Impact is a key word in advertising circles, and the Saatchi brothers’ biting slogan ‘labour isn’t working’, penned for Margaret Thatcher and the British Conservative Party’s Labour-crushing national election campaign back in 1979, certainly had that feature.
And impact precisely describes the effect that Charles Saatchi has exerted on the art world – as patron, buyer and seller – over the past 30 years and more.
Saatchi was born into an Iraqi Jewish family in Baghdad. That unusual surname is derived from the Arabic word for clockmaker, and many would hold that he has set the clock and been the timekeeper for modern art down the years, not just in the UK, where he has lived since the age of four, but worldwide.
With his brother Maurice, he in 1970 founded the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency that, within 16 years, had become the world’s largest advertising agency, with some 600 offices globally. The brothers later left to create the rival M&C Saatchi business, taking the massive British Airways’ account with them.
As a teenager, Saatchi was already an almost obsessive collector, with a passion for hoarding everything from rock ‘n’ roll records, to superman comics to jukeboxes. His life-changing experience came though when he saw a Jackson Pollack painting in the Museum of Modern Art while on a visit to New York.
“From then on, art played a major role in my life,” he recalls today. His first acquisition was a work by British artist David Hepher that he bought while on a 1973 visit to Paris with first wife, Doris Lockhart. He insists his almost compulsive art-buying programme ever since has been as much a case of indulging his aesthetic artistic tastes as of making a succession of sound investments that have consistently embellished his already burgeoning fortune.
“Essentially, I buy things because I like them,” he insists, and, down the years he has shown a constant willingness to share the pleasures of his collections with a wide public, through his own gallery and his patronage of various exhibitions at the Tate Modern and around the world.
“Unlike many of the art world’s heavy hitters and deep thinkers,” he has said, “I don’t think that painting is exclusively middle-class and bourgeois, incapable of saying anything meaningful anymore, too impotent to hold much sway. For me, and for people with good eyes, who actually enjoy looking at art, nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting – whether it happens to have been painted in 1505 or just last Tuesday.
The man who helped the likes of Tracey Emin, Jenny Saville, the Chapman Brothers and Damien Hirst make their fortunes continues to hallmark the works of fast-rising young talents by purchasing their works. He did this when he wielded his chunky cheque book at the Royal Academy’s art school graduation show last year – an occasion on which he bought all 13 of Carla Busuttil’s paintings, priced at between £450 and £2,000 each; seven of the 10 exhibited Jill Mason landscapes, tagged at up to £600 each, and the five cut-out cartoon characters shown by Angus Sanders Dunnachie and priced at £7,900 in all.
Of course, that’s all small change compared to many of Saatchi’’s voluminous art investments. His purchases – and sales – are today widely regarded as a key barometer to the world art market.
As Maurice Cockrill, keeper of the Royal Academy told The Times: “Charles Saatchi’s buying immediately puts values up. His purchases make others think that if an artist has drawn his attention then there must be some future in that artist. He associates with winners, losers are not in his sights.”
Saatchi tends to buy in bulk, which led to a falling out with Damien Hirst after the artist declared that “Charles Saatchi only recognises art with his wallet,” but it has to be countered that the scale of his trading has helped the market to focus on artists and art movements that have benefited enormously from the resultant instant spotlight. Not least, of course, Hirst himself, who, in 2003, made a tidy penny following a deal through which he and his dealer bought back and were then able to sell on most of the Damien Hirst works that Saatchi had collected over the years,.
Two years ago, Hirst became, for a short time at least, the world’s most expensive living artist when a medicine chest – which, as one critic put it, could have been mistaken for simply that if placed anywhere other than in an auction house or an art gallery with a Damien Hirst tag on display – was sold for an astonishing £9.65 million at Sotheby’s in London.
Of course, arguments have raged long and fierce over the puzzle of whether Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde and Tracey Emin’s unmade bed, replete with soiled sheets – which was bought by Saatchi for a reputed £500,000 and is now valued at more than £1m – are art at all. Or are they merely the ultimate in pretentious hype, better judged on a par with the mass of skilfully created advertising slogans with which Saatchi made his fortune in the first place rather than as serious works of art.
Married now to celebrity cook Nigella Lawson – his third marriage – and something of a recluse, who rarely visits showings: “I don’t attend my own, and I extend the same courtesy to the showings of others,” he put it succinctly.Saatchi has strong views on the art world and its goings on.
“Art collectors are pretty insignificant in the greater scheme of things,’ he told the Daily Telegraph recently, adding, “What matters and survives is the 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.
“As I have been doing this for 30 years, I think that most people in the art world get the idea by now.
“They realise that it doesn’t mean that I’ve changed my mind about the art that I end up selling. It just means that I don ‘t want to hoard everything forever.”
Often criticised himself, Saatchi has some harsh words for certain art critics: “Some of Britain’s critics could as easily have been assigned to write on gardening or travel and been cheerfully employed for life. This is because many newspaper editors do not themselves have much time to study their review sections nor do they have much interest in art.”
In finding success, being in the right place at the right time is as important as the aforementioned ability to make a real impact in the fields within which one operates. Saatchi was astute to recognise some decade and a half ago that remarkable things were happening within Britain’s creative circles, and he was astute enough to get in fast and buy up quickly. Recently, he has switched his attention to new Chinese and American art, and once again he seems set to prove to be the Warren Buffett of the art world: the ultimate investor. It will be fascinating to see what the future holds for his now 20-year-old St. John’s Wood London gallery.