The Madnesses of Vincent Van Gogh

...And when no hope was left inside
On that starry, starry night

You took your life as lovers often do

But I could have told you, Vincent
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you

(Vincent – Don McLean)

I’ve never been a fan of Don McLean’s music. He only ever wrote two noteworthy songs, and of those, American Pie is pretentious gobbledegook, and Vincent is syrupy shmaltz. Its lyrics regurgitate the tired old trope of Vincent van Gogh as a martyr to an uncomprehending and unfeeling world that could not recognise his genius. I’ve also never been a committed fan of van Gogh, despite seeing many of his paintings at the van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, the Kroller-Muller museum at Otterlo (the world’s second largest collection of his works), and elsewhere. To me, his late pictures appear wonky and gaudy; his images diminished by being overused on merchandise. So the purpose of this article is not to present a Don McLean-like hagiography of Vincent van Gogh, but to critically explore his life and his art, his experience of mental illness and the obsessive efforts of modern psychiatry to explain that experience. I will also consider what may be regarded as the madness of his mythical afterlife as one of the icons of modern art.

Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889)

The Madness of Vincent van Gogh

Vincent was born in 1853 in a village named Zundert, in Brabant, the Netherlands. The van Goghs were a successful middle class clan – one of Vincent’s uncles was an Admiral in the Dutch navy and another (Uncle Cent) was a partner in the international art dealing firm Goupil and Cie. Vincent’s father, however, was a humble pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church, spending his working life in small rural congregations in mainly Catholic areas. Consequently, the family was not well-off, and money would be an issue for Vincent throughout his life.

Vincent was highly intelligent, very well-read and a good linguist. He was articulate and expressed his innermost thoughts clearly in his extensive correspondence with his younger brother Theo and others (he used his letters to Theo as one might use a diary). His letters show that he had a deep-seated need for social companionship and love (and sex), and for a fulfilling purpose for his life. Unfortunately however, from childhood he had an extreme personality that meant that he never achieved those dreams. He was careless with his personal appearance and looked odd. He had poor social skills and lacked empathy with others. He was intense, not allowing those he latched onto any space. He was also argumentative and sure of his own opinions and browbeat those who disagreed with him. All his life he tried to form relationships with family and acquaintances, but sooner or later most were put off by his manner and behaviour and broke contact with him. The only person who did not reject him (though he mostly kept his distance) was his brother Theo.

By the age of fourteen, Vincent’s schooling was finished, largely through his inability to get on with his fellow pupils and teachers. When he was sixteen, Vincent’s Uncle Cent found him a job with the art dealers Goupil and Cie, at the firm’s office in the Hague. A few years later, his brother Theo also joined the firm, initially in the Brussels office. Theo thrived as an art dealer, rising to become head of the prestigious Paris office. Vincent, by contrast, performed poorly, and at this stage in his life showed limited active interest in art. He would have been quickly dismissed if not for his Uncle Cent. Instead, he was transferred to the London office, and later to Paris (before Theo went to work there), but would not (or could not) toe the line and was finally sacked in 1876, aged twenty-three.

By this time, Vincent was becoming increasingly religious – one of a series of enthusiasms that came and went during his life. Following a brief (and unsuccessful) spell as a schoolteacher in England, he persuaded his parents to let him study for the priesthood. Yet again, however, he failed to fit in and was forced to abandon this ambition. Still full of religious fervour, he became a lay preacher and missionary in the Borinage, a mining area in Belgium, where he lived among the poor inhabitants and tried to establish a religious community. Unsuccessful again, his contract was not renewed.

By now (1880) Vincent was twenty-seven and had failed at every attempt at a career. His religious fervour faded, but he had begun to show a greater interest in art, adding rough sketches to some of his many letters to Theo. His brother encouraged him to take up art seriously, and for the remaining ten years of his life, Vincent devoted himself to drawing and painting. He had no paid employment, and sold just one painting in his lifetime. He was supported financially for the decade by Theo, who regularly sent him money from his own salary.

Theo van Gogh was a complex character. On one hand he was a sophisticated and successful art dealer, with standing in his profession and a wide circle of clever friends (and mistresses). On the other hand he was himself emotionally needy and never escaped Vincent’s clutches. He allowed Vincent to manipulate him into sending increasing amounts of money with vague promises of reimbursement when Vincent became a successful artist. Although he mostly kept Vincent at arms length geographically, for two years (1886-1888) he allowed Vincent to live in his apartment in Paris, and was swept up in Vincent’s chaotic lifestyle, which embraced excessive drinking (particularly absinthe), eating junk food and making extensive visits to prostitutes. Both Vincent and Theo contracted syphilis – with later tragic consequences for Theo.

Having decided to devote his life to art, Vincent never wavered from that aim. With no training in drawing or painting, he largely taught himself, from books and endless practice. He had a few brief spells of instruction, first from a cousin, a respected Dutch painter named Anton Mauve; later at an Art School in Antwerp, and finally at the studio of Fernand Cormon in Paris, where fellow students included Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In every setting, Vincent quickly fell out with his teachers, and did not get on well with other students. He was not a naturally talented draughtsman and never perfected the ability to accurately depict the human figure. However, he never stopped practising, spending copious sums on art materials, subsidised by Theo.

In the first half of the 1880s, Vincent lived in a variety of places in the Netherlands, sometimes in rented studios and sometimes with his parents, though his relationship with them was always stormy. This was partly a consequence of his typically eccentric love life. For a time, he was infatuated with a widowed cousin named Kee Vos, bombarding her with proposals of marriage and in the process alienating both her and many members of his wider family. Later, he lived in the Hague for some eighteen months with a former prostitute named Sien Hoornik and her two children. Theo finally persuaded Vincent to leave Sien, and following the break-up Vincent moved to Drenthe, an isolated rural area where he hoped to establish himself as a painter of landscapes and peasant life. After only a few months, however, he was driven away by poor weather and loneliness, the locals regarding him as an oddball and ostracising him.

In the Kroller-Muller museum in Otterlo, a room is devoted to Vincent’s paintings. On one wall are earlier works, mainly landscapes or scenes of peasant life, and uniformly dark in colour and form. On the other wall are the later works, in the brightly coloured, emotionally charged style that is today most associated with Vincent van Gogh. The contrast is startling, and perfectly encapsulates the development of Vincent’s art. In the years before moving to Paris to live with Theo in 1886, Vincent was heavily influenced by the works of Jean-Francois Millet and other painters of the ‘Barbizon School’. This was a group of artists who established a ‘colony’ in the small French village of Barbizon in the 1830s, painting landscapes and depictions of peasant life ‘en plein air’. As well as admiring their art, in his loneliness Vincent long dreamt of establishing an artistic colony himself. But Vincent would not, or could not, paint pictures with the facility of Millet and the others, who produced sanitised rustic scenes attractive to middle-class urban buyers. Despite Theo’s constructive criticism, Vincent’s early paintings, typified by his first ‘masterpiece’, The Potato Eaters (1885), were unremittingly dark in colour and tone, messily constructed, and with human figures that were little more than caricatures. Vincent sent The Potato Eaters to Theo hoping that he would find a buyer for it, but Theo knew better than to offer it for sale.

The Potato Eaters (1885)

In late 1885, Vincent left the family home and the Netherlands for good, driven out by conflict with his family (his father had died in March 1885), and the local villagers, who accused him of getting a peasant girl pregnant. He went to Antwerp in Belgium, enrolling at the Art School there, but soon alienated his teachers and fellow students. He seems to have had a depressive breakdown as a result, and following a vague invitation from Theo he turned up unannounced at his apartment in Paris, staying there for the next two years.

As mentioned earlier, Vincent’s stay in Paris did not do his brother’s health much good, and cramped his social life, as Vincent put off Theo’s friends with his strange and combative manner. Theo himself wrote in a letter that Vincent was, “impossible to get along with...since he spares nothing and nobody...Everyone who sees him has said: ‘C’est un fou’”. However, Paris marked a turning point in Vincent’s art. Theo introduced him to the work of the Impressionists, of whom Vincent had previously known little. Vincent started to paint like an Impressionist, his work making the transition from dark to light.

The art dealing firm for whom Theo worked, which had previously largely sold old masters and Salon painters, began to embrace avant garde art, with Theo van Gogh taking the lead. Through Theo, Vincent met Impressionist artists such as Camille Pissaro, and newcomers who came to Theo hoping that he would promote their art. Chief among these was Emil Bernard, who used his acquaintance with Vincent as a way of currying favour with Theo. However, he also introduced Vincent to Japanese art, whose bold, simple colours and clean lines combined with Impressionist influences to create Vincent’s late, most popular paintings. Another hopeful artist who crossed Vincent’s path at that time was Paul Gauguin.

Then in February 1888, Vincent abruptly left Paris and settled in the little town of Arles, in Provence – no one knows why (there is no surviving correspondence with Theo from this time). He rented rooms in a building known as the Yellow House, next to a rough all-night cafe, and adjacent to a park that was a haunt of prostitutes and their clients. Subsidised by Theo, Vincent set up a studio and produced painting after painting in his new style, enchanted by the light and bright colours of the South. As elsewhere, the locals viewed him with suspicion (Paris hadn’t changed him), and his only acquaintances were some of the lowlife characters who frequented the cafe. However, he maintained his dream of a community of artists, and tried to persuade artistic acquaintances such as Emil Bernard to join him in Arles. He also cajoled Theo into trying to recruit candidates for a community. The only person who could be persuaded was Paul Gauguin, who was ambitious but broke, and came to Arles on condition that Theo subsidised him as well as Vincent.

Gauguin provisionally planned to stay with Vincent for a year, but left after just nine weeks (at the end of December 1888), finding Vincent’s lifestyle, his neediness and combustibility overwhelming. When he learned that Gauguin was leaving, Vincent had the first of what would prove to be a series of apparently psychotic breakdowns. He threatened Gauguin with a razor, and after he left, sliced off most of his own ear. In a delirious state, he knocked on the door of his favourite prostitute and handed her the ear. He was admitted to hospital in Arles, staying there for several weeks and remembering little about the incident.

On discharge, Vincent returned to the Yellow House and continued to paint, but experienced more psychotic or delirious episodes, and in May 1889 allowed himself to be admitted to a Mental Hospital in Sant-Remy-de-Provence, staying there for a year. The psychotic attacks continued; sometimes taking the form of stuporous episodes. On one occasion, in a delirious state, Vincent was found eating paint. In between times he continued to produce pictures, painting some of his best known works (including ‘A Starry Night’).

Starry Night (1889)

Vincent left the mental hospital in May 1890 (pronounced cured) and moved to the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, some twenty miles from Paris, to be nearer to Theo, and also to Doctor Paul Gachet, a psychiatrist who had treated other artists. Yet again, Vincent resumed painting. Yet again, he struggled with companionship in Auvers, but he spent time over the summer with teenage brothers, Rene and Gaston Secretan, who were staying at the family holiday home. Vincent regarded them as friends, but they were more motivated by teasing or playing pranks on him.

During the turbulent time following the ear-cutting episode, two significant events happened far away in Paris. The first was that in April 1889 Theo married Johanna Bonger (Jo), the sister of a friend, and their son, Vincent Willem was born in January 1890. The second was the publication, also in January 1890, of an appreciative article about Vincent’s work by a young art critic named Albert Aurier (some of Vincent’s paintings had been displayed at Theo’s instigation at the Salon des Independentes and a group exhibition of Belgian artists known as ‘les Vingt’). As a result of the article, Vincent began to get some recognition among his fellow artists, and made his first sale, of a painting named ‘The Red Vineyard’. However, Aurier’s article related Vincent’s art to his social isolation and mental disorder, thus sowing the seeds for the legend of the ‘mad genius’.

Vincent was pleased by the positive review of his work, but was more concerned by the implications for his future of Theo’s marriage. As well as being preoccupied with his wife and baby son, Theo was also unsettled at work, and spoke of setting up his own art dealership – and he was increasingly worried about his own health. Vincent feared losing Theo and his financial support, and the consequences of his continuing psychotic attacks, and became more and more despondent. He pleaded with Theo to bring his family to Auvers, where they could all live together. Inevitably, Theo declined.

On 27 July 1890, Vincent took his painting materials into the fields, as he was accustomed to do most days. He returned in the evening, apparently in physical distress. His landlord asked him what was wrong and Vincent showed him a small hole under his ribs from a gunshot wound, and said, ‘I wounded myself’. There were no witnesses to the incident. When the police came to investigate, they asked him if he had intended to kill himself (suicide at the time was a crime), and Vincent replied, ‘Yes, I believe so’. Medical help was summoned, and Theo arrived from Paris. Two days, later, Vincent died of his wound, aged 37. He was buried in Auvers on 30 July 1890.

The manner of Vincent’s death raised questions that have never been fully answered, and which call into question the assumption that Vincent had committed suicide (needless to say, in the USA a group of conspiracy theorists believe that he was murdered). While Vincent had talked of suicide before, he never mentioned the possibility of shooting himself. He was not known to own a gun, and the weapon that shot him was never recovered. It was identified as belonging to young Rene Secretan, who denied knowing how Vincent had got hold of it. Vincent was shot in the abdomen, not the heart or the head as with most suicides. And when the first shot did not immediately kill him, he staggered home rather than finishing the job. The verdict of suicide suited everyone, apparently including Vincent. But years later, Rene Secretan, then in his eighties, gave an interview in which he stated that it was indeed his gun that had shot Vincent, and, without giving specific details, said that the incident was a prank that had gone wrong.

Six months after Vincent’s death, Theo van Gogh died in a Paris asylum, of an incurable neuro-degenerative disease. He was 33 years old.

The Madness of Vincent’s Psychiatric Diagnoses

Just as armchair detectives love to speculate on the identity of Jack the Ripper, armchair psychiatrists are fascinated by Vincent van Gogh. Some 150 mental health professionals have considered his case in the 130-odd years since his death, and he has been given over 30 different diagnoses. It is of course hard to properly assess a historical figure – one cannot interview, observe or get to know him, and cannot use modern psychological or medical tests. There is written evidence available, from Vincent’s copious letters, eye witness accounts and the surviving case notes of the doctors who treated him. But Vincent was garrulous and self-absorbed to a fault, and his letters reveal everything and nothing. Stories by people who knew Vincent were generally told long after his death – while he was alive few paid him any attention. And his nineteenth century doctors wrote to other sets of assumptions and diagnostic categories to those of today, and used terminology differently. None of this however has stopped speculation about his confusing mental state.

Disorders that Vincent has been suggested to have experienced include bipolar disorder, as evidenced by his mood swings from despondency to excessive energy and enthusiasm. He has also been labelled as having borderline personality disorder, which may have been behind his difficulty with social relationships, holding down a job and his successful manipulation of his brother. In his letters, he spoke fluent ‘therapy speak’, showing understanding of his problems while being completely unable to change – another characteristic of borderline personality disorder. He was also almost certainly an alcoholic, freely admitting to consuming large quantities of absinthe and cognac to blunt his feelings and get him through the day. In addition, he may have been experiencing mental effects of syphillis infection.

His psychotic or delirious episodes were diagnosed by his doctors as being caused by temporal lobe epilepsy, and that diagnosis was held to be valid for many years, before falling out of favour more recently. Other possible explanations for them are schizophrenia, catatonia or an acute stress reaction fuelled by alcoholism and nutrient deficiency. Opinions differ as to whether the attacks were a more extreme continuation of his previous difficulties, or a new mental illness.

In 2016, the van Gogh museum held an Expert Symposium on Vincent’s mental state. Its conclusions were suitably guarded. Each of the above conditions were considered possible, without coming to a definite verdict. Could Vincent be diagnosed more accurately if he was alive today? Well perhaps, but psychiatry is still a notoriously imprecise business. Psychiatrists often disagree about a diagnosis even if they have the patient in front of them, with a battery of test results, and are generally stumped when asked what actually caused the person’s disorder. And there is also no guarantee that the person can be treated, let alone cured. As a commentator pointed out recently, only one psychiatric condition has been reliably pinned down in the past hundred years, in terms of identifying a reliable diagnosis, cause, treatment and cure, with the result that the condition in question has more or less been eradicated. It is a neurodegenerative condition named General Paralysis of the Insane (GPI), which before the development of antibiotics was a common (and fatal) consequence of tertiary syphilis – and ironically what killed Theo van Gogh.

But this is not the end of the story, for in the last few years, two new conditions have been invented that have eagerly been applied to Vincent’s case. These are the ‘neurodevelopmental’ conditions, Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Both appear to fit Vincent like a glove. His lifelong difficulties with social skills, empathy and making friends are characteristic of ASD, as is his single-minded pursuance of notions or activities. At the same time, his chaotic lifestyle, constant production of swiftly completed paintings (sometimes one a day) and inability to manage money tick the boxes for ADHD. Vincent has become a poster boy for neurodevelopmental disorders.

So that’s that then. But in reality, ASD and ADHD are hypotheses, not solidly identified medical entities, like GPI. Vincent fits their diagnostic criteria – but those criteria are so broad that so do a significant portion of the adult population. Actual neurological mechanisms underpinning the ‘symptoms’ of these ‘conditions’ have not been discovered. While trendy at the moment, it is quite possible that in the future ASD and/or ADHD will go out of fashion, and new diagnoses will be mooted to explain the enigma of Vincent van Gogh.

Or perhaps, the medicalisation of life will itself fall out of fashion, and like those who knew him in the nineteenth century people will simply shrug their shoulders and say, ‘C’est un fou’ – which roughly translates to, ‘He’s an arsehole’.

The Madness of Vincent’s Artistic Afterlife

We noted above that Vincent sold just one painting in his lifetime. When he died, his entire stock of paintings and drawings (some 860 oil paintings and over a thousand works on paper) came into Theo’s possession. Theo died just six months later, and his widow, Jo van Gogh Bonger was left with Vincent’s artworks. And that could have been that. Despite some positive attention given to those paintings that Theo had exhibited on Vincent’s behalf, there was no clear demand for his art, and apparently no one alive to promote it. Jo could have disposed of her cumbersome legacy, and Vincent would have been, at best, a brief footnote in art history.

But Jo had other ideas. She was an intelligent, cultivated, energetic and canny woman, whose role in rescuing Vincent’s art from obscurity has until recently been underplayed (when Jo and Theo’s son, V. W. van Gogh spoke at the opening of the van Gogh museum in Amsterdam in 1973, long after Jo’s death, he inexplicably did not mention his mother’s contribution). Jo began to act as an art dealer, to bring Vincent’s work to the market. She was apparently not motivated by money (she was comfortably off), but by her desire to provide a fitting memorial to Theo and Vincent. She cannily placed paintings on the market, and stoked up interest in Vincent’s work by accompanying them with extracts from his letters to Theo. Thus, as with Albert Aurier’s 1890 article, Vincent’s art was inextricably linked to his backstory. In 1905, Jo organised a major exhibition of Vincent’s work at the Stediljk museum in Amsterdam, and in 1914 she published her own translation of his letters to Theo. By 1920 the popular legend of Vincent van Gogh as a ‘mad genius’ was in place. It was reinforced by the publication in 1934 of Irving Stone’s novel ‘Lust for Life’, loosely based on Vincent’s life, and boosted further by the 1956 film of the book, starring all-American hero Kirk Douglas as a far too handsome and strapping Vincent.

So was Vincent a genius, mad or otherwise? He certainly adhered to Malcolm Gladwell’s dictum that genius requires at least 10,000 hours of practice (despite which his draughtsmanship remained imperfect), and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of art theory and contemporary artists from his extensive reading (Theo sometimes sought advice from Vincent when considering whether to promote an artist). His untutored mix of impressionism and Japanese styles, and his signature bright colours and wonky compositions are certainly appealing to popular taste, with or without his romanticised backstory. He has been credited as a key influence on the early-twentieth century European Expressionist movement, and on post-war ‘Neo-expressionist’ artists such as Anselm Keifer and Julian Schnabel.

At the same time, while Jo was trying to spark interest in Vincent’s art, not all art critics or dealers were equally impressed by his work. Paul Durand-Ruel, the dealer who brought the Impressionists to the attention of the public would not promote Vincent’s paintings (though to be fair, he disliked Cezanne and Gauguin as well). Roger Fry, the inventor of the term ’Post-impressionism’, included some of Vincent’s works in his seminal 1910 exhibition of the same name, but preferred the more formal and technically adept style of Cezanne and omitted Vincent from the 1912 follow-up exhibition. Later, the dealer Daniel Kahnweiler, who promoted Picasso and Cubism, censured a fellow dealer for advertising that he was interested in purchasing van Goghs, stating disdainfully that this was “the behaviour of an interior decorator, not an art dealer”. And in the 1950s, the influential American critic Clement Greenberg was uncomplimentary about Vincent’s ‘craft competence’, and questioned whether he could be regarded as a great artist.

By this time, however, critics such as Greenberg were on the wrong side of history. The popularity of Vincent’s art, fuelled by ‘Lust for Life’, had rendered all criticism null and void. Prices paid for Vincent’s paintings have risen exponentially, with the most expensive sold at auction to date being ‘Orchard with Cypresses’, painted at Arles in 1888, and fetching $117 million in November 2022. A canny commentator has noted that as the prices of Vincent’s paintings increased, critics became more positive about his art. Vincent van Gogh has become a genius by default.

Conclusion: The Madnesses of Vincent van Gogh – a Marriage of Art and Backstory

In 2025, the Turner Prize, the UK’s annual art prize, was won by Nnena Kalu, a 59-year old woman artist who is autistic (uncontroversially), learning disabled and has limited communication. Her art includes sculptures bound together with VHS tape and drawings of swirling, tornado-like shapes. Her victory was not universally approved of by the critics. Some saw little in her work that the other short-listed artists couldn’t do as well or better, and questioned the extent that the judges were influenced by her history of cognitive difficulties. Others came to Kalu’s defence, deeming her an original and exciting artist and a worthy winner and accusing the naysayers of prejudice against people with learning disabilities. As with Vincent, any sober consideration of her art was rendered moot by knowledge of her backstory.

So what can we learn from the life and afterlife of Vincent van Gogh? In my opinion, nothing. He was a one-off – a freak, if you will – a deeply disturbed and unsympathetic character with a unique and baffling array of psychiatric symptoms. He somehow taught himself to paint, and was lucky enough to have a brother and sister-in-law who devoted themselves to supporting him and promoting his art in life and after his death. The stratospheric popularity he has gained in the 130-odd years since his passing is the result of a unique coming-together of a highly romanticised version of his life story, and the garish, untutored output of his brush. We will never see his like again.

 

Key Reference

Naifeh S & Smith GW (2011) Van Gogh: The Life. New York: Random House  

Charles Saatchi: The Man Who Was British Contemporary Art

One Sunday afternoon in June 2013, a paparazzi photographer named Jean-Paul noticed the retired adman and art collector Charles Saatchi and his then wife, the TV personality Nigella Lawson, on a terrace of Scotts, a Mayfair restaurant. They were arguing, and Saatchi put his hand around Lawson’s neck, apparently throttling her, while she jerked back in alarm. Soon, Jean-Paul’s photographs were in newspapers and magazines worldwide. Saatchi urbanely referred to the incident as a “playful tiff” and insouciantly accepted a police caution. But soon after, he and Lawson were divorced.

It was a rare insight into the character of a notoriously private man. Saatchi rarely gives interviews and his spoken and written utterances are generally bland and uninformative. Despite a lifetime as a leading patron of contemporary art, he remains an enigma. He rarely appears at exhibitions in the gallery that bears his name, and fundamental questions about his relationship with the art that he collects remain unanswered. In particular: does he actually like the art that he buys, or is he just playing the market? And how good is he as a judge of contemporary art? In this article we will review Saatchi’s ‘career’ in contemporary art and explore these questions.

Where did the Money come from: Charles Saatchi, the Adman

Saatchi’s involvement with the world of art was financed by his career in advertising. He was born into a prominent Jewish family in Iraq in 1943. Soon after, his family moved to Britain to escape antisemitism. He founded his first advertising agency, CramerSaatchi, in 1965 and then Saatchi and Saatchi, with his brother Maurice in 1970. Through a combination of Charles’s creative understanding and Maurice’s business acumen, Saatchi and Saatchi became the largest advertising agency in the world. Its most famous advert was the ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster campaign that may have helped the Conservative party win the 1979 General Election. But by the end of the 1980s, profits had fallen and an ill-judged attempt to buy the Midland Bank damaged the brothers’ reputations. They stepped down as joint Chief Executives of the company and in 1995 Maurice was ousted as Chairman. The brothers left to found a new agency, M&C Saatchi, which still operates today, though neither brother is still actively involved in the company. Saatchi and Saatchi also still exists, but the crown of the world’s largest agency has long been held by WPP, run until recently by Martin Sorrell, a former Saatchi and Saatchi finance director. His business career has left Charles extremely well off; at the time of their divorce, his and Lawson’s combined wealth was estimated at around £250 million.

Collecting Art in the 1970s and 1980s – and Selling it Too

Saatchi’s first art purchase was a piece by the American minimalist artist Sol LeWitt, in 1969. His taste in art during this period was heavily influenced by his first (American) wife, the late Doris Lockhart Saatchi, whom he met in 1967 and married in 1973. Doris had degrees in art and art history (Saatchi had left school with two O-Levels), and reputedly moved Charles’s collecting tastes on from old comics and jukeboxes. The couple accumulated a collection made up of works by British artists, along with a fine sample of American pop art and minimalism, and later ‘neo-expressionist’ works by the likes of Anselm Keifer and Julian Schnabel.

In 1985, the Saatchi Gallery opened in a disused paint factory in St John’s Wood, with exhibitions of artists collected by the Saatchi’s. At the time, Saatchi was unusual in Britain in showing his artworks to the public, rather than keeping them for himself, and his gallery hosted some of the first exhibitions in Britain of American contemporary art. The gallery moved in 2003 to part of the former County Hall building on the South Bank, then in 2008 to the Duke of York’s Headquarters building in Chelsea, where it remains.

At the end of the 1980s, Saatchi abruptly sold much of his art collection, for a considerable profit. This act created waves in the art world, and began the accusations, never dispelled, that he was effectively an art dealer rather than a collector, motivated primarily by money rather than by a love of art, and using his gallery as a shop window to attract future sales. In mitigation, it has been pointed out that at the time his advertising business was not thriving, and he needed funds to pay for his divorce from Doris. However, his actions left a sour taste with some of the artists whose work he offloaded. The art market is divided into the ‘primary market’, where artists sell their new work, usually to a dealer, and the ‘secondary market’, where dealers and collectors sell to each other. Artists do not get any direct benefit from sales in the secondary market (or bear the losses if their work drops in value), but it can affect the prices they achieve for their new work. Saatchi had been in the habit of buying individual artists’ works in volume, and so selling many pieces all at once flooded the market, lowering prices for the artists’ new pieces, and sending a signal to the market that he believed the artists’ popularity may have peaked. One artist whose work he sold, the abstract painter Sean Scully, remarked, "He's really a commodities broker who has been let loose on the art world. He claims to love art, but his is the love that the wolf has for the lamb." The Italian neo-expressionist painter Sandro Chia went further, claiming that Saatchi had ruined his career, an accusation that has been oft-repeated. In response, Saatchi and his supporters pointed out that he had only sold seven works by Chia, not enough to significantly affect his market, and opined that if Chia couldn’t attract good prices for his new work it was due to the diminishing quality of that work.

Today, Scully remains one of the most popular contemporary artists in the world in terms of auction sales, and even Chia is within the top 350. But Saatchi’s clear out started a habit that he has continued, with him buying work, often in bulk, displaying it in his gallery and selling it a few years later. He has been termed a ‘specullector’, somewhere between a dealer and a collector, an art world character that he more or less invented, but which has proliferated worldwide in recent years.

Saatchi and the Young British Artists (yBas)

In 1988, Saatchi was invited to view Freeze, an exhibition of work by art students studying at London’s Goldsmith’s College. It was highly unusual for students to put on their own art show, and unheard for such a show to be attended by the country’s foremost contemporary art collector (Saatchi), along with senior figures from the Royal Academy (Norman Rosenthal) and the Tate Gallery (Nicholas Serota). The exhibition was organised by 23-year-old Damien Hirst, and included work by sixteen students, including Hirst himself and others who would come to dominate British contemporary art in subsequent years, including Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas and Fiona Rae. Saatchi - and Doris, to whom he was still married - liked what they saw and started buying work by members of the group and other young artists, including Rachel Whiteread, Tracey Emin, Jenny Saville, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Chris Ofili. Starting in 1992, Saatchi put on a series of exhibitions at his gallery entitled ‘Young British Artists’ (subsequently abbreviated to ‘yBas’). The centrepiece of the first exhibition was Hirst’s The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, otherwise known as ‘The Shark’, the construction of which was funded by the Saatchis, who paid Hirst £50,000 for it.

The yBas became fixtures on the list of nominees for the Turner Prize and it was won by Saatchi-supported artists Rachel Whiteread (1993), Damien Hirst (1995); Gillian Wearing (1997) and Chris Ofili (1998). But the yBas’ fame did not really spread beyond the world of contemporary art until an exhibition staged at the august Royal Academy in 1997. Entitled Sensation, it was arranged by Norman Rosenthal and comprised works by yBas and other contemporary artists from Saatchi’s collection. The exhibition achieved notoriety for the controversial – and confrontational – nature of some of the works, such Hirst’s A Thousand Years, which comprised thousands of flies feasting on a rotting cow’s head; Jake and Dinos Chapman’s disturbing mannequins of children with displaced sexual organs and – especially – Marcus Harvey’s huge painting Myra, a depiction of a familiar police photo of Moors Murderer Myra Hindley, made out of hundreds of children’s handprints. The yBa formula – an attention-grabbing mix of pop art and conceptualism, reinforced by the outsized personalities of figures such as Hirst, Emin and Lucas, who combined the attitudes and behaviour of 70s punk rock with 80s ‘Loadsamoney’ culture, caught the popular imagination. Outrage in the popular media fuelled the fire, and the public visited the exhibition in droves - some 300,000 during its run. The yBas became – briefly – as feted as the contemporary Britpop bands (Oasis, Blur, Pulp etc) as symbols of ‘Cool Britannia’. The impact of The Shark and other yBa pieces has been credited by the critic Waldermar Janusek with providing the impetus for the establishment of Tate Modern, in 2000.

Sensation has been compared in its impact on the contemporary art world to the 1863 Salon des Refuses that saw the first stirrings of the Impressionist movement. But while the Salon des Refuses marked a beginning, Sensation was the beginning of the end for the yBas, who were felt to have already produced their best work. Certainly Saatchi himself thought so and, as we will see, was moving on to sponsoring other groups of artists. In 1998, Saatchi sold 130 works (5% of his collection) at auction, including pieces by Hirst, Whiteread, Lucas and Ofili, the total sale generating £1.6 million, which Saatchi said would be used to finance bursaries for art students. Subsequently, Saatchi sold many other yBa works. In 2003, Hirst bought twelve works back from Saatchi for much more than Saatchi originally paid him, and in 2005 Saatchi sold ‘the Shark’ to an American collector for around £7 million (remember he originally paid Hirst £50,000 to make it). In 2004, Saatchi let it be known that in his view, only Hirst out of the yBas would still be regarded as of lasting influence in ten years time.

Also in 2004, a huge fire at a warehouse rented by the art storage firm Momart destroyed some 100 artworks owned by Saatchi, including iconic yBa pieces such as Tracey Emin’s Everyone I have Ever Slept With, a tent embroidered with their names, and the Chapman brothers’ installation Hell. Saatchi was said to be ‘devastated’, but the reaction of the popular press was of glee and schadenfreude, with commentators opining that the lost works were so unskilfully made that they could easily be reproduced, and that any sense of loss that Saatchi felt would be swiftly assuaged by a substantial compensation cheque.

So did Saatchi cynically nurture the yBas during the 1990s so that he could profit from their notoriety? Certainly, his actions were in keeping with the ‘specullector’ model that he had developed in the 1980s. Protestations that his sales were to fund his gallery and to support new artists were met with scepticism. Inevitably he fell out with some of the yBa artists; in 2002 Hirst remarked, "I'm not Charles Saatchi's barrel-organ monkey...He only recognises art with his wallet.” It is often said that Saatchi the Adman was attracted to the yBas as their more striking works looked like advertisements, eye catching images carrying simple messages, and regarded them in the same way, to be discarded once their impact had been made. Certainly, one of Saatchi and Saatchi’s most iconic adverts, the photograph of a ‘pregnant man’, made in 1970 for a health education campaign, could easily have been repackaged as a yBa artwork.

On the other hand, Saatchi’s involvement with the yBas did not really follow a clearly planned route. It is said that at first Saatchi was not particularly impressed by the original Freeze exhibition, and it was Doris who encouraged him to engage with Hirst and others. He did not dream up the term ‘Young British Artists’ (or ‘yBas’), it is attributed to the writer Michael Corris. If Saatchi seemed to be the only collector buying yBa art in the 1990s, it was largely because at the time he effectively was the market for contemporary British art – no one else in the UK was buying on anything like his scale, so Saatchi set the market by default. Even the Sensation exhibition was a lucky accident; Norman Rosenthal had a gap in his schedule, and at short notice (in art world terms) Saatchi offered to fill the gap with works from his collection, reputedly making some hasty last-minute purchases to bulk up the exhibits. While the yBas attracted all the headlines, they actually only made up around half of the 42 artists shown at Sensation.

And so, while Saatchi is sometimes credited with ‘discovering’ and controlling the careers of the yBas, the reality is more nuanced, with Saatchi’s contributions being sometimes more seat-of-the-pants than ruthlessly focused. It seems improbable that world-class self-promoters such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin would not have succeeded in the art world without Saatchi. No yBa careers were ruined by Saatchi selling their work. And twenty years on, Saatchi’s 2004 claim that only Hirst would be regarded as consequential in ten years time has proven to be wide of the mark. Today, while Hirst is fabulously rich, his artistic reputation is at a low ebb, while other yBas, such as Rachel Whiteread, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Saville and, yes, Tracey Emin achieve both high prices for their work and continuing critical plaudits.

After the yBas – Diminishing Returns?

In 1998-9, while the afterglow of Sensation was still shining, and iconic yBa works such as Tracey Emin’s My Bed had only just been created, Saatchi held two exhibitions in his gallery of rather different young artists. The exhibitions were put on under the title ‘Neurotic Realism’, a term apparently coined by Saatchi himself, and included artists in their 20s or 30s, mostly British or working in the UK (and mostly male). A couple (Martin Maloney and Paul Davies) had been included in Sensation, but were not connected with the yBas; the others were essentially unknowns.

And mostly remained so. If ‘Neurotic Realism’ was Saatchi’s attempt to invent a new popular art movement to succeed the yBas, it had all the impact of a Sinclair C5. Reviews of the shows were generally scathing, with critics finding the label amorphous and confusing and many of the individual artists second-rate (though two artists involved in the shows were subsequently nominated for the Turner Prize: Tomoko Takahashi in 2000 and Dexter Dalwood in 2010). The public stayed away. If, in showbiz terms, the yBas and Sensation was a Hit, ‘Neurotic Realism’ was a resounding Miss.

The ‘Neurotic Realism’ label was dropped quicker than a misfiring advertising campaign, but the exhibitions set a pattern for subsequent shows at the Saatchi gallery. Saatchi specialised in buying and displaying works by young artists, predominantly in traditional media (painting, sculpture, some photography), and with little pure conceptualism. While some of the photographers he supported explored social issues, there were few overtly political works (as one might expect from a man who reputedly helped Margaret Thatcher win an election). Images he favoured tended to be bright and immediate. His exhibitions leaned towards ‘art for art’s sake’, and there was less of a shock factor than previously, although in 2004 the press was stirred up by his inclusion of paintings by Stella Vine of heroin victim Rachel Whitear and an unflattering portrayal of Princess Diana. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century his gallery put on a series of exhibitions of ‘new’ British artists, picked up by Saatchi at degree shows and trade fairs. Stories abounded of Saatchi turning up at degree shows and buying all the works exhibited by an artist; sometimes paying full price and sometimes ruthlessly beating the hapless student down, apparently with little rhyme or reason behind his purchases. It was sometimes said that some young artists deliberately made works in ‘Saatchi style’ to try to attract his interest.

Few of the young artists he promoted have had stellar careers, and the feeling among some commentators was that Saatchi was continually searching for the ‘next big thing’ to cement his reputation as a creator of art trends. In 2009, he put his name to (but characteristically didn’t appear in) a television series called School of Saatchi, a reality show that aimed to find a new great young British artist (spoiler alert: it didn’t). He also bought, and put on shows of young artists from other countries: America, India and China. The most successful exhibition at the Saatchi gallery in terms of visitor numbers was 2008’s ‘The Revolution Continues, New Art from China’, which had 500,000 visitors (beating Sensation’s 300,000), but which included artists who were already becoming established in China and worldwide. Do I like ‘Saatchi style’ art? Not really, it is all a bit gaudy and trite for my taste; the sort of pictures one might see on the walls of a trendy hotel or restaurant. Easy on the eye but needing no more than a few seconds scrutiny.

Saatchi continued his ‘specullecting’ by regularly selling works after he had shown them. Following a well-received 2005 show called ‘The Triumph of Painting’, which featured established artists such as Martin Kipperberger, Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans, Saatchi auctioned many of the paintings, and a work entitled The White Canoe, by the Scottish painter Peter Doig, was bought by a Georgian oligarch for £6 million, far more than Saatchi had originally paid for it. The sale sparked increased interest in Doig’s work, which now regularly goes for seven-figure sums in the secondary market, although the artist ruefully reflects that he doesn’t see any of the proceeds. Saatchi could not claim to have ‘discovered’ Doig – he had won the Turner prize back in 1994 – and this sale possibly reflected good luck more than an expert eye for the market.

The relationship between Saatchi’s gallery and London’s other major venue for contemporary art, Tate Modern, has not always run smooth. Tate Modern opened in 2000, and in 2003, Saatchi moved his gallery from the wilds of St John’s Wood to the former County Hall building on the South Bank. It was now a short distance from the new museum, a move some commentators interpreted as provocative. In 2004, Saatchi let it be known that he had spoken to the Tate’s Director, Nicholas Serota, about the possibility of donating his collection to Tate Modern, to be displayed in a then-unused area of the building known as the Tanks. Serota apparently rebuffed the proposal, citing the cost of converting the Tanks, and doubtless concerned about the degree of influence that Saatchi would expect to wield. Time has demonstrated also that the Tate’s priorities are not those of Saatchi, with the former favouring art with a strong theoretical base and a social or political message (latterly embracing ‘woke’ themes), and being less keen than Saatchi on works that are visually striking.

In 2010, Saatchi announced that he was donating his gallery and entire collection, which at the time had an estimated value of £30 million, to the Nation. He anticipated that this offer would be gratefully received by the Arts Council, and indeed by the Tate. However, both those bodies sat on their hands, and the donation never materialised. While the details of the negotiations were not made public, there was once again suspicion as to Saatchi’s motives – did he want to rid himself of the expense of running his gallery and would he want to influence which of his artworks were shown and how? The proposal came to nothing, and in 2019 the management of the Saatchi gallery was taken on by a charitable Trust. Also in 2010,Saatchi founded ‘Saatchi Online’ (now ‘Saatchi Art’), an online platform for artists and the public to sell and buy art (all Saatchi’s ventures include his name, which may be vanity, but as an Adman, Saatchi understands the power of brands).

In 2024, Saatchi, now 81, sent three-quarters of his art collection, some 500 pieces, for sale by public auction through the online dealer Artsy. The proceeds were donated to Great Ormond Street Hospital. Typically, Saatchi did not explain why he had chosen to benefit this charity. The total proceeds of the sale were some £250,000, or an average of £500 per piece. Doubtless, Saatchi kept his more valuable artworks out of the auction, but it was a far cry from the £30 million his collection had once been worth. Scrolling through the images of the sale works online, it was notable how many of his purchases since the yBas have been of paintings that were visually impactful but by artists with small followings and low value.

Conclusion: Charles Saatchi – A Rich Man who likes a Flutter?

One day in 2004, shortly before the opening at his gallery of one of his many exhibitions of new young artists, Saatchi had a chance meeting with the critic Adrian Searle. Years of frustration came out as Saatchi fumed, "Let me write your review for you. I'm a cunt, this place is shit, and the artists I show are all fucked. Will that do for you?"

Searle’s subsequent review of the exhibition said much the same thing, though in 1,500 words rather than 15. Saatchi has never been a darling of the critics, who like to think that their motives are more pure, and their taste more acute than his. And by writing this article, I am setting myself up as a critic, passing judgement on Saatchi and his decades in the contemporary art world. Now he is in his eighties, Saatchi’s ‘career’ in art is largely behind him. He is no longer the only British patron of contemporary art, or even the richest. His collection has largely been sold off and his gallery is under new management. So what conclusions can I reach?

Well, there is no doubt that for several decades, Saatchi was the foremost patron of contemporary art in Britain, and a revolutionary figure in the art world. In the 1980s, he introduced leading American artists to this country, and was the only collector in Britain showing contemporary art in his own gallery. In the 1990s, he was midwife to the yBas, the most impactful contemporary art movement that the country has seen. He created the ‘specullector’ model of art patronage, and his example has subsequently been followed by art patrons worldwide.

Was he a great judge of art? His record of buying and exhibiting art in the years since Sensation would suggest not. Many of the shows of new artists that took place at the Saatchi gallery received lukewarm reviews. If he hoped to discover the ‘next big thing’ he was disappointed (although no one else has found the ‘next big thing’ either). But perhaps that was never the point.

Saatchi’s public utterances have been few and far between, and are generally dismissed as trite and disingenuous. He once said to an interviewer, "There's nothing complicated about me. There are no hidden depths. As Frank Stella said about minimalism, what you see is what you see." But perhaps he speaks more candidly about himself than he is given credit for. Talking to the same interviewer about his purchasing strategy, he said, I buy new art, and 90% of the art I buy will probably be worthless in 10 years' time to anyone except me. I don't know how much of the art I like is significant; I hope some of it is. Who knows what will last?...I do it for the pleasure of putting on shows”.

And perhaps that’s it. Perhaps Saatchi wasn’t trying to find the next big thing, he was just buying new art – lots of it – and giving young artists a chance. As we have seen, there was a ‘Saatchi style’ – brash, immediate, eye-catching, largely non-political, that his exhibitions after Sensation largely stuck to. Saatchi may (or may not) have known a lot about art, but he knew what he liked.

Similarly, perhaps there was less to Saatchi’s ‘specullecting’ than conspiracy theorists think. In 2009 he published a typically slight book titled, ‘My name is Charles and I’m an Artoholic’. But perhaps the (rather crass) title has significance – maybe Saatchi was addicted to buying art (Damien Hirst once said that he was “addicted to shopping”). At the end of the day, Saatchi was a rich man with an absorbing hobby – and rich men often like a flutter. And so, along with supporting young artists, Saatchi sometimes indulged himself by playing the market.

Let us leave the last word to Saatchi himself. In a 2009 interview, he summed up his thirty years’ involvement with contemporary art:

“I buy art that I like. I buy it to show it off in exhibitions. Then, if I feel like it, I sell it and buy more art….What matters and survives is the art”.