YGAs* set to take BritArt by storm

* Young German Artists

By Robin Stummer
Sunday, 29 February 2004

It may be the beginning of the end for BritArt. Vastly expensive, habitually hyped and predictably shocking, the work of the YBAs (Young British Artists) is having to make way for the new passion among wealthy collectors and international art-market speculators: the Young German Artists.

It may be the beginning of the end for BritArt. Vastly expensive, habitually hyped and predictably shocking, the work of the YBAs (Young British Artists) is having to make way for the new passion among wealthy collectors and international art-market speculators: the Young German Artists.

The buying habits of the multi-millionaire collector Charles Saatchi can shape art markets. Mr Saatchi is credited with "making" celebrated BritArtists, such as Damien Hirst, the Chapman brothers and Tracey Emin, but over the past 18 months he has been discreetly buying up work by young continental artists in their 20s and 30s, including several Germans.

Now, The Independent on Sunday has learnt, another major international art buyer, the Korean property magnate-turned-artist CI Kim, has focused his attentions on Germany. Mr Kim, who, like Mr Saatchi, has been an avid collector of British contemporary art, has just completed his own hurried shopping spree in Leipzig and Berlin. The IoS understands that he has bought around 20 works by various YGAs. Mr Kim's office would not reveal the amount he spent in Germany, but on a similar spree in London last August, he is believed to have paid several million pounds for works including Charity, Damien Hirst's massive bronze statue of a disabled-girl collection box.

Mr Kim's office told the IoS yesterday: "He is interested in this art because they have such a distinctive character and style." And, of course, if you've a few hundred thousand pounds to spare, new German art could also prove to be a very good investment.

Though yet to command the vast sums paid for some of the BritArt oeuvre, many YGA works are believed to be selling for between £20,000 and £100,000 - the kind of amounts achieved in the early days of the BritArt boom.

Mr Kim has already amassed the largest collection of contemporary British art outside the UK, housed in a specially built gallery complex in the city of Cheonan, Korea. He now intends to create one of the world's great repositories of recent German art.

Such is the current feeding frenzy among buyers for the work of German painters and sculptors that experts say Leipzig, the powerhouse of the country's burgeoning art industry, has sold out of new art. There is now a waiting list of up to three years to acquire new work.

Since the 1960s, a series of German artists have attracted international attention, notably Josef Beuys, Anselm Kiefer and Sigmar Polke. The city of Cologne provided much of the energy behind the modern art resurgence of the 1980s. More recently, the conceptual photographer Thomas Ruff and the Leipzig painter Neo Rauch have received critical acclaim.

Mr Kim is believed to have bought at least one work by Tobias Lehner, a 24-year-old Leipzig painter, while Mr Saatchi is believed to have bought several works by the Berlin-based painter Jonathan Meese. One of these, the huge, three-panel Temptation of the State of the Blessed Ones in Archland, was unveiled in January at the Saatchi Gallery in London.

Temptation is among many European works bought by Mr Saatchi over the past 18 months, and will feature in the New Blood exhibition, which opens next month at the Saatchi Gallery. It marks a clean break with Mr Saatchi's almost exclusively BritArt tastes of the past 10 years.

Including work by several Germans, as well as artists from Belgium, Japan, New Zealand, Israel and the United States, the exhibition will contain only a smattering of young British artists, among them the 26-year-old conceptualist Conrad Shawcross, son of the writer and journalist William Shawcross.

"New German art is being very strongly collected by collectors and banks from within the country," says Jari Lager of the Union Projects gallery in London. "But there are also a few major private collectors in Britain who are now making their first purchases and contacts and visits to Germany.

"The Leipzig artists have sold out of their work - you can't buy anything," she adds. "Everything has been bought. There are around a dozen artists there who are doing very, very well."

According to Anna Somers Cocks, founding editor of The Art Newspaper, the rise of the YGAs began across the Atlantic. "The reason the Germans have become strong is because the Americans adopted German contemporary art with a vengeance about five years ago," she says.

"The Germans have a school of photographers who produce enormous architectural images. The Americans like photography anyway, but these Germans are by far the best photographic artists around."

How Saatchi discovered the art of a stripper

From The Times

February 24, 2004

By Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent A STRIPPER with no training as a painter has found herself in the art market’s spotlight after Charles Saatchi bought her first painting.

Stella Vine, 35, was astonished to learn that Britain’s foremost collector of contemporary art had bought her portrait of a bleeding Diana, Princess of Wales, for £600 — the pay for four nights’ work in a strip club.

When Mr Saatchi buys and sells, the art world takes note. His activities are regarded as a barometer of the market. Damien Hirst, the animal pickler, and Tracey Emin, best-known for her unmade bed, are among the artists whose reputations have been made by Mr Saatchi’s interest in them.

“I really love your painting,” he had told Ms Vine, after noticing it at the Transition Gallery in North London. Ms Vine, a friend of the gallery’s owner who had been included in a show of emerging artists, said that Mr Saatchi had said: “ ‘How much is that? I’ll have it’. I couldn’t believe it.”

The artist, who is a single mother, had until recently performed at the Windmill Club in Soho. Now she has moved to a smaller venue in London.

Her painting Hi Paul Can You Come Over, which shows the Princess begging for help from her butler Paul Burrell, will be featured in an exhibition from Mr Saatchi that is to open next month, New Blood. Ms Vine painted the work after reading that the Princess had believed that there were plans to kill her.

Ms Vine said her dream is to become a full-time artist. It was the “dark side” of stripping that she wanted to get away from, she said. “You meet some wonderful women — people in the law, nursing and single parents trying to get by,” she said. “But you also meet a lot of dark men and it is easy to get sucked into dodgy stuff. You’ve got to be really tough inside to maintain who you are.”

Ms Vine left home at 13 and became pregnant at 16 by the caretaker at the bedsits where she was living. She eventually left him and went to a drama school in Wandsworth.

She worked as a waitress but was not making enough to live on, and found work in hostess bars and strip clubs, dancing nude. She said: “At one point, I was totally broke. I began table-dancing in Wembley, earning £20 a night. I was struggling.”

A year after opening its doors at County Hall, the Saatchi Gallery will feature previously unseen work by a new generation of artists in its new show. The exhibition features a vibrating mummy by a New Zealand artist, Francis Upritchard; a travelling theatre caravan constructed from old tables and cupboards by an English artist, Brian Griffiths; and taxidermal horses’ bodies posed like Henry Moore sculptures by a Belgian artist, Berlinde de Bruyckere.

Since its opening, the Saatchi Gallery has attracted more than half a million visitors. The forthcoming exhibition will fill most of the 40,000 sq ft gallery, although works by the Chapman Brothers, Emin and Hirst will also be on view.

Painting without the pandering

From The Times

January 1, 2004

The art market downturn will expel hyped-up tosh and allow more enduring work to thrive

By Rachel Campbell-Johnston

THE shadow of economic slump has spooked the art market. Old-Master dealers tend to stick it out, however heavy the going, but the contemporary scene is more highly strung. Over the coming year it is likely to grow even more skittish. And observers can expect a few nasty falls.

Art lovers may think this won’t affect them. But it will, because art, seen at one level, is simply the production of a saleable commodity much like any other but less useful than a washing machine.

The state of the market directly affects contemporary production. When markets are buoyant, the contemporary is kept afloat.

London founded its Frieze Art Fair this autumn. Our capital needs to be able to compete, though with art fairs now overcrowding the cultural calendar (fairs in Berlin, Paris, Cologne, Turin and Miami Beach all take place in the same few months), dealers will be choosing carefully where they want to be represented. And it’s the dealers who control the contemporary scene.

Brit Art was the creation of Charles Saatchi. An advertising man, he understood the power of a certain type of spectacle. And by creating a market value for this, he launched a brand. As prices increased, so did media coverage. And since most of us are less interested in art than in what other people are interested in, Saatchi-style aesthetics were soon being consumed like soup.

This had an adverse effect on artistic standards. “A lot of artists are producing what is known as Saatchi art,” Chris Ofili told The Times. “You know it’s Saatchi art because it’s one-off shockers. And these artists are getting cynical. Some with works already in his collection produce half-hearted crap knowing that he will take it off their hands. And he does.”

But now the buzz of Brit Art is over. Only the strongest will survive the hard times. It is significant that Saatchi has chosen this moment to sell almost his entire collection of the work of Damien Hirst. Hirst was the leader of the Brit pack. His were the pieces that first turned the conceptual into a craze. And this sale marks a turning point. For though Hirst was a trendsetter and will no doubt survive, the fate of many of his followers is less certain.

Over the past years, artists whose work passed all but uncommented upon in the Royal Academy’s landmark Sensation show of 1977 have, one by one, found enthusiastic advocates. This was not necessarily an indication of the calibre of their work.

As far as an Old Master is concerned, there are certain criteria to be met. Experts assess an oil painting according to its condition. They judge the minute distinctions between different impressions of a print. But when it came to the conceptual, an awful lot of the appeal can lie in the fact that a piece is in accordance with a certain dominant trend.

A trend promotes a certain “look”. And in recent years this “look” has focused on lifestyle, pop and youth culture. It has subverted ideals of traditional beauty to appeal to a younger, more diverse, audience. It has been influenced by, and reflected in, the world of fashion and magazines — the Royal Academy of Arts’ Armani retrospective is one example.

This “look” has given a lift to entire areas of the contemporary. And it is these pieces — buoyed by fashion and hype — that, now put under financial pressure, will be subjected to closer scrutiny. As the tide of fashion goes out, observers will start to see who exactly is swimming naked.

The beginnings of this process could well be most marked in photography.

This year Tate Modern broke ground with its huge photographic exhibition Cruel and Tender. But when the show moved to Germany, audiences were far from impressed, says Melanie Puff, a freelance curator. Germany, after all, was the nation that had produced such pioneering photographers as Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth. And these artists had influenced a host of empty imitators.

“Art photography, in the past ten years, has become a commercial career,” says Charlotte Cotton, a curator of photography at the V&A. “And some younger photographers are looking at the work of mature picture makers such as Gursky or Struth and, without having a subject or approach of their own, they are imitating their deadpan aesthetic. They think it will make their work into art. But it doesn’t. It just makes it look like art. These also-rans are just trying to appeal to an assumed constituency of new collectors.”

Such opportunism could survive while the art market was booming and collectors were ready to buy anything that looked as if it could be cool. But as markets grow wary, photography faces a serious reassessment. And MoMA’s spring show, Fashioning Fiction in Photography (the first devoted to fashion photography), is likely to become a focus of argument.

It is high time this happened. Art that endures is not that which simply cashes in on a craze. It tends to be rooted in a profound sense of engagement. Content is as important as style. And this intense engagement with subject matter tends to arise out of periods of silence and retreat, which is precisely what market success won’t allow the creator, because when prices are high so is the corresponding hype. Some of the most creative moments arise when there is little money about.

As far as the contemporary art scene is concerned, economic downturn should be seen as a source of hope. The Brit Art phenomenon began only after the recession of the early 1990s when dealers who survived financial troubles were looking to capitalise on the next big thing. Which is why, in 2004, we should watch the contemporary art world more carefully than ever.

Don't miss...

Vuillard (Royal Academy)

The first major retrospective of a French modern master famed for the warm domestic intimacy of his interior scenes. Jan 31-Apr 18.

The Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature (Tate Britain)

Every intricate detail of nature picked out in pure Pre-Raphaelite colour. Feb 12-May 3.

Roy Lichtenstein (Hayward Gallery)

Wham! Comic-book kitsch on a vast scale by the American Pop pioneer. Feb 26-May 16.

Brancusi (Tate Modern)

40 works by a founder of modern sculpture in all their eloquent simplicity. Jan 29- May 23.

Rubens (Palais des Beaux- Arts)

Lille celebrates being joint Euro Culture Capital with a spectacular show of the great Baroque master. Mar 6-Jun 14.

Cy Twombly at the Serpentine (Tate Britain)

Echoes of our horticultural passions in the master scribblings of one of America’s most admired living artists in the Serpentine Art of the Garden show. Jun 3-Aug 30.

The Liverpool Biennale

New commissioned works by international artists are a focus for the biennale of the city that knows how to party. Sept 18-Nov 28.

Exotic Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500 to 1800 (V&A)

East meets West in a display that charts 300 years of artistic, cultural and technological interaction. Sept 23-Dec 5.

Helen Chadwick (Barbican Art Gallery)

Only in her forties when she died in 1996, Chadwick described the feelings her work provoked as “gorgeously repulsive, exquisitely fun, dangerously beautiful”. Apr 29-Aug 1.

New directions

Charles Saatchi has dumped his works by Damien Hirst, affecting the artist’s “look”. His pieces will still set the upper price limit for new art, but values will fall from there, forcing fellow artists to be less derivative.

Philip Hoare: Arise, Sir Damien Hirst, and welcome to the Establishment

Sunday, 30 November 2003

Just how rebellious is contemporary art? Last week the sensational work of the Chapman brothers was defended by British justice when District Judge Brian Loosely sentenced "comedy terrorist" Aaron Barschak to 28 days in prison for tipping a pot of red paint over Jake Chapman and his Goya-derived The Rape of Creativity. It seems that the YBAs (young British artists) are now part of the establishment they once sought to subvert. At the same time, it was revealed that Damien Hirst had bought back key works from Charles Saatchi, having disapproved of the way in which they were displayed at the latter's South Bank gallery. Where Hirst once needed Saatchi's patronage, he can now afford to reclaim work for his own collection (not least because his last show at Hoxton's White Cube 2 sold out within a day, accruing £11m in the process).

Just how rebellious is contemporary art? Last week the sensational work of the Chapman brothers was defended by British justice when District Judge Brian Loosely sentenced "comedy terrorist" Aaron Barschak to 28 days in prison for tipping a pot of red paint over Jake Chapman and his Goya-derived The Rape of Creativity. It seems that the YBAs (young British artists) are now part of the establishment they once sought to subvert. At the same time, it was revealed that Damien Hirst had bought back key works from Charles Saatchi, having disapproved of the way in which they were displayed at the latter's South Bank gallery. Where Hirst once needed Saatchi's patronage, he can now afford to reclaim work for his own collection (not least because his last show at Hoxton's White Cube 2 sold out within a day, accruing £11m in the process).

I'm not a big fan of the Chapmans' brutal vision, although in person they're perfectly charming. Their art reflects a cynicism in contemporary culture - yet acts as a critique of it, too, given the violence of our times, and our continuing obsession with consumption, image and celebrity. One of most sensational works of modern art I saw last week was Michael Jackson's mugshot, taken on his arrest for suspected child abuse. The bizarre, asexualised, pantomimic face with Joan Crawford eyebrows stares quizzically, and speaks volumes for our age. Jackson's own weird, airbrushed transition from blackness to whiteness resembles nothing so much as one of Cindy Sherman's self-transformation photo-pieces, in which the American artist casts herself in characters ranging from whores to clowns.

But perhaps there's a new faith in art. For his White Cube show, Romance in the Age of Uncertainty, Hirst installed blood-spattered vitrines filled with medical symbols of the 12 martyred Apostles; and although many might take issue with his severed cow's head, there was something authentically moving about the overtly unironic manner with which Hirst treated these Christian themes, freighted as they are with 2,000 years of faith. Similarly, Bill Viola's video pieces, The Passions, at the National Gallery are proving the pulling power of emotionally and spiritually direct art. Perhaps we are finally over all that Nineties irony. Perhaps that's why the V&A's Gothic show has been so successful; and perhaps it is why Olafur Eliasson's "transformative utopian installation" at Tate Britain is one of the biggest draws in town.

And perhaps it is why artists such as Rachel Howard - brought up as a Quaker and currently showing her cruciform photographs in Dering Street - and the Mancunian feminist Linder, the muse of Morrissey, are producing gripping new work. Linder's latest project is sponsored by the British Council and opens in Prague next spring. Like Sherman, she is fascinated by identity and sexuality; only her work adopts personae from the edge of religious belief: bearded female saints or the Mother of the Shakers, Ann Lee. Others might find such performances extreme; I find them essentially restorative - not least because I've spent the past three years writing about utopian beliefs. And to paraphrase Moz, Heaven knows we need a new utopia now.

Gore beats grind

I've just spent my second week back at school. It's a strange sensation: I keep expecting to be told not to run down the corridors or (as I was taught by monks) to hear the swish of a black cassock in pursuit as my mates and I are discovered smoking in the cricket nets. In fact, I've been commissioned by Hampshire County Council's literature development officer, Emma Dolman, to teach creative writing, and my classes have ranged from sweet seven-year-olds at Sholing Infants to the rather more intimidating teenagers of Hamble Community College. (Actually a well-behaved bunch: one of them even came up and shook my hand, an act which, given the strict codes of cool operating in school society, was a true honour.)

The premise for these sorties is the subject of my last book, the vast Victorian military hospital which stood at Netley, on the eastern banks of Southampton Water. The idea is to elicit fiction from fact and to get the little darlings thinking laterally. I've realised that to silence a group of restive infants, all you have to do is to mention amputated limbs - there's nothing they like better than a bit of gore and a gruesome ghost story. Bitterne C of E Juniors particularly liked the tale of the Grey Lady, a Victorian nurse who threw herself off the chapel tower after mistakenly administering a fatal dose to her soldier-patient-lover, while the tougher nuts of Hamble preferred the macabre Pathé film from 1918 of shell-shock victims at Netley. And when we took a class from Townhill Juniors to the site itself - now the Royal Victoria Country Park - they were most excited by the cemetery.

Taken out of the daily grind of the National Curriculum, you get the sense that you are freeing young minds. That afternoon, one of the boys turned to his teacher and said, "I think Mr Philip is the best person in the world." What do you say to that? The experience has impressed on me the extraordinary things we expect teachers to do. They're entrusted with our children, shouted at by parents and beleaguered by league tables, Sats and targets. Their hours get longer as their pay gets shorter. Yet they have the responsibility of rearing a new generation.

What really brought it home to me was the fact that, as the Townhill kids wandered towards the beach, their supervisor pulled out a life preserver and had to instruct her charges how to use it should they start drowning (even though the tide was so low that they would have had to wade through mud for 30m before they got wet). It is difficult to understand a society which undervalues these professionals while its fat-cat company directors display a sense of responsibility which begins and ends with taking a 10 per cent cut in their million-pound bonuses when the shareholders cut up rough.

On my list of things to do, watching a rugby match at 9am on a Saturday ranks somewhere below root canal treatment. However, after an early-morning call from my excited sister in Sydney - she'd flown out to join her husband and sons who had tickets for the final - I felt duty-bound to spend nearly two hours watching 30 grown men wrestling in a muddy Australian field. After about half an hour, I think I'd worked out the rules. I even cared who won. But I do wonder what it says about our priorities when it is proposed that pupils get time off to watch the victory parade, while their peers who wanted to go on the anti-Bush march were threatened with punishment for truancy.

Janet Street-Porter is away

If it weren't for Saatchi's money, Hirst would probably be pickling herrings

From The Times

November 29, 2003

Ben Macintyre THE RELATIONSHIP between artist and patron is inherently unstable, and that between Damien Hirst and the art collector Charles Saatchi has now disintegrated in a miasma of lurid polka dots and bits of dead cow.

The advertising guru bought some 50 of Hirst’s works, starting with a medicine cabinet in 1990, and showcased him as the most inventive of the Britart crowd; Hirst became exceedingly rich and famous. But despite the formaldehyde, something was rotting. Hirst, it seems, came to see Saatchi not as a connoisseur, but merely as a shopper, a businessman “who only recognises art with his wallet”; Saatchi did not consult Hirst on the exhibition of his works in County Hall. Each man believed he had created the other. It is a familiar pattern: the patron who comes to see his protégé as an ungrateful prima donna; the artist who regards his patronising patron as a philistine. Hirst has now huffily reacquired a number of his works.

The Saatchi-Hirst relationship was one of the few examples of a genuinely successful patron-artist collaboration in modern Britain. Whatever the artistic value of a pickled shark, their much-hyped alliance created a new audience for art, and a buzz that went far beyond the flies breeding inside the head of a dead cow.

Hirst is one of the most popular artists alive, yet little of the popularity has rubbed off on Saatchi. In Britain we tend to regard privately funded art as somehow corrupt, an opportunity for the rich to show off that can only undermine artistic integrity. We instinctively dislike philanthropists (witness the hostility faced by Henry Tate) and distrust patrons as modern Medicis, using art to increase their social or political cachet. We like nothing better than to kick gift-horses in the mouth. The desire to nurture or rescue what we perceive to be beautiful is a universal aesthetic, whether this involves collecting matchboxes or diced sheep. Britons are notorious hoarders, yet we habitually question the motives of rich collectors.

The antipathy towards patrons goes back to the 18th century, when commerce replaced patronage as the underwriter of creativity. Samuel Johnson despised artists who relied on the rich man’s largesse. His dictionary definition: “Patron: One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.” The market alone, he believed, should dictate artistic success. That view was echoed loudly by artists who had already made good. Just as Hirst chose to diss Saatchi only once he was well and truly established, so Alexander Pope sniffed at lesser poets who scrabbled for preferment (once he was rich enough not to have to do so himself):

Like the vile straw that blows around the streets The needy poet sticks to all he meets.

Royal patronage has not been an important factor in British art for at least a century, yet the merest whiff of it is enough to elicit scorn. The mockery sometimes directed at the Poet Laureateship comes from the assumption that anything written to order is, by definition, degraded.

Yet private patronage has sustained and rescued many great artists, and still does in the US. John Dryden, William Blake and Leonardo da Vinci all lived on handouts without compromising their artistic integrity. James Joyce would never have completed Finnegans Wake without the sustained financial support of Harriet Shaw Weaver, the American benefactor who continued to write the cheques when everyone else had given up on him. Maecenas, the wealthy Roman statesman of the 7th decade BC, went out of his way to patronise young, penniless writers: which is why we have Virgil and Horace.

Wordsworth’s contemporaries believed that a stipend from a lordly admirer doused the fires of his early radicalism, but the reverse argument is just as strong. Without Saatchi’s cash in his pocket, Hirst might have paused before preserving his shark and settled instead for a more conservative pickled herring. Would the market have come to embrace Hirst’s dissected sheep without Saatchi’s enthusiastic and extravagant support? That Saatchi may have been acting from commercial motives is entirely irrelevant. Patrons do not create art, but they can mould taste, which helps.

Almost all patrons, with rare exceptions such as John Paul Getty II and Harriet Weaver, are at least partly motivated by self-aggrandisement. Those wealthy individuals who sponsored elaborately beautiful side-chapels in medieval cathedrals seldom did so for aesthetic reasons or to provide employment to struggling artists, but rather to increase their kudos and limit their stay in Purgatory.

Individual, risk-taking art patrons are a vital counterbalance to the potentially deadening effect of art reliant solely on state subsidy and popular taste. Arts councils tend not to attract gamblers, and it is surely no accident that some of the greatest collectors have also been canny entrepreneurs, who knew how to spot a trend ahead of time. Such individuals are rare and undervalued in Britain, but at a time of shrinking arts subsidies, they are increasingly vital.

The Hirst-Saatchi story demonstrates that, however tense it may be, the collaboration between artist and patron can be fruitful and mutually beneficial; even when it falls apart, for the value of Hirst’s work will only increase as a result of their recent tiff. This, then, is a story with a happy ending for all involved. Except the cow. And the sheep. And the shark.

Hirst deal to buy back work from Saatchi is 'ploy to stoke up price'

By Vincent Graff, Media Editor
Thursday, 27 November 2003

The conceptual artist Damien Hirst, who has embarked on a spending spree to buy back some of his most important works, was accused yesterday by experts of trying to stoke up the price of his art.

The conceptual artist Damien Hirst, who has embarked on a spending spree to buy back some of his most important works, was accused yesterday by experts of trying to stoke up the price of his art.

Overnight, Hirst has become one of the largest owners of his own works, after he agreed a deal to repurchase 12 pieces he had sold to the advertising guru and art collector Charles Saatchi.

The deal was made through White Cube, the gallery which, through Hirst's dealer Jay Jopling, has sold all his work.

In a terse statement, a spokesman for the Saatchi Gallery confirmed: "We have sold 12 Hirsts back to White Cube." The Gallery refused "for contractual reasons" to identify the works in question, but revealed details of what the haul does not include. "So that visitors to The Saatchi Gallery at County Hall aren't confused, they will still see The Shark, The Sheep, The Dots, The Butterflies, The Fish, The Flies and Hymn, the 20ft anatomical figure."

There was no word from Hirst's camp but it is thought that among the pieces that have changed hands are some of his most extreme, including his pickled, sliced pig, a rotting cow's head and flies in a pool of blood.

Neither side was prepared to comment on the value of the deal, which is likely to be a seven-figure sum. Recently at auction, a Hirst work entitled Something Solid Beneath The Surface of All Creatures Great And Small, a large glass and steel cabinet featuring mounted skeletons of small animals, was sold in the United States for $1.6m (£940,000), twice the amount it was expected to raise.

Hirst is already a rich man: a few months ago he made £11m within a fortnight of the opening of his latest exhibition, Romance in the Age of Uncertainty. In the past, he has described Saatchi, the man above all others who has bumped up prices of his works, as a businessman who "only recognises art with his wallet". But yesterday, the artist's motives were questioned by art experts, who suspect his surprise move was prompted by concerns more financial than aesthetic.

Relations between Hirst and Saatchi have recently been strained and the artist may have feared that his former friend and mentor might put all his Hirst works on to the open market at the same time.

Anna Somers Cocks, founder and group editorial director of The Art Newspaper, said: "I think we can take it for granted that he has done this to avoid a flood of his own works coming on to the market ... If a dumping operation took place, it would be very damaging."

Tom Lubbock, art critic of The Independent, said he had never in modern times heard of an artist attempting to recover such a large haul of his early works. He said: "Charles Saatchi has got rid of large amounts of work before, and he has harmed a lot of people's prices."

Hirst is not the first artist to have a desire to buy back his own works. J M W Turner bought examples of his early oeuvre, though perhaps for more noble motives. The art dealer Lowell Libson, who specialises in 18th and 19th-century British art, said Turner was driven by a mission to make sure his art was not hidden from public view in the private collections of the rich. "He was assiduous in reacquiring work when it suited him. In middle age, he was conscious of his own work, and he took a long-term view about how he wanted the public to see his art after his death."

Most artists have a problem quite unlike Hirst's or Turner's. Having conceived the works, they are unable to sell them in the first place.

The love affair that ended in a right pickle

From The Times

November 26, 2003

By Godfrey Barker

“HIRST thought he made Saatchi. Saatchi thought he made Hirst. There’s all you need for a terminal quarrel between lovers,” a Bond Street dealer close to both men said yesterday.

The quarrel has been three years in the making. “He only recognises art with his wallet,” Hirst stormed about Saatchi and his market manipulations in 2001. Quarrel turned to fury in April when Hirst went to the opening Saatchi show, “dedicated to Damian Hirst, the Alpha-Male of Contemporary British Art, Constantly Re-examining the Beauty Found in Death”, and saw the 45 or so Hirsts that Saatchi owns mostly lost in a rabbit warren of small brown County Hall backrooms down lonely corridors, where many thought they looked ineffective and absurd.

Hirst, who had no say in the exhibition, told Saatchi what he thought. He told him how he should be shown: sky-high and dramatic as in the yawning white spaces of the White Cube gallery in Hoxton. He added that he did not care to see himself mixed up with and hidden behind works by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tracey Emin, Marc Quinn, Sarah Lucas and Gavin Turk.

Saatchi hit back nastily in Time Out: “Many in the art world, artists included, think they can only be seen in pristine white space . . . It’s time to break out of the White Cube timewarp . . . (art like that) condemns itself to a worryingly limited lifespan.”

Since then, Hirst has left the Saatchi retrospective off his curriculum vitae and Saatchi has more or less stopped buying Hirst. A sale has been on the cards all summer.

As Hirst’s No 1 patron since 1990 (when he paid £1,000 for a medicine cabinet) drops out of the market, is this the moment that the artist’s sliced cattle, embalmed sheep, insectocutors and tanks drop in value around the world? “No one wins,” was the instant response of one Bond Street Hirst man yesterday. “It’s bad for both of them.”

The risk is that 45 Hirsts all sold back to White Cube will bring a glut on the market. But given that they are mostly high-quality early Hirsts, made before the repetitious flood of spot-and-spin paintings, there should be no problem. There is a long line of international buyers.

Beyond that, Hirst and the dealer Jay Jopling are cash-rich and do not need to sell in any hurry. Saatchi may be providing the market with an unrepeatable chance to mop up highly desirable work.

For Saatchi — “he believes he can affect art values with buying power and he still believes he can do it” sneered Hirst in a recent book — there will, short term, be a fat, fat profit. He is almost certainly not selling back to White Cube at cost and paid under £10,000 for most of the works.

For Hirst, it may be the best thing to cut his ties with the patron who has made him and manipulated him and to rebase himself and his art on a broad international market.

COWS, PIGS, SPOTS AND SPIN

Medicine cabinets: display cases filled with empty bottles