The Triumph of Painting (2005) and the Failure of Charles Saatchi

Date: 23-01-2005
Owning Institution: Saatchi Gallery
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2012  
Subject:   Now    

It has been eighteen months since Charles Saatchi opened his new gallery, in the labyrinthine, wood-panelled atriums, corridors and offices of the old County Hall on the South Bank, and it seems that he has already decided that it is time once more to reconfigure his ceaselessly shape-shifting collection of contemporary art. His association with the group of young British sculptors and installation artists who first came to prominence in the late 1980s and early 1980s is, apparently, at an end. He has sold Rachel Whiteread’s monumental, elegiac masterpiece Ghost. He has allowed Damien Hirst to repurchase many of the works that he collected at the beginning of that artist’s career and, as if to symbolise the end of a particular era in his collecting activities, he has even disposed of the signature work by Hirst which, more than any other, came to symbolise the Saatchi Collection in the 1990s. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living – otherwise known as the pickled tiger shark – recently went to a collection in America for a figure rumoured to be in the region of £7 million.

The disposals have been matched by new acquisitions, primarily in the field of painting, and it is these which Saatchi intends to display over the next year or two, in an exhibition of such extent that it has had to be divided into three separate instalments – under the grand title “The Triumph of Painting”. The first instalment opened at the gallery last week, with works by just six painters: Hermann Nitsch, Martin Kippenberger, Georg Immedorff, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans.

These artists come from widely differing backgrounds and range in generation from Nitsch, who was born in Vienna in 1938, to Doig, an artist of Canadian origin who was born in Scotland in 1959 and now lives in Trinidad. One of them, Kippenberger, died several years ago, in 1997. They cannot be said collectively to represent any particular new trend or tendency, but have been selected instead (or so it is implied) because they somehow exemplify what Charles Saatchi himself believes is the contemporary zeitgeist. According to a prefatory text in the tombstone catalogue to the exhibition, “At the start of the twenty-first century, when every possible medium is valid as a creative means and the artistic options are endless, we are in fact witnessing the vigorous reassertion of painting.”

This is by no means the first time that this type of language has been used to resurrect the medium of painting from the supposed tomb of neglect – similar proclamations accompanied the Royal Academy’s influential exhibition, “A New Spirit in Painting”, some two decades ago – and it has the feel, on this occasion, of slightly tired and shopworn rhetoric. Those who suspect Saatchi of having metamorphosed from a collector into a secondary market art dealer are unlikely to be persuaded, by this exhibition, to change their views. The motives behind the show are certainly anything but clear. It is possible that Saatchi genuinely believes that the most significant art of today is being carried out in the medium of painting, and feels compelled to collect and show it. It is also possible that, like a cannily contrarian fund-manager working the equities market, he has simply decided that painting is currently an undervalued sector – and has bet his portfolio on the proposition that it has a big recovery upside. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between.

The exhibition is beautifully, spaciously displayed, although also inevitably uneven, given its heterogeneous contents. Martin Kippenberger’s self-consciously abject, trashily ironic self-portraits, cityscapes, scenes of pornographic encounter, and sundry other manifestations of his own sense of unease, have a raw energy about them. But the eclectic styles in which they are painted are highly derivative and their playful insubstantiality may seem less engaging once the ghost of Kippenberger himself – charismatic martyr to his own self-destructive tendencies – recedes further into the past. Georg Immendorff’s manically cluttered allegories of the personal and political predicament of the artist living in post-war Germany, set in a fictional bohemian milieu he calls the “Café Deutschland”, are part of a series begun in the 1980s. Having already risen to prominence once, back then, as part of a much trumpeted “return to the figure”, he is a slightly odd candidate for Saatchi’s attentions now. The messy effusiveness of his pictures, teeming with cartoonish grotesques engaged in opaquely meaningful scenes of riotous excess, seems distinctly dated.

The Belgian artist Luc Tuymans, whose paintings were recently shown at Tate Modern, is represented by a handful of paintings which include a depiction of an empty birdcage, a landscape inhabited by blurry young men in lederhosen and a monumental still life of fruit which comes across as a rather vacuous, late homage to Cezanne. Peter Doig’s shimmering, atmospheric landscapes, many set in a Hopperesque no-man’s-land between city and countryside proper, are more impressive. Marlene Dumas’s paintings also look particularly strong: unsettlingly intense images of young boys and girls, awkwardly poised between vulnerability and threat, innocence and experience. The Baby is a particularly disconcerting example of her work – a larger-than-life depiction of an infant staring imperiously out of the canvas, bursting with vital energy and seemingly possessed with some kind of sinister foreknowledge.

At nearly seventy, Hermann Nitsch is very much the odd one out, all the more so given that he made his name not as a painter but as a performance artist, the so-called “Pope of Vienna Aktionism”. As founder of the “Orgies and Mystery Theatre”, he became known in the 1960s and 1970s for presiding over rituals of animal sacrifice, invoking what he termed “an aesthetic of the cruel” and involving “lacerating of raw meat, disembowelment of slaughtered animals, trampling on the entrails”. The aim of such activities, according to Nitsch, was to “set in motion a sex drive which reaches to the very bottom of sado-masochistic excess.” His “spatter-pictures”, a number of which have been collected by Saatchi, are the ghosts in oil paint of those earlier activities. They are surprisingly tame relics of Dionysian excess, resembling nothing so much as the walls of a disused abattoir.

“The Triumph of Painting” is billed as Charles Saatchi’s twentieth-anniversary exhibition, although it certainly seems like more than twenty years since he first made his presence felt as a collector. During that time, his art collection itself has changed out of all recognition and he himself would seem to have metamorphosed from collector, pure and simple, into collector-cum-dealer-cum-impresario. It is sometimes forgotten, in the wake of his so-called “Sensation” years, that there was a brief moment, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when he (with his first wife, Doris Saatchi) created what was the greatest collection of the art of the second half of the twentieth century to be found anywhere in the world, whether in a museum or in private hands. At that time Saatchi owned enormous quantities of work, at the highest level of quality, by virtually every significant American artist to have emerged since the 1960s. He had a dozen and more of the very best Warhols, quantities of work by the leading Minimalists, including Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Carl Andre; he had numerous sculptures by Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman, as well as superb paintings by Agnes Martin, Brice Marden, Philip Guston and others. He also owned an exceptional collection of work by some of the leading European artists of the period and had begun to collect the very best early work of British artists such as Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread. It is no exaggeration to say that had he stopped collecting at that moment in history, and chosen to bequeathe his artistic treasures to, say, the Tate, he would have singlehandedly transformed the national collections of art as no individual before him, with the exception of King Charles I.

But instead, he sold it, and set about assembling a very different group of works, by younger British artists, which has now, through further sales, changed into the collection that will be on display at the Saatchi Gallery over the next couple of years. Saatchi’s influence has been enormous, and although he has obviously encouraged numerous British artists by collecting their work, it could be argued that his greatest gift to practising artists in this country was that series of exhibitions with which he opened his first, Boundary Road Gallery –exhibitions which displayed the best and most monumental American art of the 1960s and 1970s, and by doing so transformed younger British artists’ sense of the scale and potential grandeur of what could actually be done in an art gallery. It is no coincidence that before Saatchi, much British art seemed timid, provincial and circumscribed; while after Saatchi, it breathed a new sense of possibility and self-confidence. Indeed, by putting the Tate, as it then was, to shame, by staging exhibitions so much better and more interesting than its own, it might also be said that Saatchi decisively influenced the institutional face of British art. Certainly, Tate Modern might never have seemed quite as necessary, or overdue, without the example of his activities.

But the sale of all the extraordinary work that he had amassed by the early 1990s still looks like a huge and tragic mistake – albeit one that is integral to the very nature of Saatchi as a man, who seems to love the very act of collecting so much that he has to keep selling his collections in order to indulge himself in his passion. At the moment, it appears that the one thing which the most energetic and brilliant art collector of modern times will fail to leave behind him, paradoxically, is a truly great art collection.