The
Worst and Most Decadent Art Show of the Year.
Rubbish and
Decadence of the Modern Art in England!!
Photo:
Spot Mini by Damien Hirst (2002)
It's a scene that would be repeated time and again in the years to come. This particular evening must be in 1973, when the Saatchi Collection was just taking off. In the future, the Rolls would nose through mean streets in Hackney and Tower Hamlets, and artists just out of college would see their entire exhibitions at small galleries in terraced houses and warehouses bought lock, stock and barrel. The blonde would disappear; so would many artworks, sold to make way for the collector's latest enthusiasm. Saatchi, says Nicholas Logsdail, one of London's most influential art dealers and the narrator of this particular story, "has got this impulsive craziness about him". That day in the 70s when Saatchi rolled up to the Lisson Gallery was, according to Logsdail, the beginning of Saatchi's infatuation with the New York minimalist art of Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and Robert Ryman. These were the artists that Logsdail represented, and these were the artists of whose difficult work Saatchi would become the leading private collector. Before he was notorious as the patron of Damien Hirst, he created, with his first wife Doris Saatchi (the blonde), a museum-quality collection of minimalist art shown at the appropriately cool, white gallery they opened in 1985 at 98a Boundary Road. Saatchi fell in love with Andre's floor arrangements of tiles and bricks, with Dan Flavin's neon light pieces, with this art of mute objecthood. Logsdail had trouble persuading him about the more conceptual Sol LeWitt; it took a weekend's discussion and showing of catalogues in 1974 before Saatchi phoned at 6am one Sunday to say he wanted to buy one of LeWitt's major works immediately. If you read published biographies of Saatchi, however, you will read that Charles and Doris's "first Sol LeWitt drawing was acquired in 1969 for £100" - five years earlier. Wires have obviously got crossed somewhere. And the more I tried to find out about him, the more I found that every fact is also a fiction in the bottomless pool of Saatchi myth.
