he bought an abstract landscape painting.

Such sprees are nothing new for Mr. Saatchi. But just as fast as he buys many works by a single artist, he has been known to sell them, sending prices on a rapid roller-coaster ride. This fickle behavior is a subject of great interest to gallery owners, artists, auction-house experts and collectors, who keep close tabs on Mr. Saatchi's dealings because he has been known to inflate an artist's reputation and then deflate it in short order, all single-handed. For example, in the 1980's Mr. Saatchi bought, in bulk, the work of the Italian artist Sandro Chia, and then, shortly after, he sold the work and Mr. Chia's prices tumbled. They have never quite recovered.

Just last month, Mr. Saatchi sold several important works to David Geffen of Los Angeles, the multi-millionaire producer and investor. Most of Mr. Saatchi's purges, however, occur at Sotheby's sales of contemporary art in New York. Over the last two years, he has been the mainstay of these auctions, selling millions of dollars' worth of art by such celebrated artists as Malcolm Morley, Cy Twombly, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Mr. Morley is one artist whose prices have fallen, in part because of Mr. Saatchi's offerings at auction and also the threat of his selling off more important Morleys known to be in his collection. An Ever-Rotating Collection

Mr. Saatchi's London-based advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, founded with his brother, Maurice, has reported losses for the last two years. In that time, the collector's art-buying has been more modest and less frequent than in the boom years of the 80's. Instead of buying big-name artists at big prices, Mr. Saatchi has recently concentrated on young British painters whose prices are low and whose reputations he is helping to establish. He buys not only for his own personal collection, but also for the Saatchi Collection, his small museum on Boundary Road in northwest London; open to the public by appointment, it has no permanent holdings but is more like a rotating showcase for Mr. Saatchi's new acquisitions.

Mr. Saatchi is no stranger to the Anderson O'Day Gallery. Two days after a young British artist, Alex Hartley, had an opening there in May, Mr. Saatchi bought all four works. And two years ago at the gallery, he bought two paintings by another young British artist, Abigail Lane.

While Mr. Saatchi declined to comment on his recent purchases, Ms. O'Day said, "He's terribly interested in what's happening and is someone who really knows what he is looking at." Asked whether she is concerned that he may turn around and quickly sell the works, devaluing her artists in the process, she replied: "It's a slight worry. But his input is vital, since no one else is buying right now." Wanted: Young Collectors

If you're under 35, rich and collect art, Thomas Krens wants you.

The Guggenheim Museum, where Mr. Krens is the director, is recruiting members for its newly formed Young Collectors Council. So far, this "trustees in training program," as the museum calls it, includes Bill and Karen Lauder, Alan Mnuchin, Liz Macklowe, Elizabeth Sarnoff, Jay Maloney, Jason Rubell, Jennifer and Craig Barnett, and Mark Hamm.

"It's a list still in formation," said Marc Glimcher, who has organized the council with Michael Govan, the Guggenheim's deputy director.

"It's a serious group," said Mr. Glimcher, a son of Arne Glimcher, the owner of the Pace Gallery in Manhattan and a film producer. "We will raise money by holding movie screenings and premieres and organizing lectures, symposiums, debates and publications." He added that the members would use their Hollywood connections to raise money to renovate a theater, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, under the museum's rotunda.

Mr. Govan said the idea for the Young Collectors Council had been percolating for four or five months. "The concept of old-fashioned philanthropy is dying," he said. "So many collectors these days are looking to start their own museums. This is our way of trying to devise an important role for young collectors, now and in the future."

He emphasized that the new group would work with the existing junior committee, although the two have different functions. The junior committee organizes fund-raising events for the museum in general. The council is to work on projects specifically related to exhibitions. The Met's New Rembrandt

Rembrandts, real and not so real, were a hot topic this week. A real one, "Portrait of a Man," from 1632, has just been added to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's permanent collection. The painting was actually given to the museum in 1964 by Mary Louise Elsworth, who died on Tuesday, in memory of her husband, Lincoln Elsworth, a celebrated aviator and explorer who died in 1951.

The painting, which has been valued at $9 million, was donated in 1964, the last year of a tax law that allowed people to give art to museums while retaining a life interest in the work and gaining a deduction based on the "remainder interest," the estimated value of the work after the owner's death. While Mrs. Elsworth kept the painting in her Manhattan apartment, she occasionally lent it to the museum.

Ashton Hawkins, the executive vice president and counsel to the Met's trustees, said the museum had about 30 other such outstanding gifts. This Rembrandt is particularly special, he said, because "the Rembrandt Research Project has written that this painting is genuine and that the signature and date are by the artist." All That Glistters . . .

The Met is lucky. Re-evaluating Rembrandts has been a continuing exercise among scholars both in the United States and abroad, and the number of authenticated Rembrandts continues to shrink. Two belonging to the National Gallery of Art in Washington have not received such glowing reports. "A Turk," circa 1635, and a 1650 self-portrait may not have been painted by the Dutch master after all. One was downgraded by the Research Project, a group financed by the Dutch Government-that has been studying the artist's work all over the world. The other has not yet been evaluated, but scholars have questioned its attribution.

Dennis Weller, the assistant curator of Northern Baroque paintings at the National Gallery, said X-rays and laboratory examinations suggest that "A Turk" was never completed and that the style of the brush strokes was similar to the work of Govert Flinck, one of Rembrandt's students.

"And an X-ray of the self-portrait showed no sense of Rembrandt," Mr. Weller added. One telltale sign, he said, was that the X-rays showed that the painter had applied lead white only to highlights of the face, rather to the entire face, as Rembrandt always did.

"A lot of students of Rembrandt did portraits of him that were later considered self-portraits," said Dr. Walter Liedtke, a curator of European paintings at the Met. "Anything that vaguely resembled a Rembrandt in the 18th century was attributed to Rembrandt."

Mr. Liedtke also said he believed that the "survival rate" of works believed to be by Rembrandt these days is roughly 50 percent. "In 1900, the consensus was that there existed about 700 true Rembrandts," Mr. Liedtke said, adding that the figure has now dropped to about 250. A Harnett Donated

The National Gallery did have one piece of good news this week. It received "The Old Violin," from 1886, one of the most famous trompe l'oeil paintings by the American artist William M. Harnett. The painting was bought for the museum by Mr. and Mrs. Richard Mellon Scaife in honor of Paul Mellon, a major benefactor to the museum. (Mr. Scaife and Mr. Mellon are second cousins.)

While the museum declined to disclose the painting's price, art experts said it had been valued in excess of $5 million. "This is a very great acquisition for us," said Earl A. Powell 3d, the museum's director. "We have a small Harnett, but nothing of this stature. It represents the pinnacle of American still-life painting."

The work is a centerpiece of a traveling Harnett retrospective that opened in March 1992 at the Metropolitan Museum. The show went on to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Its last stop is the National Gallery, where it opens on Sunday and continues through June 13.