Charles Saatchi

Charles Saatchi Donates Gallery And Major Works

Art collector Charles Saatchi is famous for his patronage which has made the careers of British artists like Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst, fueling the trend for young British artists in the 1990s. Now the ad man has announced that his lifetime of collecting will be Britain's gain. He has announced plans to donate his London gallery and 200 works as a new public art museum. The impressive gift is worth more than 25 million pounds. The Saatchi Gallery will be renamed the Museum of Contemporary Art, London.

Pieces being donated include Emin's "My Bed" and Richard Wilson's "20:50," a room filled with oil. Saatchi, who is married to celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, is an insatiable collector and even after the donation he will still own many, many works. The donation, no doubt, will allow him to go on collecting while helping insure that contemporary art has a place in Britain's future. The works that Saatchi favors are at time controversial and often challenge the nature of what really makes something "art."According to an article in Art Daily, Rebecca Wilson, associate director of the Saatchi Gallery, said that the gift also includes other works that can be sold to buy new acquisitions to help grow the collection. She referred to is as being a "very agile collection that can respond quickly to developments in contemporary art from all over the world."

The owner of the building that houses the gallery on London's King's Road, Cadogan Estate is hoping that the new museum will stay put in the same place. The staff and management team are also staying the same. What is changing is the name and the knowledge that the gallery, while still the result of one man's obsessive art collecting, is now a gift to the city he lives in.

Tags: art, charles saatchi, donation, london, museum, saatchi gallery

Phillips de Pury Auction Worth the Price of a Painting

by Tom Johansmeyer (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Auctions, Art

The Phillips de Pury auction on Thursday night raked in what once would have come from a single painting. Despite parading out pieces by Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Richard Prince, the sale was good for a mere $7 million, with individual lots moving for prices in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Thirty-nine went under the gavel, and eight didn't sell.

The Chelsea auction house lacks the savvy, knowledge and reach of Sotheby's and Christie's, so it had to lean on British art collector Charles Saatchi, who has agreed to complete most of his transactions through Phillips de Pury. In trade, subsidies from the auction house help keep access to Saatchi's gallery free.

Roughly a dozen of the lots came from Saatchi, while the others are said to have been rejected by Sotheby's and Christie's. In general, the pieces were "pretty skimpy," according to Manhattan art dealer Edward Tyler Nahem, who observes that the auction house "did pretty well with what they had."

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama was the top seller, with her painting "Infinity Nets (T.W.A.)" busting past its high-end presale estimate of $400,000 and settling at $842,500 (including fees). Kusama's performance follows a well-hyped exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery this year.

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