He's gotta have it (part two)

No one has done more to shape modern British art. But the so-called Supercollector has as many critics as admirers. In the most revealing portrait of the 21st-century Medici, Jonathan Jones goes in search of the real Charles Saatchi

Friday April 4, 2003
The Guardian

In the 80s money was the theme of art. Prices escalated, the dealer became a star, critics fretted over mammon, and artists - above all Andy Warhol, and then his little wooden boy Jeff Koons - gloried in finance. But by the end of the 80s money had lost its crispness; it was soft and saggy, like a too-much-handled fiver. In the art of the past 15 years cash has rarely been the subject. Death, decay, the sublime were the themes of the British art that defined the end of the 20th century; the horror of a shark swimming towards you through formaldehyde, the terror of a house become a sealed tomb.

The sublime was the aesthetic of these years, this art - and the sublime, as the 18th-century politician and thinker Edmund Burke argued, is about power. The origin of the sublime, for him, lies in our awe before a majestic, divine authority. Today it is an awe of art itself, or at least a desire to experience that awe; to be knocked over by art, to be kicked in the teeth.

But with this taste for the power of art has come something uglier, stranger, sleazier - a fascination with power itself. Every book and documentary and bit of gossip about British art seems to slaver over the names of those considered "powerful in the art world" - the "tastemakers", to quote one hideous title. It is as if, as the power of British art has fallen off since the glory days of the early 90s, we have found sublimity instead in the institutions that surround it. The art world has become a spectacle, and we wonder who is more powerful: is Jay Jopling, owner of White Cube, a more crucial player than Norman Rosenthal, exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy? And the million-dollar question: is the most significant man in the British art world Tate director Nicholas Serota, or is it Charles Saatchi?

Among those who liken Saatchi to Conrad's terrible Kurtz is a leading British artist whose work is a treasure of the Saatchi collection. He said that going to the old Saatchi Gallery and seeing all the cartoons that had appeared in the papers about this artist, collected and framed by Saatchi, felt like entering the lair of the trader in Heart of Darkness. It was a terrible revelation, he thought, of how obsessively his work's public reception had been manipulated by the hidden hand of the collector.

Given my desire to confront this monster, I was disappointed when press stories started to make Saatchi sound more like one of us. There have been well-publicised changes lately that might explain his willingness to show a few people around his new gallery. Saatchi's relationship with Nigella Lawson is a surprise in every way, a shocking contradiction of his image. Is he, after all, to become part of the London media world? I was weirdly saddened to hear that he might be normal, even nice.

And it has to be said that a feeble "nice" is the first word to describe what he was like when I met him. Affable, courteous, and - I think genuinely - shy: it's not just a cover story, his shyness, even if it is something he is obviously used to saying about himself. Others feel the same. "He's nice, isn't he?" says the artist Jake Chapman - with his brother, Dinos, currently Saatchi's major enthusiasm, second only to Hirst. "He's basically a wide boy - he's a shark, he's a fucker, but he's nice." "Oh no, he's going to be angry with you again," objects Dinos. "All right - he owns a shark, he owns a fucker, but he's nice."

Nice. Is that all there is? For all his elusiveness, there's something expressive about Saatchi. First there is his smoking. He smokes a lot. And with a sigh he mocks me for not smoking - that is, he is a little self-dramatising about it.

Just like Hirst, who has said you shouldn't trust people who don't smoke. Smoking is a central image in Hirst's art. I stand with Saatchi peering into Hirst's giant ashtray filled with cigarette butts collected at the Groucho Club, a vast smooth white receptacle - as big as the marble bowl from Nero's palace you can see in the Vatican - and on its base, where you might imagine a fountain, this grey and brown morass, this sickening residue. Luxurious death. The room has just been cleaned to get rid of the nauseating stench.

Saatchi's emphatic smoking is a confirmation that he profoundly identifies with Hirst, the artist above all others for whom he confesses himself a sucker. Art-world gossip has it that Hirst has fallen out with Saatchi. But if there is a froideur, it's not on Saatchi's side; he can't stop talking about how great he thinks Hirst is.

If the smoking suggests Hirst's imprint, it is also autobiographical. Saatchi's first famous ads, for the Health Education Council, included a series of unprecedentedly explicit anti-smoking posters. One showed a stream of black tar being poured into a transparent saucer. "No wonder smokers cough," read the copy. You can imagine the children who would become the Young British Artists seeing these ads on the way for a fag behind the bike sheds. Of course, Saatchi & Saatchi also advertised cigarettes - the ones he's smoking today, Silk Cut.

Saatchi is ritually described as the ad man-art collector, and Margaret Thatcher's ad man to boot. This is always brought up pejoratively. Not only is Saatchi a rightwing bastard, the line goes, but his shallow understanding of promotion makes him seek out crudely attention-grabbing art and push it in people's faces. According to this theory, Saatchi himself engineered the controversies over Sensation in London in 1997 and Brooklyn in 1998. In London Marcus Harvey's giant portrait of Myra Hindley made with children's handprints, and in New York Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary with its collaged pornography, seemed to catch the attention of the groups most likely to be offended by them remarkably quickly. That is, before the exhibition opened.

But above all, Saatchi's "influence" has been talked of in financial terms. He has been hated and feared as a man always ready to take out his wallet. He can buy museum approval, and he can bankrupt a reputation.

Most artists collected by Saatchi are reluctant to talk about this. Only a rare artist is able to ignore, or reject, Saatchi. Michael Landy, one of the artists in Hirst's Freeze (and a couple of years ago the recipient of rave reviews for a show in which he destroyed all his possessions), told me Saatchi was never a "supporter" of his work but did buy a sculpture of a fruit and veg stall, which he then sold. Landy recently got a call from Saatchi wanting to buy another version of the same stall for the County Hall gallery, "but I wouldn't sell it to him". He can't be bothered going through all that again - to be bought and sold.

In the 80s Saatchi's readiness not just to buy huge quantities of an artist's work but also to sell, with potentially huge damage to the artist, was even more feared than it is today. "I'm not so crazy about this thing of collectors buying and selling in bulk," says the Lisson's Logsdail. "I wouldn't say he's totally uncaring about it; when he realised what damage he could do by selling an artist, he was quite shocked. Since then he's done it more carefully."

Jake and Dinos Chapman are not scared of him - but then, they can afford to be cocky. Just before Christmas Saatchi paid £1m for the entire contents of their exhibition Works from the Chapman Family Collection, a museum-like display of pseudo-tribal artefacts, "primitive" totems shown in darkness. He is planning a big Chapmans show for the new gallery.

Several years ago, he almost destroyed them. In the mid-1990s Jake and Dinos Chapman were outrageous, entertaining manufacturers of perverse mannequins, and although they got a lot of attention, they never quite entered the canonical league represented at that time by Hirst, Hume and Whiteread. In December 1998 Saatchi sold a selection of his British art through Christie's; it was an event that caused the usual feverish speculation about Saatchi's intentions, his ability to make and break artists, even to end a historical moment. Was this how the British art boom would end - not with a bang but with an auction?

Whatever Saatchi's motives, the only artists who suffered from the sale were Jake and Dinos Chapman. The Chapmans' major sculpture Ubermensch (of Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair atop a rocky promontory) went for a humiliating £10,350, a tenth of the prices paid for minor works by Hirst and Whiteread.

The Chapman brothers were also ditched by their then dealer, Victoria Miro; they suddenly seemed an exhausted stock. They admit that they had no money, no future, and reached the point where they thought they would have to get full-time jobs - for which, they joke, being Britart stars didn't really qualify them. Instead they planned and constructed Hell, a tableau starring thousands of miniature German soldiers in a psychotic toy holocaust, and sold it for £500,000 to Charles Saatchi. The £1m they made him pay for their latest exhibition was "punishment", they say, for that £500,000 - which they thought undervalued Hell. This was in 2000, the year Saatchi paid the first six-figure sum for a Young British Artwork, Damien Hirst's Hymn. There were stories that Hymn's price was more notional than real. Jake and Dinos Chapman boast they got real money, all £1m of it.

When you start looking into the history of the Saatchi Collection since the 70s, and place it alongside the history of taste in the same period - the history at any rate of official art-world taste, the artists sanctified in museums and art magazines - it makes confusing reading. For a start, many people will be surprised there even was a Saatchi Collection in the 70s. In Saatchiworld, change is sudden, brutal and absolute: when the Boundary Road gallery closed its doors at the end of 2001 there was no fuss, no funeral, no flowers. That was then.

This is the most glaring eccentricity of the Saatchi Collection, and by extension, of Saatchi's sensibility - these massive, seismic, brutal changes of affinity. Saatchi seems, to judge from his collecting and his selling, to hate reassurance, to shun tradition; he has cut off his collection not just from history but, weirdly, from its own history. Today we associate the Saatchi Collection entirely and exclusively with the British art of the late 80s and since, ie the Hirst generation and younger. He claims not to have much time for previous British art - for example, 80s figures such as Julian Opie and Tony Cragg.

So I went and looked through some old catalogues - and found New British Art in the Saatchi Collection, published by Thames and Hudson in 1989, on the very eve of Hirstmania (a year after Saatchi says he encountered Hirst in Freeze). It contains a dignified collection of the venerable painterly heroes of an earlier School of London: major paintings by Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, RB Kitaj, Leon Kossoff, Malcolm Morley. And Julian Opie and Tony Cragg.

I asked Saatchi about far older art than that, about whether he had ever wanted to collect the Old Masters and thus become a more universally respected figure. He confessed to an interest in the subtle and spiritual Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca, but it is clear he could never be interested in collecting anything except the art of his generation. Meaning Hirst's generation. It's as if Saatchi - who is 60 this year - has so identified himself with this still thirtysomething generation, and with Hirst in particular, that he feels younger than he is. This empathy with youth crops up again as he shows me the room in which he will promote brand new artists, just out of college.

Saatchi, and he alone, pursues the absolutely contemporary - not just daring to buy the new, but seeking the newer than new, and showing it in complete seclusion from the old. It is as if what he is really trying to collect is something no one can bottle, not even Damien Hirst - the present moment, the moment that is always disappearing.

There are many who will find this a romantic and melodramatic way of talking about Saatchi, who is, they will say, just a human Hoover, a mechanical buyer, a vacuous spendthrift. For every good work of art he owns, there are 10 bad ones: how can you say he has taste when he likes the kitsch modellings of Ron Mueck (an artist whose career owes everything to Saatchi) and the dreary paintings of Jenny Saville? Does he even like art?

Having finally met Saatchi, I can say some things for certain about his sensibility - he does have one, though he himself denies it almost as vociferously as his critics. He is clever. More to the point, he is clever about art, in a way that makes the most hostile things said about him - including the idea that his ex-wife, whose magazine articles about art are far less interesting than his talk, was the true creator of his collection - seem absurd.

I suspect he is very au fait with contemporary art criticism. Saatchi makes it plain that visual pleasure, rather than the muted intellectualism of a certain kind of concept-heavy art, is what matters to him. The most cursory examination of the Saatchi Collection suggests this is true, with the qualification that visual intoxication for him comes from the grotesque as much as, or more than, the beautiful. I guess he has been reading the American critic David Hickey, whose writings, as it happens, endorse the sensuality of the private collector and "the big, beautiful art market" against what Hickey sees as the deadening "therapeutic" culture of public museums. Other things Saatchi says are more original, and reveal real passion, flowing in unexpected directions. He plans to put on an exhibition of the abstract expressionist Clyfford Still, a contemporary of Jackson Pollock who is overdue for recognition as one of the greatest American painters.

Given his reclusiveness, it is tempting to interpret Saatchi's collection itself, and his exhibitions, as a self-portrait. The old, white, hollow-skull Saatchi Gallery communicated a tangible fiction of Charles Saatchi as a remote autocrat. His new exhibition space says something else entirely. County Hall is warm - claustrophobically so - with wood panelling everywhere and long, umbilical corridors connecting organ-like spaces. At the heart is the old council chamber, restored and looking for all the world like the tribune of the Uffizi or an imitation by some crazed Victorian. And off the corridors, little offices of long senile or dead bureaucrats, each with a fireplace, are rooms painted white. In most, for this opening exhibition, is a solitary Hirst. While the former space denied history, this one rejoices in it. Saatchi spent two days with one painting, trying to set the lighting. The light, it seems to me, is singularly dusty and dead.

What the new gallery has in common with the old is spatial paradox. Here you get no sense of the structure around you; you're lost in a fantasy world. Except that where the first Saatchi Gallery was science fiction, this is gothic. Saatchi was bored with white space; it got so everyone was using a space like that, so with this he has deliberately set contemporary art in an old, eccentric context.

Most of all, Saatchi seems to feel the need for a palace. It makes his collection seem more aristocratic. And, it turns out, his own template of the art collector is an aristocratic one.

Saatchi's hero and model among art collectors is Count Panza, an Italian who bought a great deal of minimalist art and gave it to public collections: MoCA (Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles), the Guggenheim. Saatchi is ardent about the greatness of this collector hero, always repeating that "Count" as if he was especially struck by this, by the aristocracy of taste.

Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo - to whom the Lisson's Logsdail remembers introducing Saatchi in the 70s - is a major collector of the 20th century but, perhaps most strikingly, he set his collection in a palatial context, his Villa Litta in Varese, north of Milan. Today, the parts of his collection not in museums around the world are on public display there, in an extraordinary play of the minimal and the baroque, the contemporary and the old. Dan Flavin neon pieces and James Turrell light installations are in the stables; monochrome canvases hang in rooms with ornate rococo ceilings and curvaceous fireplaces.

And it is, or was, a home. It has the eccentricity of a home. This, I believe, is what Saatchi may be after. His new gallery has the scale of a museum but it has the personal, undesigned feeling of a home. There are fireplaces, clocks, little rooms where you can be by yourself.

Partly, he is giving the art a home - to stabilise it and let it settle down. He now seems unhappy about Sensation. The artists from it are in his opening show, but this will be a chance for a more thoughtful appreciation of their work. However, as Jake Chapman points out and as Saatchi himself is aware, it's a place where bad art will look really bad.

In terms of the myth it creates of Charles Saatchi, this is a home for him, too. Instead of having his own palace with art in it, he has bought one ready-made. Through Count Panza, this connects him with the kinds of collectors to whom he is sometimes compared; the Italian Renaissance princes, the Medici or Duke Federico da Montefeltro.

He really does envisage this as a place he will maintain in his old age. The Tate no doubt hopes that when he dies he will leave his great rival his entire collection. But the new gallery has a long lease, and he paints a vivid picture of himself being wheeled around here years from now, drooling.

The best thing here is Damien Hirst's A Thousand Years, a sealed transparent tank containing a severed cow's head and myriad flies, which create woozy and ever-changing black graphics until they buzz merrily into the insectocutor. It is an epic history of life and death in a godless universe, as ambitious as any art is likely to be for many years to come.

Hirst and Saatchi; Saatchi and Hirst. They are coupled for all time. Or for five minutes. It depends how Hirst is remembered, how he is rated by history. It would be completely wrong to think Saatchi values the other artists in his collection in the way he values Hirst. Hirst is what he stands or falls by, and he knows it. Saatchi's favourite Hirst is Away From the Flock (1994), with its little stray lamb innocent and forever young in its tank of greenish formaldehyde. He finds it, he tells me, an especially emotional work.

The opening exhibition, although it includes works by Chris Ofili, Sarah Lucas, Glenn Brown, Tracey Emin, Gary Hume, Marc Quinn and Ron Mueck, is primarily and authoritatively a Hirst retrospective. It's the first chance in London since 1997 to see the classic vitrines, to gawk at the pickled shark. (It now looks sadly desiccated, although when I walked towards its mouth and the refraction of the tank suddenly made it seem to leap towards me, I found the effect almost as daunting as it was more than a decade ago.) Here, for the first time, you can compare these early works with Hirst's anatomical sculpture Hymn and a new vitrine that has live carp swimming about. The tank also contains an office desk; it's a far more joyous subversion than the older vitrines. Also, there is a spin painting actually spinning - lovely to behold.

I agree with Saatchi that Hirst belongs in the same company as Warhol. Hirst is the definitive artist of the end of the 20th century; we have yet to see how he will shape up in the 21st. Hymn is a transitional work, a confession of a dead end, a joke about the fact that everyone thought the logic of his work was to pickle a human corpse. Of course it wasn't: he's an artist, not a psychopath, and the art in his art is beautifully formal and gracious in this context - the repeated blue-green tanks containing that sliced-up cow, the graphic networks of viscera against glass, the strong, bold, white metal frames, the grim joke of the bisected pig. Saatchi compares Hirst to the minimalist Don Judd. The shapes, the fearful symmetries.

"He's a shark", as Jake Chapman said. Damien Hirst already made the joke, visually. Charles Saatchi is no monster. But the Saatchi fictionalised by the Saatchi Collection is - a gorging consumer of art, swimming remorselessly up the Thames, towards Tate Modern.

Ah yes, Tate Modern. There is no doubt the tension between Saatchi and Serota is real, although they profess mutual admiration. It seems obvious to me that if the Tate wanted to make friends with Saatchi it would ask him to curate a show. He does not think of himself as a collector but a maker of exhibitions. It is showing, not owning, that matters to him. In this sense he is the perfect collector of post-minimalist art, because what he craves is precisely what the critic Michael Fried styled, pejoratively, the "theatricality" of the contemporary art object.

Saatchi is dismissive of the current Tate Triennial exhibition. I head over the river to Tate Britain, and find that Days Like These presents a very different picture of British art from that inside County Hall. It takes the attitude that we have moved on, that time has passed, that Hirst is history. The new art is - well, it's not much, on this showing. Some incredibly bad paintings by Dexter Dalwood (once a Neurotic Realist); some mesmerisingly good ones by George Shaw; an almost exciting colourful floor by Jim Lambie; a lot of mediocre video installations. Saatchi dislikes video art.

It's a doomed quest, it seems, this search for what comes after Damien Hirst. Saatchi himself came a cropper when he tried to identify post-Hirst art in his Neurotic Realism shows. Now, having put that in the dustbin of history and returned to A-grade Hirst, he can afford to sneer. But what is really missing from the Tate show, I realise, is the fleeting sense of the contemporary, the absolute present, that Saatchi endlessly pursues. At Tate Britain the contemporary seems to have moved on, though the exhibition only opened a few weeks ago. The deep appeal of contemporary art may be that it can briefly make us feel, if not like a community, then at least like contemporaries of one another: it releases us into an intoxicating present. Saatchi is our greatest scenarist of the contemporary. Art for him is news, or it is nothing.

The violence of the Saatchi Collection - his shedding of artists and eras as a snake abandons an exhausted skin - is itself an image of the history of Britain since the 1970s. As a nation, we have abandoned, buried, scorned history as brutally as Saatchi changes his taste; we are as cut off from pre-Thatcher Britain as the new Saatchi Gallery is from the collection he had in 1984, or 1989. Perhaps the appeal of this art for us is precisely that it mirrors our distance from the past - our having become, and still at the same time longing to become, contemporary.

Strip away all the myths, pull off layer after layer of obfuscation, penetrate the penumbra of Saatchi power and you find ... what? Someone who is perhaps stranger than anyone even thinks he is. Not Kurtz, certainly - but perhaps Jay Gatsby, a romantic of the modern, in desperate pursuit of some always-vanishing dream. There really is a singlemindness to Saatchi's collecting, despite - perhaps because of - all the sales and the convulsions and the jettisoned history. There is no overall logic to the range of artists he has loved and got bored with, but there is an overriding obsession with the contemporary, with this moment.

I can't imagine having his resources as a collector and never (even at 59) succumbing to the desire to own, say, a nice 18th-century painting. Saatchi, it seems, can't imagine wanting to collect anything but the newest generation. It must be exhausting to live in the present, to really, always and truly, be contemporary.

· The Saatchi Gallery, London SE1, opens on April 17. Details: 0207 823 2363.

He's gotta have it

No one has done more to shape modern British art. But the so-called Supercollector has as many critics as admirers. In the most revealing portrait of the 21st-century Medici, Jonathan Jones goes in search of the real Charles Saatchi Read part two of the interview here Friday April 4, 2003 The Guardian Charles Saatchi stands on the steps of the Marriott Hotel inside London's County Hall, looking down into the circular courtyard. In the middle of this hollow space is a turfed ziggurat, bright green in the afternoon sun. He is telling me about what lives below it: two and a half million rats. This appears to please him hugely. Two and a half million rats under the building in which he is about to open his new art gallery. It reminds me, oddly, of a previous conversation about rats. When I spoke to the curators of Tate Modern on the eve of its opening three years ago, they told me with some embarrassment that the hordes of rats from Bankside power station had fled to a nearby council estate. Perhaps all this tells you is that if you live by the Thames, you'd better not be scared of rats. But I can't help thinking that the two contrasting images - Saatchi gloating about all his rats and Tate Modern vanquishing theirs - represent two versions of art about to do battle beside the river: the Tate's high-minded vision of a politicised and serious contemporary art, and the rather more ratty and gothic version in the collection of Charles Saatchi, with its rotting cow head, dead shark, child murderer and porn cuttings. From afar - and the notoriously reclusive collector has gone out of his way to ensure that most perceptions of him are from afar - Saatchi can seem a sinister, controlling, calculating figure. Up close he is very different - a man of passion and enthusiasm, a bit of a romantic, at least about artists and rats. With all the myths that surround him, he seems to have the excessive quality of a character in fiction: the Great Gatsby or the Last Tycoon, perhaps. Or, as his harsher critics would have it, the sinister Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. Charles Saatchi is a man who assiduously cultivates his own myth. Removing yourself from the ordinary channels of communication, refusing interviews, absenting yourself from openings and parties is not so much normal shyness as a way of producing narratives of power and influence. In the past few years, as some in the London art world have claimed he was losing his sure touch as a discoverer of young art, he has taken steps to ensure that his reputation as the man who discovered Damien Hirst is written into history. Now he is about to unveil a monument to himself as patron of modern British art. When rumours first circulated that Saatchi planned to close his London gallery in St John's Wood and open his own museum in County Hall, a brisk walk upstream from the colossally successful Tate Modern, the very idea seemed stupendous. Saatchi's new gallery is an open defiance of Tate Modern and Tate director Nicholas Serota; it sounded megalomaniacal even for him. But he meant it. Now the classics of British art in his collection are displayed in the wood-panelled debating chambers and corridors once filled with the cigarette smoke of huddled councillors. It looks good. Saatchi has the best collection in the world of British art from the past 15 years - a period in which British artists, notably Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Tracey Emin, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili and latterly Jake and Dinos Chapman, were at the forefront of international art in a way not seen since the early 19th century. There is no question that Saatchi beat public collections to the best of this stuff. "Something went wrong with the Tate," says Edward Booth-Clibborn, a fellow advertising man turned art publisher who has known and admired Saatchi since the 1960s. "Somebody went to sleep. How is it that an individual has this collection?" It's a good question. Who on earth is this man so confident of his taste (though he claims he has no taste) that he is launching a private museum of modern art? I spent more than two hours in Saatchi's company, during which he led me around the new gallery then to the Marriott bar, and we had a wide-ranging conversation about art and collecting, but it was explicitly "not an interview". He was warm, if shy, wearing a baggy white shirt, smoking a lot. Now I know him, he intimated, I could call any time. Except that he neglected to give me his number. Since the late 80s, Young British Art has been both admired and hated for its outrage and gutter heart. Saatchi started collecting it almost at the very beginning, and if you want to see Hirst's shark, Emin's bed, Marcus Harvey's portrait of Myra Hindley, Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary - if you want to see the works that caused the rows - this is where they are. But does this mean that Saatchi is the true begetter of modern British art, that it could not have happened without him? Here, as with everything else about Saatchi, myth and reality are ornately entwined. Picture this. The owner of an art gallery is just closing up for the evening, the sun setting on a quiet London street. Business, too, has been quiet. Just then, a black Rolls-Royce sweeps up. Out gets a man in tennis shorts, accompanied by "this beautiful blonde girl in a mink coat". By the time he leaves, Saatchi has bought four paintings and asked the dealer to provide him with catalogues on all the artists he represents. Over the next few years they will do a lot of business together. It's a scene that would be repeated time and again in the years to come. This particular evening must be in 1973, when the Saatchi Collection was just taking off. In the future, the Rolls would nose through mean streets in Hackney and Tower Hamlets, and artists just out of college would see their entire exhibitions at small galleries in terraced houses and warehouses bought lock, stock and barrel. The blonde would disappear; so would many artworks, sold to make way for the collector's latest enthusiasm. Saatchi, says Nicholas Logsdail, one of London's most influential art dealers and the narrator of this particular story, "has got this impulsive craziness about him". That day in the 70s when Saatchi rolled up to the Lisson Gallery was, according to Logsdail, the beginning of Saatchi's infatuation with the New York minimalist art of Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and Robert Ryman. These were the artists that Logsdail represented, and these were the artists of whose difficult work Saatchi would become the leading private collector. Before he was notorious as the patron of Damien Hirst, he created, with his first wife Doris Saatchi (the blonde), a museum-quality collection of minimalist art shown at the appropriately cool, white gallery they opened in 1985 at 98a Boundary Road. Saatchi fell in love with Andre's floor arrangements of tiles and bricks, with Dan Flavin's neon light pieces, with this art of mute objecthood. Logsdail had trouble persuading him about the more conceptual Sol LeWitt; it took a weekend's discussion and showing of catalogues in 1974 before Saatchi phoned at 6am one Sunday to say he wanted to buy one of LeWitt's major works immediately. If you read published biographies of Saatchi, however, you will read that Charles and Doris's "first Sol LeWitt drawing was acquired in 1969 for £100" - five years earlier. Wires have obviously got crossed somewhere. And the more I tried to find out about him, the more I found that every fact is also a fiction in the bottomless pool of Saatchi myth. The published, more or less reliable facts about Charles Nathan Saatchi are as follows. He was born in Baghdad in 1943, the son of a successful Jewish textile merchant. When he was four years old he came to Britain with his parents; he has lived in London almost ever since. His brother Maurice was born in the suburbs of Baghdad in 1946. They left Iraq in an exodus of 120,000 people at a time of increasing persecution of the country's ancient Jewish population. While the move to Britain was not easy, their parents managed to once again build a prosperous business, and the family lived in a large house in Highgate, north London. At school Charles did poorly; he didn't go into higher education and appears to have more or less drifted into the advertising industry, his real enthusiasms at the time including cars and poker. Saatchi was a gifted copywriter and worked with some now famous names - including the film director Alan Parker and the producer David Puttnam - at a time when advertising was becoming more proud and self-conscious in the pop art climate of the 1960s. Puttnam and Parker thought him a good enough writer to encourage him to follow them into the film business, and he did try to write screenplays for Puttnam; one scenario, reportedly developed into a Parker script, was filmed as SWALK. This 1971 film is also known as Melody, under which title Halliwell's film guide describes it as a "tough-sentimental teenage comedy-drama of little interest to adults". But wait. We have barely got into the 1970s and the plot starts to thicken. When I read about Charles's almost-happened film career in The Brothers, Ivan Fallon's 1988 business history of Saatchi & Saatchi, I was fascinated. It raised the possibility of another Charles Saatchi altogether, the life that might have been - and as it has entered the Saatchi mythology, it does seem to have been a possibility. I asked Parker how he remembers it. Very differently from the received version, it turns out. "In 1968-9," Parker said, "Charles and David Puttnam had aspirations of going into the film industry. Charles and Puttnam took me to lunch at a Greek restaurant in Charlotte Street and told me their notion of getting involved with film and persuaded me to write a script. Charles was going to write one as well. I duly wrote my screenplay and Charles wrote his. Puttnam and Charles eventually went to the US to sell the scripts. My script was picked up; Charles's wasn't. Hence Charles was instantly disenchanted with the film business and announced that he would start an advertising agency with his brother. "The rest is history. Charles did not write the 'scenario' for my script. He had no involvement with it. He might have had some involvement financially in the film due to his relationship with Puttnam, but by the time it got made, he had long since lost interest in any notion of being in the film industry." Once again, the Saatchi story turns out to be slippery. But perhaps the most fascinating thing about Parker's recollection is the abrupt change of heart that he says Saatchi had when his first film venture failed. That was that. This is a theme that recurs in Saatchi's story and, spectacularly, in his art collecting: radical and absolute changes of direction that are then presented as the new reality, with a denial that history exists or imposes any responsibilities. Bold self-invention. When I meet Saatchi at County Hall, I discover yet another life that might have been: he sometimes wishes he had gone into journalism instead of advertising. He reads the papers for a long time every day, apparently - all the papers - and re-edits them in his head. It's one of his favourite pastimes. But it was as one half of the advertising partnership Saatchi & Saatchi that he became famous in the 1970s. Combining Charles's creative expertise and his brother Maurice's brilliant business sense, Saatchi & Saatchi became known as the hardest- hitting agency in Britain. Edward Booth-Clibborn, who chaired the advertising industry's D&AD awards (won again and again by Saatchi) saw Charles as a genuinely creative copywriter: "For a long time advertising was saturated with Americanese, but he used our own language with English colloquialisms. He is a very talented writer. He ran two sorts of accounts - one sort where he made his name, and others that were the hard business." The high-profile accounts included the Health Education Council: the anti-smoking posters warning "You can't wash your lungs clean"; the image of a pregnant man used to promote contraception. Saatchi & Saatchi got the ultimate account, however, when they were hired by the Conservative party in 1978, the first truly professional use of advertising by a British political party. In the summer of that year, amid Tory fears that James Callaghan's Labour government was about to go to the country on the back of relatively good polls, Saatchi & Saatchi came up with their notorious poster of a dole queue with the slogan Labour Isn't Working. It was a riotous success and may have contributed to Callaghan's decision to delay, thus blundering into the winter of discontent. Once again, Saatchi's path crossed that of Booth-Clibborn, who worked - voluntarily - as Callaghan's advertising man in the 1979 election. "I wrote a letter to Callaghan saying that with the arrival of Charles Saatchi the role of advertising in politics would change. I think what was revolutionary about Labour Isn't Working was that it summed up everything with a one-liner - it was a stunning poster. They really did change political advertising." But all this seems a long time ago. By the end of the 1980s, Saatchi & Saatchi had lost a lot of their mystique; share prices fell, they rowed with the increasingly unhappy Tory party, and an attempt to buy Midland Bank was ridiculed by financial journalists as insane hubris. It was not until 1995 that Charles and Maurice were driven out of their own company and opened a new agency, M&C Saatchi, but there is no question that by 1987-8 the Saatchi myth was dented. At this time, too, Charles separated from Doris - Doris with her New York background, her east-coast and Sorbonne education, with whom Charles had built his collection of American art and opened his American-style gallery. It was at this moment that he made the alliance with a ragtag group of artists barely out of college and showing their work in East End warehouses - work he immediately recognised as the biggest revolution in British culture since punk. To Saatchi, Young British Art is very like punk, which he remembers fondly, though he no longer listens to the Clash (does that mean that White Riot was on the stereo as he worked to elect Margaret Thatcher?). Origin myths are a universal phenomenon, and Young British Art has its own Genesis, its own memory of birth. In 1988 Damien Hirst curated Freeze, an exhibition with fellow Goldsmiths' College art students and recent graduates including Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas and Michael Landy in an east London warehouse. In art-world legend it has become the equivalent to Picasso's painting of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, or the Dada cabaret in first world war Zurich. In reality, says the critic and curator Carl Freedman, who was an intimate part of the tightly knit group that created Young British Art (he co-curated the key exhibitions with Damien Hirst and even helped to make Hirst's vitrines), it was a glorious time when they were all friends, but virtually no one came to see Freeze. "It would be interesting to know how many people saw it," he muses. And yet a lot of people remember being there. They include Charles Saatchi. The story goes that he first encountered Hirst's work when he went to see Freeze in 1988. Saatchi was impressed not by the work - the only good things were Gary Hume's hospital door paintings and Mat Collishaw's photograph of a gunshot wound; Hirst only showed some corner constructions composed of painted boxes - but by the attitude. Freedman can't confirm that Saatchi saw the show: "I don't think so." His memory is that Saatchi "was taken round the degree shows by Michael Craig-Martin [artist and Goldsmiths' professor] and he certainly was aware of Damien's drug cabinet pieces". But he didn't buy anything then, or at Modern Medicine, the show that followed Freeze. The first acquisition Freedman can recall was from the next show, Gambler (1990). But the recent history of British art is fictive in a more profound sense than just who saw what when. British art is still living off the reputation it made at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, at the fag-end of the Tory years, when a grim vitality, a harsh poetry seemed to emerge in several media and generations. There were a lot more things going on at that time than just Hirst's Freeze; nor was Goldsmiths' the centre of everything. In 1987 Richard Wilson's installation 20:50, a reflective sea of sleek black oil, was shown at Matt's Gallery in the East End; since 1991 it has been on permanent display in the Saatchi Collection. This was a work by an artist with a concept of architectural intervention very different from Hirst's interest in potent objects. Another classic work of the period was Lucian Freud's series of portraits of the club star and lead singer of Minty, Leigh Bowery, a collaboration between an older artist and a youth culture star that was parallel to, yet different from, the Hirst generation. The paintings were shown at the Whitechapel Gallery and you could walk from there to see Rachel Whiteread's House, a concrete cast of a house standing alone and desolate in an East End "park". What all these artists had in common, in the years from about 1987 to 1993, was an anger, a sense of the capital as place of bitter chill and violence. After the Thatcher revolution and the abolition of the Greater London Council, Roy Porter concluded in his 1994 book London: A Social History that London was a city "yielding to disintegration. There is a new pessimism, a new anxiety about the future." Perhaps Saatchi is aware of the irony of opening his new gallery in what was once the seat of London's local government, until Margaret Thatcher's government did away with the GLC. Or perhaps he has no sense of irony at all. As we climb the steps he taps on a rough sleeper in a tatty sleeping bag. It rings metallic and hollow - a simulacrum by artist Gavin Turk, a brand new item in the collection. All the classic art made in London at that time - Freud's portraits of a man heroically facing death, Whiteread's monument to the demolished East End house, Hirst's shark swimming as efficiently as Saatchi himself through the waters of the free market - emerge from this London. And it was Saatchi, the man who advertised Thatcher's Conservative party, who grabbed many of the artworks that so icily described the new Britain. Saatchi's claim to be the most daring and generous collector of this art is indisputable. He provided the perfect cool white stage in his north London gallery; he visited all the new shows and bought a huge swathe of young artists' work, some of it now forgotten. Saatchi is clearly frustrated with the Tate curators, whom he views as whingeing bureaucrats in their timid attitude to acquiring new art. He modestly believes anyone would have championed Hirst after seeing his first work - but only he did. And that's why it is Saatchi who is opening his own art museum. The old Saatchi Gallery, the one that is now gone and forgotten, opened in 1985. It was like a space station orbiting the earth. To enter that white, curving, extensive space was to step out of the surrounding streets and be at the magic centre of the absolute present - whether Manhattan, or Mars. The absent lord of the place was therefore, by extension, imagined as a silent, remote controlling mind. It was here that Saatchi staged a series of exhibitions entitled Young British Artists, starting in 1992. It was for this space that he helped Hirst to hire an Australian fisherman to catch a 12ft tiger shark for the work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. In 1997 the power and excitement of this art was summed up for a larger audience by Sensation: New British Art from the Saatchi Collection at the Royal Academy, which subsequently toured to Berlin and New York. Saatchi seemed to turn his back on the Hirst years when in 1998 he announced a new generation, the Neurotic Realists - and saw his "movement" mocked and his taste once again questioned. His opening show at County Hall has barely a Neurotic in sight, and the opening exhibition is dominated by his unrivalled collection of Hirsts. Money might seem to be the obvious theme of the Saatchi story. And yet when it comes to collecting, money has almost nothing to do with it. Art collectors do not collect art to make money. They collect art because they have money and want to turn it into something else. That might be respectability - the longing for legitimacy that drove New York's robber barons to pour dollars into august high culture. It might be the desire to participate in creativity. But more often than not it is power the collector craves. The power to make and break reputations, to influence museums, to establish critical consensus, to change history. Whether or not that is what Saatchi wanted, whether it is even anything he thinks about, it is what he has got. It is also what we want to know about. · The Saatchi Gallery, London SE1, opens on April 17. Details: 020-7823 2363.

Young British Artists of the Nineties are dismissed as outdated relics

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
Wednesday, 2 April 2003

The so-called Young British Artists championed by Charles Saatchi are relics of the near past, the head of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) insisted yesterday as the advertising guru prepared to open a new London gallery.

The so-called Young British Artists championed by Charles Saatchi are relics of the near past, the head of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) insisted yesterday as the advertising guru prepared to open a new London gallery.

Philip Dodd, the ICA's director, said of the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, whose work will take pride of place in the Saatchi Gallery at County Hall: "The YBAs are a very Nineties story."

Yesterday, though, Mr Dodd was faced with a tricky problem as he revealed what he said was the future of British art: much of it was proving somewhat elusive.

Unveiling the annual Beck's Futures exhibition, featuring nine artists shortlisted for a share of £56,000 prize money, Mr Dodd admitted that many of their works could not be put on show in the conventional environment of the ICA's galleries in the Mall.

Carey Young, for example, even went so far as to produce a gagging order preventing Beck's from using one of her works, created but seen by no one apart from the sponsors, for their own publicity under pain of having to pay damages. Ironically, her efforts provoked the greatest interest in the sponsors since the prize began in the year 2000.

Another, Nick Crowe, created a cyberglobe of 74 website addresses showing the world as under constant armed attack. It is represented in the show by his website address on the wall and 10,000 promotional plastic bags.

Inventory, an art co-op, staged a football match in the Mall, which is represented only by photographs of the game, and is also making a 40-second film for BBC4.

Lucy Skaer planted tropical moth pupae under seats at the Old Bailey, but was not there to see them hatch.

Asked whether he only really had half a show, Mr Dodd said: "We've got a show and a half and the half is what is elsewhere."In a dig at Mr Saatchi's new venture, he added: "Historically the principle on which the ICA has worked is do it first. Given Saatchi's identification with the Nineties and that the first few shows are all of the Nineties, [his new gallery] has the feel of a contemporary art museum. It's a museum of the recent past. It's different from showing artists that haven't been canonised."

Mr Dodd said the new generation presented in Beck's Futures were shameless and were defined by a kind of DIY aesthetic – or, as critics of conceptual art would see it, by a total absence of "art" in the commonly accepted sense.

Video works, such as those by Alan Currall, in which he reads the contents of his will or recites a message to his best friend, did not require expensive materials or huge ranks of assistants.

Mr Dodd quoted the Cambridge archaeologist Colin Renfrew in claiming that art now was more like an "experimental laboratory", examining questions of who we are and where we are, than it was about paintings.

A spokesman for Mr Saatchi said it was unfair to categorise his art as passé. He continued to collect young, unknown artists and many of them would be featured in the new gallery when it opened on 17 April.

Other shortlisted artists for the Beck's prize are David Sherry, Francis Upritchard, Bernd Behr and Rosalind Nashashibi. The top prize of £24,000 will be announced on 29 April, with the remaining eight artists each receiving £4,000.

The Saatchi coterie

DAMIEN HIRST The original bad boy of the YBAs, Hirst, born in 1965 in Bristol, was the brains behind Freeze, the seminal art show of his Goldsmiths' class of 1988. Rapidly became famous for pickling a shark, cows and sheep, and his work commands prices of up to £1m.

SARAH LUCAS Her aggressive series of self-portrait photographs contributed to her sharing the bad girl of BritArt tag with her friend Tracey Emin. In works such as 'Au Naturel'fruit and household objects are assembled into suggestive sculptures. Born in 1962 in London.

MARC QUINN Quinn, born in 1964, studied history and art history at Cambridge and was not part of the Goldsmiths' crowd, but he later shared a flat with Hirst and his conceptual art, such as a sculpture of his head made of nine pints of his blood, grabbed Saatchi's attention.

The ICA contenders

DAVID SHERRY Sherry, born in Northern Ireland in 1974, is a performance artist based in Glasgow, who will represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale of Art this summer. In his video 'Stitching' he is seen apparently sewing balsa wood on to the soles of his feet.

FRANCIS UPRITCHARD New Zealand-born, London-based Upritchard, 27, is fascinated by taxidermy and fetishistic effigies such as the shrunken heads of Maori tradition or her own simulations in the shape of the Prince of Wales. Her main work here is a moaning, vibrating mummy.

CAREY YOUNG Young, who has worked in business, takes the art of PR and marketing to create her key work, a legally binding Non-Disclosure Agreement forbidding Scottish Courage, Beck's distributor, disclosing what she has been commissioned to make for the show.

Indoor waterfalls drench Dali artworks

By Terri Judd
Thursday, 20 February 2003

Flooding caused thousands of pounds of damage to artworks by Salvador Dali yesterday when builders working on the new Saatchi gallery hit a sprinkler system.

Flooding caused thousands of pounds of damage to artworks by Salvador Dali yesterday when builders working on the new Saatchi gallery hit a sprinkler system.

Staff at the Dali Universe exhibition in County Hall, London, which shares the building with the unfinished Saatchi gallery, are still assessing the damage. They were forced to remove 300 visitors shortly before lunchtime after workers, finishing off the new gallery on floors above, caused the flood. Water poured into a hallway of the Religion and Mythology section.

While several sculptures – including Vision of the Angel – were drenched, they are unlikely to have suffered permanent harm. Damage to some graphic works was likely to run to thousands of pounds, a spokeswoman said. "There were four or five waterfalls. It was very surreal and shocking to see water pouring down through the ceiling," she said. "But I don't want to complain. These things happen. They [the builders] have been very supportive and helpful."

The works of art, which were on loan from the Stratton Foundation, were all insured and organisers hoped to reopen the gallery today, she said.

Dali Universe is a permanent exhibition dedicated to the work of the Spanish surrealist artist. Charles Saatchi announced last September that he wanted to open a new privately run museum. He intends to showcase work by some of the best-known younger British artists in a location expected to attract a larger audience than his previous gallery, which was in St John's Wood, north London.

Art collector Saatchi gives the Turner Prize a run for its money

He can make or break an artist by buying or selling their entire oeuvre. Now the multi-millionaire who put Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin on the map plans to outdo the Tate by launching his own £40,000 prize for contemporary art, reports James Morrison

Sunday, 26 January 2003

Charles Saatchi, the multi-millionaire advertising mogul and doyen of the contemporary British art scene, is to launch his own version of the most infamous event in the art-world calendar, Tate Britain's Turner Prize.

Charles Saatchi, the multi-millionaire advertising mogul and doyen of the contemporary British art scene, is to launch his own version of the most infamous event in the art-world calendar, Tate Britain's Turner Prize.

In a move likely to antagonise the Tate and its director, Sir Nicholas Serota, Mr Saatchi is planning to award a £40,000 prize to an outstanding UK artist each year – twice the sum lavished on the winner of the Turner.

The prize is expected to be unveiled officially in the spring at the launch of his most ambitious venture yet, a 40,000sq ft gallery designed to house his 3,000-piece collection of modern art. Situated barely half a mile from the Tate Modern along the south bank of the Thames, in County Hall, the former Greater London Council headquarters, it will showcase some of the most notorious works of recent times.

Highlights will include an opening retrospective for Damien Hirst, featuring Hymn, the 20ft anatomical doll he sold to Mr Saatchi for £1m, and the "pickled" shark, sheep and cow that first made his name. Permanent fixtures will also include at least one of Tracey Emin's unmade beds and a theatre for performances by the Old Vic.

Mr Saatchi's decision to launch an alternative to the Turner, a prize he recently dismissed as "claptrap", will be seen as an act of extraordinary vanity by a man who more or less single-handedly launched Brit Art. His ability to spend huge sums acquiring works by obscure artists has catapulted relative unknowns to instant fame. Last year alone, he spent an estimated £2m on new pieces – equivalent to the Tate's entire annual acquisition budget.

His attempt to upstage the Turner Prize will especially anger the Tate, which for some years has been struggling to retain its status as the primary custodian of contemporary British art. Unlike Mr Saatchi, who has the money to snap up works at auction on impulse, the gallery has neither the resources nor the remit to buy anything without consulting its trustees and raising donations.

As a result, Tate Modern remains relatively barren of work by many of the biggest names in contemporary art, while Mr Saatchi has acquired almost the entire oeuvres of "YBAs" (Young British Artists) such as the Chapman brothers and Jenny Saville. Tracey Emin, whose Turner Prize-shortlisted My Bed was bought by Saatchi for £150,000 three years ago, is said to be ambivalent about his patronage because of his work on the Tory campaigns that helped to keep Labour out of power throughout the 1980s. One art world insider said: "He can make or break people by cottoning on to them suddenly, or just deciding he's gone off them and he wants to dump all their stuff back on the market."

Reaction to news of the putative prize, which some wags are already calling "The Charlie", received a mixed reaction. Sir Nicholas was outwardly sanguine, despite the fact that he is said to be struggling to persuade Saatchi to loan some of his Chapman collection to Tate Liverpool for a retrospective scheduled for next year. "I don't think there's a feud," he said. "What he's doing is different. He's showing the things in his collection, whereas we are about celebrating the whole of contemporary British art."

While he declined to comment directly on the new prize in the absence of a formal announcement, he added: "If there are more prizes for art in this country, that's no bad thing."

The art critic Brian Sewell was not keen, however, dismissing the latest venture as further proof of what he called Saatchi's "infantile enthusiasm".

"I think there's genuine passion with him," he said. "I think it's like many people who know nothing – they don't know how little they know. He is unaware of his ignorance and therefore he uses all his money and his inadequate taste to buy all these things. It began as a type of infantile enthusiasm; once he had some pieces he had to have more and more. I don't think he rigs the market. The market rigs itself.

"It's got to the ridiculous stage now where people are buying up things just because they were once owned by Charles Saatchi, not even because of who the artist is. He will storm into an end-of-year show and buy up everything by a complete unknown. He should be taken very seriously."

Tim Marlow, the television presenter and editor of Tate Magazine, an admirer of Saatchi's championing of rising young artists, said: " If anything, we need more people like him." However, he added: "The prize idea is him being the 'ad man'. I don't think the timing is right."

The elusive collector, who lives with cook Nigella Lawson, was unavailable for comment, but sources confirmed he had been "talking about" the prize venture.

Meanwhile he has suffered one small setback. A £1,000-a-head fund-raising soirée for the Old Vic which would have seen Kevin Spacey, Sting and Ms Dynamite raising the roof of the gallery with the songs of Sir Elton John has had to be re-scheduled to a larger venue.

Saatchi derides Turner prize shortlist as 'pseudo-controversial rehashed claptrap'

By Cahal Milmo
Monday, 25 November 2002

Charles Saatchi the advertising tycoon whose largesse has almost single-handedly sustained modern British art, has issued a blunt critique of its most cutting edge institution, the Turner prize.

Charles Saatchi the advertising tycoon whose largesse has almost single-handedly sustained modern British art, has issued a blunt critique of its most cutting edge institution, the Turner prize.

The multi-millionaire patron, whose 3,000-piece art collection includes works by many nominees for the award, dismissed its latest shortlist as "pseudo-controversial rehashed claptrap."

Saatchi, 59, said he could not understand why a series of 24 ethnographic sculptures holding McDonald's food by the British brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman – for which he paid £1m last month – was passed over by the judges.

Instead, he said, the contenders for this year's prize, which include a multi-coloured Perspex ceiling and the retelling of a pornographic film in pink letters, showed that those in charge of awarding the £20,000 prize were out of touch.

The broadside from the advertising executive turned art collector is the second example this month of the Turner prize proving its enduring ability to inspire as much annoyance as admiration in aesthetic circles. Kim Howells, the Culture minister and 1960s art student, emerged from a viewing of finalists' work to describe it as "conceptual bullshit".

Mr Saatchi, who was voted the most influential figure in the art world for next month's edition of Art Review magazine, said the latest work of the Chapman brothers, famed for their 21 child-sized mannequins sporting genitalia on their faces, was the sort of art that the Turner prize should have been showcasing.

He told The Sunday Telegraph: "That is what great art should be. Something that gives real visual pleasure and makes you sit up and think, not the pseudo-controversial rehashed claptrap that Turner judges actually believe is cutting-edge art."

Duvets at dawn ? modern art gurus fall out over Tracey's bed

A state of war exists between the Tate's Nicholas Serota and Charles Saatchi over Tracey Emin's 'sequel' to her infamous creation. By James Morrison

Sunday, 6 October 2002

With its delicately embroidered quilts, curtained surrounds and handsome brass frame, it owes more to Laura Ashley than the excesses of Brit Art. Three years after exhibiting a shabby bed strewn with vodka bottles and condoms, Tracey Emin has unveiled a smart four-poster whose dainty coverlets bear only faint traces of the emotional angst that inspired the original.

With its delicately embroidered quilts, curtained surrounds and handsome brass frame, it owes more to Laura Ashley than the excesses of Brit Art. Three years after exhibiting a shabby bed strewn with vodka bottles and condoms, Tracey Emin has unveiled a smart four-poster whose dainty coverlets bear only faint traces of the emotional angst that inspired the original.

But just days after appearing publicly for the first time in New York, the latest bed is set to become a battleground between the two biggest players on the British art scene. The work, sold to an anonymous buyer for an undisclosed sum last week, is believed to be en route to Charles Saatchi, the millionaire collector and advertising magnate.

If so, it would be viewed as a major lure to his promised "museum of modern art" in the former GLC headquarters on London's South Bank – and a personal affront to his arch-rival, Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Galleries. It would also be an ideal companion piece to its predecessor, My Bed, which Mr Saatchi bought from Emin for £150,000, and now keeps at the home he shares with the TV chef Nigella Lawson.

Mr Saatchi's suspected coup comes as Sir Nicholas shows signs of mounting frustration at the Tate's inability to compete with wealthy private bidders in the cut-throat salesrooms of the contemporary art market.

In a series of outspoken interviews, the normally publicity-shy director criticised ministers for failing to address the "acute" shortfalls that have left his four galleries with an acquisition fund of just £2m a year.

Last night, the Government, which is understood to be dismayed by his remarks, released figures for the first time showing that the Tate is one of the biggest beneficiaries of tax breaks to encourage landowners to give their works of art to the nation.

Over the past decade, it has used the inheritance tax scheme to obtain items worth nearly £23m, including Turner's The Temple of Poseidon at Sunium for £105,000, and a Millais painting worth £4.2m.

A Whitehall source told The Independent on Sunday: "The scheme is the unsung hero of the arts funding world. It's puzzling that institutions sometimes seem reluctant to acknowledge its benefits for their collections, when discussing their acquisitions."

However, Sir Nicholas, who the Tate insists acknowledges the value of the tax break, is known to have more on his mind than Old Masters. While publicly he will only say he wants to broaden his contemporary art collection, he is known to be infuriated by Mr Saatchi's acquisition of major Brit Art works such as My Bed and Damien Hirst's giant anatomical doll, Hymn. His anger has been compounded by the 59-year-old collector's repeated refusal to loan anything to Tate Modern, leaving it bereft of many of the defining works of Brit Art.

Observers believe that Sir Nicholas, 56, will perceive the "loss" of yet another high-profile Emin work to Mr Saatchi as a call to all-out war.

One prominent fine art journalist said: "I think there's personal animosity between them.

"Nicholas Serota is angry with Charles Saatchi. He's annoyed that Saatchi has some of the biggest works from that particular moment in modern art, and he's not playing ball. He's not willing to lend anything to the Tate."

He added that Sir Nicholas was already plotting to outwit Saatchi over future acquisitions. In particular, he is believed to be negotiating the purchase of Upper Room, 12 paintings of monkeys by the Turner Prize-winner Chris Ofili, loosely based on the Stations of the Cross, from London's Victoria Miro Gallery.

"Victoria Miro wants to sell the piece to a public institution," said the journalist. "Also, a lot of the Brit Art artists have been annoyed with Saatchi for years, because, as well as being a collector, he is a dealer. He's not just in it for the love of art."

Neither Sir Nicholas nor Mr Saatchi could be contacted.