London Warehouse Fire Destroys Artworks

By SARAH LYALL

Published: May 27, 2004

A fire that began on Monday and ripped through a warehouse in east London has destroyed millions of dollars worth of work by leading contemporary British artists, dozens of them from the vast collection of Charles Saatchi, the warehouse's owner and Mr. Saatchi said on Wednesday.

Among the works that have been lost are pieces by Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili, Tracey Emin, Rachel Whiteread and Jake and Dinos Chapman, all part of the influential and showy Young British Artist movement championed and sustained by Mr. Saatchi for the last 15 or so years.

Well-known works destroyed in the fire, which raged for two days and leveled the warehouse, included Ms. Emin's ''Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995,'' a tent on which she had stitched the names of dozens of past lovers; and the Chapman brothers' ''Hell,'' a series of nine miniature landscapes depicting the horrors of war that took them two years to make and that, according to some reports, cost Mr. Saatchi £500,000, or about $905,000.

The fire broke out early Monday in an industrial park full of small businesses, spreading from another building into a warehouse belonging to Momart, a company that specializes in handling, storing and transporting art and antiquities. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said that the fire was being ''treated as suspicious'' -- which is routine in such cases -- but would not confirm reports that it had been caused by explosions in gas canisters stored in a building adjoining the art warehouse.

In a statement Momart, whose clients include Tate Modern, the Tate Britain, the National Gallery and Buckingham Palace, said that it had lost 5 to 10 percent of the artwork it stores. It declined to estimate the cost of the works that had been destroyed, but news reports speculated that the pieces were worth millions of pounds.

Momart is highly respected in London and, according to its Web site, www.momart.co.uk, has handled most ''major exhibitions in the U.K. over the past 20 years.''

In its statement issued late Wednesday Momart said the fire was so fierce that company officials had not been allowed onto the site, known in Britain as an industrial estate, and thus had been ''unable to ascertain the exact condition of the works that were stored there.'' The company said however that ''it would appear that all the buildings on the estate have been destroyed.''

Momart also said that confidentiality agreements meant it could not provide details of the works that had been destroyed or the clients who owned them. But it said, ''We can confirm that the facility contained works owned by a wide range of commercial galleries and individual collectors.''

Details of the works that were destroyed trickled out all day Wednesday, though. A spokeswoman for Mr. Hirst, Jude Tyrell, said that Mr. Hirst had lost a number of pieces from his personal collection, including 16 of his own paintings depicting butterflies and ''spinning'' designs, as well as works by Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas and Angus Fairhurst. ''Charity,'' a 22-foot-tall bronze statue by Mr. Hirst owned by another collector, which news reports said was worth more than £1 million (about $1.8 million), was also destroyed, Ms. Tyrell said.

Mr. Hirst, best known for work like his dead shark floating eerily in a tank of formaldehyde, is one of the most important figures in the Young British Artist movement. To the extent that the movement had a specific beginning, it was when he commandeered an abandoned warehouse in 1988 and organized ''Freeze,'' a show of his and his friends' taboo-breaking works in video, sculpture, painting, collage and photography that investigated themes like life, death and the angst of existence.

A number of pieces from ''Freeze'' were destroyed in the fire, said Will Paget, a spokesman for the Saatchi Gallery.

Mr. Paget said that Mr. Saatchi had lost about 100 pieces but that his collection was evenly spread out among six warehouses, only one of which had been destroyed. But Mr. Saatchi was said to be devastated at the loss of so much of the collection he had lovingly and cannily built up.

''Many of these works are great personal favorites of Charles Saatchi and works he considers to be completely irreplaceable for the history of British art,'' Mr. Paget said.

In a statement Ms. Emin said she was ''very saddened'' at the loss of works that ''had great personal and emotional value and are irreplaceable.'' She added, ''It is a great tragedy for British culture that so much art was destroyed in the fire.''

Several of the artists, including Ms. Emin, Mr. Hirst and the Chapmans, are represented by the White Cube, a gallery that, as much as Mr. Saatchi, is strongly identified with the Young British Artist movement.

Jay Jopling, the gallery's director, said he did not yet have a complete list of which works had been destroyed. ''A number of our artists have been affected by this terrible tragedy, and everyone is in a state of profound shock,'' he said.

As for the Chapman brothers, whose depictions of mutilated plastic dolls with extra limbs and genitals in strange places have attracted attention and opprobrium, they reacted to the fire by telling The Daily Telegraph that ''Hell,'' the piece that was destroyed, was ''only art'' and that they could make it again.

The work, depicting scenes of disaster and chaos, was made from 5,000 figures portraying skeletons, Nazis, soldiers and deformed humans that had been cast and hand-painted by the artists.

Although he later said that ''on a scale of 1 to 10 of how annoyed I am, I'd say about 11,'' Jake Chapman also joked to The Telegraph that the work ''can't be burned, because it's hotter in hell than it is in there.'' He added, ''I suspect, in fact, it will, in fact, have gone up in value if it has been burned to death.''

Correction: May 28, 2004, Friday Because of an editing error, an article in The Arts yesterday about a London fire that destroyed millions of dollars' worth of art misidentified the warehouse owner in some copies. It is Momart, a company that handles, stores and transports art and antiquities -- not Charles Saatchi, the collector, who owned dozens of the lost works.

Only art's enemies cheer the Saatchi bonfire

From The Times

May 27, 2004

By Jeanette Winterton NEWS of the fire destroying a vast collection of work by Britpack artists, including Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, the Chapman brothers and Gillian Ayres, is bringing joy to the philistines who would have paid good money to torch it themselves.

Not since a Tower Hamlets council bulldozer demolished Rachel Whiteread’s House 1993-94 on the day it won the Turner Prize have so many landscape-loving art-idiots felt so self-righteous and so vindicated.

The visual arts make the British nervous. We don’t know what we are looking at and we don’t know how to look. Recent rows over the Trafalgar Square plinth have seen us mooning over “proper” sculpture, and denouncing Marc Quinn for having the cheek to call his marble statue of the disabled, pregnant Alison Lapper, a work of art.

Even Sir Roy Strong, who knows a thing or two, wanted an equestrian statue of the young Queen Victoria to occupy the empty plinth. The joke is that if you ask anyone to name what is on the other plinths, they don’t have a clue. The British like their art invisible.

The great strength of Brit Art in recent years is that is has forced the debate on what art is and who it is for. Even the tabloids, not known for their in-depth art debates, have had to talk about Tracey and her tent and her bed, and Damien and his formaldehyde friends. People who would never step inside an art gallery have been to the Saatchi Gallery. Go there, and the room is alive with talk. Of course some people think it’s rubbish, but they are as energetically combated by those who are finding something in such images for the first time.

A VIBRANT culture needs living art, and it needs all of us to be in dialogue with that art. More people are coming to the visual arts now than ever before, and I believe that this is because of the brand new way that Brit Art has engaged the popular imagination.

If culture is to stay alive and not become a sentimental museum, it must encourage a supply of controversial art. It is right that we question the art that is made today, but it is equally right that we question ourselves; is our response honest or kneejerk? Are we open to what we see, or are we conditioned by habit and assumption?

The informal Constable appreciation society forget that their hero had tomatoes thrown at his pictures, and that they were considered crude daubs by those who complained that Constable did not understand chiaroscuro, and simply laid one primary colour next to another without grading. He also took his easel outdoors and painted from nature — which was pretty shocking to the studio artists who would never have dreamt of getting their feet wet.

When the critic for The Times reviewed Roger Fry’s landmark exhibition at the Grafton galleries in 1911, featuring work by Matisse, Cézanne, and Picasso, he declared that the frames were worth more than the pictures.

Rubbing our hands over the charred remains of Brit Art is not far from cheering at the burning of books. Anyone who is glad to see creative energy and serious thought go up in flames is an enemy of culture and the worst kind of yob. I do not care whether or not all of the destroyed works were of equal value or whether all of them would have stood the test of time. I care that we in Britain are making some of the most interesting art in the world. We should be proud of that. To lose it in a careless fire is a loss to all of us because — and this is where the philistines get it hopelessly wrong — the art of our own time is a living bridge to the art of the past and the future. Burning bridges, like burning books, is a favourite sport of barbarians everywhere.

Fears for Saatchi's collection after fire guts art warehouse

By Andrew Johnson and Danielle Demetriou
Wednesday, 26 May 2004

Works by some of Britain's best-known contemporary artists, including Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas and the Chapman brothers, are feared destroyed after a fire at a warehouse in east London.

Works by some of Britain's best-known contemporary artists, including Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and the Chapman brothers, are feared destroyed after a fire at a warehouse in east London.

Reports last night suggested that Emin's Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1994 ­ a tent on the inside of which are embroidered 102 names, including those of her family ­ and Hell by Jake and Dinos Chapman may have been lost, along with other works from the collection of Charles Saatchi.

The warehouse belonged to Momart, which looks after the Queen's collection and stores works for Tate Modern, the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York. Its personnel installed Damien Hirst's shark in its tank of formaldehyde, moved the V&A's enormous Raphael cartoons and took the Royal Academy's Sensation! exhibition to Berlin and New York.

A Saatchi spokesman said: "We are waiting for Momart to give us final confirmation. Charles is devastated and is hoping it is not as bad as first indications suggest. Key works have been lost. It's absolutely tragic."

Last night Dinos Chapman said he believed Hell ­ a controversial depiction of the Apocalypse containing 5,000 individually cast and painted figures of skeletons and Nazi soldiers, which took two years to make ­ had been destroyed.

Anna Maris, a director of Momart, said she could not confirm which works had been destroyed. "There's going to be a number of works by artists everybody's heard of, but also artists nobody's heard of. There will have been works that have never been exhibited, some of which have been stored since the 1980s," she said.

The company had three warehouses on the site, an industrial estate in Leyton. It was in the process of transferring work from the destroyed warehouse, which was the size of a football pitch, to a new unit.

"Some works were only moved a couple of weeks ago, so they had a narrow escape," Ms Maris said. "We don't know how the fire started, but we don't believe it started in the warehouse. We are devastated for our clients that have lost work."

Her fellow director Carole Hastings added that the warehouse could have contained more than 100 works ­ between 5 and 10 per cent of the works in Momart's care. "There is a mixture of paintings, big pieces and sculptures," she said.

Five hundred people were evacuated from nearby streets as more than 80 firefighters tackled the blaze, which began shortly before 4am on Monday. Last night some pockets of fire were still being damped down.

The loss of the works will be a devastating blow not only to the artists and Mr Saatchi, but to Britain's contemporary art scene. Hirst, Emin and the Chapmans have been at the forefront of the contemporary art movement for more than a decade. Renowned for their iconoclastic work, originality and disregard for convention and form, their work has attracted hundreds of thousands of people to exhibitions across the globe.

Momart was unable yesterday to put a figure on the value of the lost works, but played down reports that it could run into millions of pounds.

Malcolm Tarling, spokesman for the Association of British Insurers, said works would be insured according to the amount they would be likely to fetch at auction. "A work of art is by definition irreplaceable, because you can't go out and buy another." Many works of art are insured by specialist companies, he said.

Hell formed the centrepiece of a retrospective of the Chapman brothers' work at the Saatchi gallery in London which ended in March. Mr Saatchi reportedly commissioned the sculpture for £500,000 in 1998.

Hell is a series of nine miniature landscapes displayed in glass tanks. Its bloody scenes of disaster and destruction are made up of hundreds of tiny trees and rocks bought from model shops. They create a landscape for 5,000 individually cast and painted figures of skeletons and Nazi soldiers molesting each other. It helped to gain the brothers a Turner prize nomination in 2003.

Hell formed part of the Sensation! exhibition in 1997, along with Emin's Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, which was bought by Saatchi for £40,000. The tent contains the names of 102 people, including her family, friends, twin brother and her two aborted foetuses.

The art critic Brian Sewell said: "Major works by these artists destroyed now is going to affect our perception of the development of art in the late 20th century."

'Saatchi of the North' unveils BritArt cache to the public

DIY tycoon challenges the establishment with a new show in London and plans for his own gallery in Manchester

By Anthony Barnes and Sam Parkhouse
Sunday, 9 May 2004

A business tycoon who has secretly hoarded one of Britain's finest modern art collections, said to be rivalled only by that of Charles Saatchi, is to give the public a first glimpse of the works.

A business tycoon who has secretly hoarded one of Britain's finest modern art collections, said to be rivalled only by that of Charles Saatchi, is to give the public a first glimpse of the works.

Frank Cohen, a multi-millionaire who made his fortune from a DIY business, has a cache of 1,000 works, largely stored in a warehouse in the West Midlands.

He has agreed to display around 30 pieces in London. They include work by last year's Turner Prize winner, Grayson Perry, and fellow Turner nominees Jake and Dinos Chapman, as well as the young German artists Mr Cohen has been championing in recent years. Also on show will be work by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami.

Mr Cohen, 60, is worth around £45m. He is now planning a more permanent outlet for his collection, with a dedicated gallery in his home city of Manchester.

One of last year's Turner Prize judges, Mr Cohen has been hailed for his keen eye and dubbed the "Saatchi of the North". He built up his fortune with the DIY business Glyn Webb Home Improvements and his first purchase was a work by LS Lowry called My Family, bought because he said it reminded him of his humble upbringing.

Speaking of his ambitions, Mr Cohen said: "Art is such a passion of mine and I want to give something back. I would love to be part of creating a proper art scene in Manchester. But more than this, I want to put right the situation that, outside London and people like Saatchi with his gallery, there are no privately run art galleries and collections.

"I will be able to bring in collections at a few months' notice that the Tate would love to have but is not flexible enough to handle because it plans years in advance."

Tom Morton, a contributing editor of the art magazine Frieze, said: "His pieces are very well selected. He has a very deep and sensitive eye.

"Everyone has moved on from the whole BritArt story and the most exciting thing at the moment is collecting young German artists."

The unprecedented look into Mr Cohen's collection takes place next month as part of Art Fortnight London, featuring events in more than 70 galleries and auction houses around the capital.

Meredith Etherington-Smith, project director for Art Fortnight London, said: "There have been one or two pieces in small shows but Frank Cohen's collection has never been seen on this scale. It's a bit of a coup.

"He chose the pieces and I found this fantastic 18th-century house in Mayfair. The idea was to have pieces that would look amazing and respond to the rococo interior.

"It took me a long time to persuade him to do this and it wasn't so much me as the house that did it.

"He just loves art. His motivation is genuinely owning things and finding things and encouraging young artists. He collects things that he really responds to. He's a very pure collector. I'm not going to draw any analogies with any other collectors."

Mr Cohen follows in the footsteps of other passionate private collectors such as the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who displayed his pre-Raphaelite works at the Royal Academy of Arts in London last year. The exhibition went on to become an unexpected blockbuster.

Mr Cohen is planning to open his gallery in the Spinningfields development in Manchester city centre. He has just reached a deal with a property developer.

Art Fortnight London runs from 21 June to 5 July. Frank Cohen's collection can be seen at 3 Grafton Street, London W1

New king of contemporary art opens gallery to rival Saatchi

By Anthony Barnes, Arts and Media Correspondent
Sunday, 2 May 2004

He is reckoned to be the best-connected art dealer in the world. He represents many of the greatest artists of the past 50 years - including Jeff Koons, Howard Hodgkin, Richard Serra and the estate of Andy Warhol.

He is reckoned to be the best-connected art dealer in the world. He represents many of the greatest artists of the past 50 years - including Jeff Koons, Howard Hodgkin, Richard Serra and the estate of Andy Warhol.

And now Larry Gagosian, the influential New York dealer, is to shake up the British art market with the opening later this month of the biggest dealership in the capital. The finishing touches are being applied to an enormous converted garage measuring 12,500 sq ft which will house the gallery situated in King's Cross in central London. The Gagosian Gallery is more than three times larger than White Cube, the gallery run by the current dealer "king" of British contemporary art, Jay Jopling.

Gagosian has already had his fair share of stirring things up over here with yesterday's opening of the "Stations of the Cross" exhibition at his Heddon Street gallery in London's West End. This provocative exhibition - a collaboration between Damien Hirst and David Bailey - has Christ portrayed as a woman and has elicited a certain shock among churchmen. It is described by the gallery as part of Hirst's "fascination with Christian iconography".

But Gagosian's arrival in King's Cross and speculation about the artists he could lure to his Caruso St John-designed stable has shaken up what was becoming a moribund market.

Cristina Ruiz, editor of The Art Newspaper said: "This will undeniably have a huge impact on the London art scene. I think he's probably the most influential dealer of our times."

The opening within the next few weeks is being greeted as recognition that London is an important player in the world market for contemporary art and will bring in major exhibitions by some of the art world's biggest stars.

But it will also raise questions about whether some leading artistic lights may be tempted to leave their present dealers to show their work at the new venue.

Ms Ruiz predicts the opening will spur others to move to King's Cross. "All it takes is one major gallery to make a move and I think we will see a flocking effect and within a few years we'll see several spaces in that area."

Ms Ruiz said it would be intriguing to see what would happen when the British artists Gagosian represents in New York want to mount a major London show. "I would be very surprised if it came to a falling out," she said. "I'm sure somebody as savvy as Gagosian will move very carefully."

Stefan Ratibor, a director of the Gagosian Gallery in Heddon Street, said the new space would be used for both major exhibitions and to display works for sale. But he dismissed suggestions that Gagosian would tempt artists to move from rival dealers. "Absolutely not. There is nothing aggressive - this will only be a very positive relationship.

"We've had a West End gallery for four years. This was a question of scale. Certain artists needed a different structure - to be on a larger scale and sky-lit. Some want natural daylight which we didn't have in the existing space, and that was very much in the forefront of our minds. We see it as a mission to show the highest quality art."

Mr Gagosian's shows in New York in recent years have included eminent artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and he is currently running a retrospective of Willem de Kooning.

The art critic Brian Sewell welcomed Gagosian's move, which he said would challenge the tastes of major institutions such as the Tate. "It will be marvellous if Gagosian gets to take on the officially sanctioned art of [Tate director Sir Nicholas] Serota. Painters who would not be brought in by Tate Modern will now become visible," he said.

Mr Sewell also welcomed the unprecedented attack Charles Saatchi launched on his critics in an interview last week after his latest exhibition, New Blood, was widely derided: "It is pitiful so many critics find it easier to review me than the art."

Mr Sewell supported his rant: "I'm at his elbow on this. Bite back man, don't put up with it. "Most critics are ill informed little pigs who know nothing about anything. They are the bottom of the journalistic heap and the problem is that their editors don't care about the arts."

Saatchi returns fire at 'pitiful' critics of New Blood show

By Andrew Clennell
Tuesday, 27 April 2004

A war of words erupted yesterday between the advertising mogul and art collector Charles Saatchi and the newspaper critics who described his latest exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery as "irrelevant", "disappointing" and an "aesthetic Titanic".

A war of words erupted yesterday between the advertising mogul and art collector Charles Saatchi and the newspaper critics who described his latest exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery as "irrelevant", "disappointing" and an "aesthetic Titanic".

Mr Saatchi lashed out at writers who derided the New Blood exhibition at County Hall on the South Bank in London, calling them "mindless" and "pitiful".

He claimed his attackers, including Waldemar Januszczak of The Sunday Times and Tom Lubbock of The Independent, were usually "10 years late getting their heads around anything new" and knew "remarkably little about new art".

Mr Saatchi told the Evening Standard, which sponsors New Blood: "It is mindless to dismiss the art I show just because it's me that is showing it. It is pitiful so many critics find it easier to review me than the art. Too many of them ... can't cope without their PC guidebook or a press release and are always, but always, 10 years late getting their heads around anything new.''

The usually reclusive Mr Saatchi, who championed Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the Chapman Brothers, also said: "It's lucky for me and the artists that normal people seem to enjoy coming to see art that's new and unfamiliar ... and are not thrown into an aesthetic flap by the idiosyncratic setting of County Hall." Some of the artists will be "treated as great international talents" in a decade's time, he added.

Critics responded in kind yesterday, with Mr Januszczak suggesting Mr Saatchi's comments were "further proof he had lost the plot". He added: "'Normal people' obviously must be put off by a lot of things on show there. How couldn't a normal person be put off by something called Spunk Chandelier which shows the metal covered by white funk? I feel sorry for him - he's had an extraordinary impact on British art ... but he made a mistake by buying into that mausoleum in County Hall."

Mr Lubbock said: "Nobody who shows art in the deeply unfavourable environment of County Hall should claim to be art's big friend. As for treating his new batch as 'great international talents' in 10 years' time - want to bet?"

In his review of New Blood, which opened on 24 March, Mr Januszczak wrote: "His new show is an aesthetic Titanic, a momentous capsizing of taste filled with some of the most graceless, puerile and pig-ignorant art."

Mr Lubbock wrote: "It's the sort of art that, if you came across it in an art school would be puzzlingly depressing", while Richard Dorment, of The Daily Telegraph and Brian Sewell, of the Evening Standard, respectively, said the gallery had "begun to feel weirdly irrelevant" and that it was a "disappointing exhibition".

New Blood showcased the works of emerging artists from Britain and abroad. Portraits by Stella Vine of Rachel Whitear, who apparently died of an overdose, and of a bloodied weeping Diana, Princess of Wales caused controversy.

Despite the criticism, in its first 21 days, the show had about 2,650 visitors a day, rivalling attendances at Tate Britain, a statistic not lost on Mr Saatchi.

Yesterday a spokesman for Mr Saatchi said he did not wish to comment further, adding: "I think what's been said is fairly unambiguous."

Saatchi dragged into artists' dispute

From The Times

April 5, 2004

By Jack Malvern, Arts Reporter CHARLES SAATCHI has been reported to the Office of Fair Trading after being drawn into a dispute between an artist whose paintings he has bought and her former husband.

Stella Vine, a stripper who became a full-time artist after she sold a collection of her work to Mr Saatchi, may abandon her career because Charles Thomson, her former husband, has accused Mr Saatchi of monopolising the art market.

Ms Vine, 35, came to public attention last month when she was chosen by Mr Saatchi to be part of his New Blood exhibition at his London gallery, where her works are displayed alongside those of Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. Her portraits of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the heroin addict Rachel Whitear, each with blood dripping from their lips, gained national attention.

No sooner had her work appeared than Mr Thomson, to whom she had not spoken for two years, claimed that he and his artist collective, the Stuckists, should be credited for nurturing Ms Vine’s talent.

In a five-page letter to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) he argued that Mr Saatchi’s dominance of the art market in Britain was monopolistic and anti-competitive. “As a small competitor in a market where there is a dominant competitor acting because of their dominant position, my ability to compete is undermined,” he wrote.

The OFT confirmed that it had received the complaint and was considering whether it merited an investigation.

Speaking to The Times, Ms Vine described Mr Thomson’s account of their life together as one-sided and designed to take credit for her newfound fame. “Charles Thomson basically wants his own television show,” she said. “He doesn’t give a s*** about art or the Stuckist movement. He doesn’t believe a woman can do anything on her own. He’s a misogynist.” She added that the complaint to the OFT was part of a pattern of using other artists to gain publicity.