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”.
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