Portrait of a curator as a reviled man

There's turmoil in the galleries again and Nicholas Serota is in the firing line

Sarah Jane Checkland
Sunday, 24 June 2001

There's nothing we British like more than a good row among artists. It has always been the establishment versus the new.

There's nothing we British like more than a good row among artists. There was the so-called Art Quake of 1910, when The Times denounced the first exhibition of Post-Impressionism as "degenerate" and "the rejection of all that civilization has done". Then in 1935 Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, claimed Ben Nicholson's abstract reliefs had contracted "spiritual beri-beri" due to their "fatal defect of purity". It has always been the establishment versus the new.

But last week was different. Not only was the art establishment under attack for its keen espousal of avant-garde conceptual art, but the attacker-in-chief was a traditional figurative artist, complaining of the establishment's partiality. Stuart Pearson Wright, who won the £25,000 first prize at the National Portrait Gallery's BP Portrait Awards for The Six Presidents of the Royal Academy, a group portrait which features suited academics contemplating their mortality, symbolised by a dead chicken, used the occasion to proclaim that Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, should be sacked.

His misdemeanour? According to 25-year-old Pearson Wright, he is chief among the villainous members of the arts establishment who ignore young figurative artists and force them to choose between abandoning painting or surviving by "taking day jobs in Burger King".

"If such huge sums of public money are involved, this seems wrong and the public should have more of a say," said Pearson Wright. "I am going to do all I can to change this, and sacking Serota would be a step in the right direction."

Pearson Wright's view echoes those of the Stuckists, a group of painters who post regular manifestos complaining about the art establishment on the internet, and whose leader, Charles Thomson, stood unsuccessfully against the former Secretary of State for Culture, Chris Smith, at the general election.

But as the Stuckists' work is widely considered banal and naive, and their complaints hysterical, they tend to be dismissed as the lunatic fringe. What really made a difference last week was not only Pearson Wright's new-found credibility, but that his attack came shortly after that of the playwright Tom Stoppard. He too questioned the new orthodoxy in his recent speech at the Royal Academy dinner. Then on Wednesday, the spotlight fell again on Nicholas Serota, when the director of Tate Modern, Lars Nittve, resigned, allegedly due to clashes with Serota about the vision for the galleries.

Serota's position at the Tate gives him unsurpassed influence in the contemporary art world. Through gallery acquisitions and his opinions, he can make or break a career. But there is one man who comes a close second: Charles Saatchi, the advertising tycoon and art collector. Together they have embraced "cutting edge" art and their patronage has made its leading players among the most courted figures in the arts today. Artists such as Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread and Tracey Emin are celebrities. The Turner Prize secures almost as many column inches as the Booker.

As Saatchi is the Greta Garbo of the art world, and Sir Nicholas Serota was out of the country last week, it was left to Sandy Nairne, director of national and international programmes at the Tate, and Norman Rosenthal, exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy, to defend the establishment corner. Not only was the controversy "a load of utter bullshit", said Rosenthal, but it needed to be "nipped in the bud". All too many "things made in the name of art", he said, "are kitsch". The job of critics and curators was telling the difference. This, he said, he and his colleagues did "with great responsibility, through an international perspective, not a Little Englander one. It is not possible to paint like Turner these days. Indeed, it wasn't possible for Turner to paint like Titian. Art is about new territory."

Only Charles Saumarez Smith, director of the National Portrait Gallery, where the BP Portrait is hung each year, conceded that there was an argument for change. "For an unusually long period of time the art world has been dominated by one particular brand of practice," he said. "As a result there is a danger of this becoming the new orthodoxy." The fact that visitor numbers to the Portrait Award have doubled as a result of the row, he says, proves that "more people are interested in painting than in cutting edge art".

He points to a whole tranch of 20th-century figurative artists who were once dismissed as "oddball" but are now "seen to be fantastically dominant". The list is headed by Stanley Spencer, whose exhibition at Tate Britain closes this evening, having attracted around 90.000 visitors.

What of the painters themselves? Charles Thomson of the Stuckists heartily applauded Pearson Wright for "his courage" in joining the crusade against "the cul de sac of idiocy generated by the Serota-Saatchi axis". But the most eloquent – and influential – advocate for change was perhaps the Glasgow-based former war artist to Bosnia, Peter Howson. "Art has rules," says the 43-year-old painter. "If you break them, you are on to a false trail."

Saatchi to launch gallery for next wave of Britart

Charles Saatchi finds space to show off his signings

By Louise Jury, Media Correspondent
Wednesday, 16 May 2001

Charles Saatchi, the multimillionaire art collector and benefactor who has become Britain's leading patron of young talent, is to provide a new venue for cutting-edge works.

Charles Saatchi, the multimillionaire art collector and benefactor who has become Britain's leading patron of young talent, is to provide a new venue for cutting-edge works.

The advertising executive whose gallery in north London has helped to launch the careers of many modern artists is to open a second exhibition space to promote the students he has been supporting through college.

The new venue in Shore-ditch, east London, will be close to the premises of the influential dealers Jay Jopling and Victoria Miro, who both recently set up shop in the area.

Charlotte Mullins, the editor of Art Review magazine, which is to give details of the move next week, said: "It's almost like an authoritative stamp on the area, but it's also as if he feels he had better get in on the act. The fact that this is near Jay Jopling and Victoria Miro has not been lost on anybody.

"But picking up artists has always been his thing and he's been doing it earlier and earlier. Showing artists this way is just a bit more funky, a bit more hip."

Mr Saatchi founded bursaries for students at a number of London art colleges two years ago, including Goldsmiths', the Alma Mater of Damien Hirst, and the Royal College, which boasts Tracey Emin as an old girl, with proceeds from the £1.6m sale of works from his collection.

The students were eager to exhibit, and Mr Saatchi seized an opportunity to take over an existing space, the Underwood Street Gallery in Shoreditch, to show their work. The exhibition is expected to open on 5 June.

The move has proved a lifeline for a young dealer, Simon Hedges, who had been running the gallery until it was threatened with being sold last year.

The gallery is in a building leased from a charity. With developers taking over many of the poorer parts of London inhabited by artists, the charity looked likely to put its interests first and sell. A deal that would have seen the end of the gallery fell through at the last minute last year. But it left Mr Hedges without a settled programme of exhibitions and he decided to approach Charles Saatchi.

"He has always lent us great support," Mr Hedges told the Art Review. "He has come to all the shows, he's brought interesting people down and he's bought work from us."

Talks are still in progress about how the arrangement will work. The first exhibition was due to open next week but has been delayed to June. After the showcase of college students, it is thought that the gallery will offer space for artists in the Saatchi collection to exhibit new work.

Ms Mullins said: "The Underwood Street Gallery has always had a good reputation. This is a benevolent move, but you wonder whether he would have done it if the gallery had been in W12."

Charles Saatchi has long been a controversial figure in the contemporary art market, but his eye for spotting new talent has made him the envy of rivals. He has championed the careers of artists including the group known as the Young British Artists, headed by Damien Hirst, and highlights of his collection were shown to widespread acclaim at the Royal Academy in its controversial "Sensation" show.

But he has also been accused of distorting the market with his prolific purchases. Even the decision to create the bursaries was met with cynicism, with critics pointing out that a comparatively small part of the £1.6m proceeds from his auction at Christie's in 1999 had gone towards this act of philanthropy. The art colleges each received £10,000 a year for their bursaries. Simon Hedges is delighted that Charles Saatchi has stepped in and enabled them to continue to operate. "We were one of the original sites in Shoreditch, yet now we're a lifeboat for what used to be important here.

"We have become isolated as an independent, non- commercial space and it came to the point where we needed support."

Saatchi's new show promises to excite the Vice Squad again

By Louise Jury Media Correspondent
Friday, 27 April 2001

The attentions of the Vice Squad have clearly not left the Saatchi Gallery nursing any inhibitions. Its first exhibition since being raided by officers investigating complaints of obscene exhibits opens with an animated sequence of a modelling clay heroine pleasuring herself.

The attentions of the Vice Squad have clearly not left the Saatchi Gallery nursing any inhibitions. Its first exhibition since being raided by officers investigating complaints of obscene exhibits opens with an animated sequence of a modelling clay heroine pleasuring herself.

The police investigation six weeks ago into allegations that photographs of children were indecent has not deterred the gallery, owned by the advertising entrepreneur Charles Saatchi, from repeatedly showing the video of close-up masturbation by the artist Liane Lang. Jenny Blyth, the gallery's curator, defended its inclusion in the show by saying it was clearly not real. She said: "It's definitely not flesh. We perceive it as a humorous piece. It's the world of Wallace & Gromit and to use these materials in this way is so unexpected."

Ms Lang, a graduate of the Goldsmith's College that produced many of the Young British Artists, said she did not think people would be outraged. She said: "I never intended it to be offensive. There is also a distinction between showing adult sexuality and children."

The gallery came under fire last month from tabloid newspapers and a few unnamed visitors who protested that photographs by Tierney Gearon of her children were indecent. But the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was no case to answer.

The next exhibition, titled "New Labour", opens to the public next Thursday, chosen because of the initial expected date of the general election.

Emin back on the helter skelter of self-absorption

By David Lister Media and Culture Editor
Thursday, 26 April 2001

Tracey Emin, the leading member of the studiedly controversial Young British Artists, presented her first solo exhibition in London for four years yesterday.

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The business of being Tracey

Tracey Emin, the leading member of the studiedly controversial Young British Artists, presented her first solo exhibition in London for four years yesterday.

Once more using her own life as an art form in itself, she showed embroideries containing details of her sexual experiences, a video of the artist trying to meet her mother and a helter skelter as a throwback to her childhood days in Margate, Kent. The last was one of the very few new works in the exhibition. But the venue for the exhibition, the White Cube² Gallery in the East End of London, was, she claimed, notable.

Emin said: "This shows that artists are moving from the West End of London to the East End. There is a new community springing up here."

The exhibition is entitled "You Forgot To Kiss My Soul" with the reproduction of the Margate helter skelter at the centre of the gallery. Honey Luard, of White Cube², explained that it was "a fairly self-explanatory statement about the symbolism of the helter-skelter to life".

Emin, who last year sold her bed with its dirty linen to the art collector Charles Saatchi for £150,000 and then her reconstituted Whitstable beach hut to him for £ 75,000, says of her home town: "Being a virgin bride in Margate was not an option. You got broken into."

Emin's tent exhibit entitled Everyone I Have Slept With 1963-1995 contained the scrawled names of people she had slept with, including friends and relatives and sexual partners. It is not included in the new exhibition. Instead visitors can see a papier mâché Concorde, three new appliqued blankets, some neon displays, drawings and two videos, one of a conversation between Emin and her mother.

Emin was a Turner Prize nominee in 1999 and was recently awarded the eighth Cairo International Biennale Jury Prize.

Her home town, meanwhile, is trying to raise £13m for a Turner centre, which would show some of her works and those by contemporary Kent artists. Emin could yet see some of her works exhibited alongside those of Turner.

Giuliani creates 'decency panel' to keep art clean exhibits

By David Usborne in New York
Wednesday, 4 April 2001

Aspiring artists hoping for exposure in New York need to take care. If your work risks causing offence to the city's mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, or a group of his friends about to be appointed to an official "decency commission", you may be chased out of town. Steer clear of all religious depictions.

Aspiring artists hoping for exposure in New York need to take care. If your work risks causing offence to the city's mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, or a group of his friends about to be appointed to an official "decency commission", you may be chased out of town. Steer clear of all religious depictions.

The creation of the commission is Mayor Giuliani's latest big idea in his battle to keep New York's museums on the moral straight and narrow. Or that is how he sees it. Civil liberties groups consider it an illegal assault on the free expression rights of artists. For them it is censorship.

Apparently, Mr Giuliani intends his commission to root out works of art from the city's 34 publicly supported cultural institutions that may cross the line into obscenity. But where does that line lie? If there should be such a line. The panel members are buddies and aides of the mayor, who leaves office at the end of this year.

Mr Giuliani first frothed about so-called obscene art in 1999, when the Brooklyn Museum of Art opened Sensation, a collection of Saatchi-owned works, which included a black Madonna spattered with elephant dung. Mr Giuliani suspended city funding and tried to have the museum evicted, until a judge stopped him. When the museum hung a photo-parody of the Last Supper with a nude black woman in the place of Jesus he called it "disgusting".

Barbara Handman, director of People for the American Way, said yesterday: "The mayor has dragged the city through one costly, losing battle after another, as he persists in his attempt to become chooser-in-chief and impose his choices on the rest of us."

Nudists join the show as Saatchi's carnival reopens

Art controversy: Tierney Gearon's photographs of her naked children back on display as Crown Prosecution Service decides not to prosecute

By Thomas Sutcliffe
Friday, 16 March 2001

Just inside the inner entrance of the Saatchi Gallery there is an easy way to take the measure of its owner's attitude to media controversy. Some 15 feet of the wall is covered with a dense mosaic of framed newspaper articles bearing headlines such as "Art too hot to show" and "Art or outrage?"

Just inside the inner entrance of the Saatchi Gallery there is an easy way to take the measure of its owner's attitude to media controversy. Some 15 feet of the wall is covered with a dense mosaic of framed newspaper articles bearing headlines such as "Art too hot to show" and "Art or outrage?"

And after yesterday's opening, the first time the public could get in since the row over Tierney Gearon's photographs of her naked children erupted, it is clear that this memorial to moral consternation will soon stretch even further.

Journalists hoping to report on the seizure of the pictures may have been disappointed - the police stayed away pending a Crown Prosecution Service decision on whether there was a case. The CPS finally rang to say no action would be taken.

But there were plenty of consolations in the modest carnival of art lovers, students and protesters who arrived for the midday opening, not least the presence of Vincent Bethell and supporters of the Freedom To Be Yourself campaign.

For Mr Bethell, "being yourself" seems to be a matter of taking all your clothes off in public and - outraged by the assumption that nakedness might be crudely equated with indecency - he had come to do just that, stripping off with several colleagues just before noon.

The gesture prompted a stampede of astounded workmen from Jack's Café, across the road, and a clatter of camera shutters from the press photographers.

But it also demonstrated the curious terror that the human body can produce when exposed in unconventional ways. "I've got three children," yelled one incensed man. "If any one saw you mugs I'd slap the lot of you." Another, beside himself with rage at this eccentric defence of liberty, shrieked: "You fucking nonces."

"Hiding Obsesses, Revealing Heals" read the poster carried by one naked protester and for a moment it seemed all too likely that he would be able to apply this unconventional form of medicine in practice. Then the gates opened and the crowd surged down the ramp to queue for admission, clothed and unclothed united in decorous English patience.

Inside, Jenny Blyth, the gallery's curator, welcomed the naked protesters to the show and calmly fielded questions from journalists. Before the exhibition's opening, there had been no discussion of the pictures' potential to cause trouble, she claimed. In hindsight, she conceded, this might have been a little naïve, but she insisted she could still look at the pictures "with an open mind".

Joanna Needham and Catherine McCormack weren't quite so sure. In Jack's Café, before the opening, the two art history students from University College London, had reflected on John Berger's distinction between the naked and the nude. ("To be naked is to be yourself, to be nude is to be seen by others and not recognised as yourself" was how one of them recalled it.) And they had mused over what other art works might arouse the News of the World's moral outrage; Bronzino's Allegory of Cupid and Venus, in which a young boy tongue-wrestles with the goddess of love while tweaking her nipple, was elected as the prime candidate for a modern resuscitation of Victorian sexual terror.

In front of Gearon's images they were more hesitant about dismissing the fuss as mere philistinism. "We're slightly changing our minds about a couple of them," said Joanna, noting that in more than one picture there was a troubling ambiguity about the exact nature of the relationships. Kristina Henschen, whose child lay sleeping in the buggy she was pushing round the gallery, was unperturbed though. She could see no real problems with the pictures "but then I'm Swedish", she added, before turning away to attend to some journalists seeking to add a maternal viewpoint to those of obsessional nudists.

Outside a bereted figure who gave his name as Leon was stuffing copies of a manifesto for a free revolutionary art into the Saatchi Gallery postbox, a manifesto which called for "complete freedom for art". If he really wanted to take the battle directly to the forces of reaction all he had to do was cross the road, where Filippo Sardo, manning the counter at Jack's, was putting the case for censorship. If he were to display images of naked children, he declared, he'd be arrested. Call it art and stick it on the walls across the road though and you could get away with it.

In Mr Sardo's view the double standard was unacceptable and when it came to kids "nudidity" was out of order. The naked glamour models pinned to the wall suggested that, when it came to public display of nudity at least, he had a few double standards of his own.

Surprise, surprise

Friday, 16 March 2001

There's a surprise: the Crown Prosecution Service has decided, "after carefully reviewing the evidence", not to take legal action against the Saatchi Gallery over the photographs of naked children on show there (in a show sponsored by our sister newspaper, The Independent on Sunday).

There's a surprise: the Crown Prosecution Service has decided, "after carefully reviewing the evidence", not to take legal action against the Saatchi Gallery over the photographs of naked children on show there (in a show sponsored by our sister newspaper, The Independent on Sunday).

Plain-clothes police officers can now be recalled from investigating reports of cherubs in statuary at sundry locations around Britain, or depictions of them in paintings by Renaissance artists in public places.

The artificial panic over representations of children's naked bodies risked making worse the fearfulness for our children that so distorts our society.

Even amid our present, overheated paranoia about paedophilia, though, it was never remotely plausible that a jury would have convicted either the Saatchi Gallery or the artist, Tierney Gearon. It could not have been seriously argued that displaying the pictures put children at risk, even if some people found them disturbing.

Fortunately, common sense prevailed before this nonsense went that far.