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THE WORLD’S MOST OFFENSIVE ART AT ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST PRESTIGIOUS GALLERIES!!

THE DECADENCE OF MODERN ART IN ENGLAND

PART TWO

The published, more or less reliable facts about Charles Nathan Saatchi are as follows. He was born in Baghdad in 1943, the son of a successful Jewish textile merchant. When he was four years old he came to Britain with his parents; he has lived in London almost ever since. His brother Maurice was born in the suburbs of Baghdad in 1946. They left Iraq in an exodus of 120,000 people at a time of increasing persecution of the country's ancient Jewish population. While the move to Britain was not easy, their parents managed to once again build a prosperous business, and the family lived in a large house in Highgate, north London. At school Charles did poorly; he didn't go into higher education and appears to have more or less drifted into the advertising industry, his real enthusiasms at the time including cars and poker. Saatchi was a gifted copywriter and worked with some now famous names - including the film director Alan Parker and the producer David Puttnam - at a time when advertising was becoming more proud and self-conscious in the pop art climate of the 1960s. Puttnam and Parker thought him a good enough writer to encourage him to follow them into the film business, and he did try to write screenplays for Puttnam; one scenario, reportedly developed into a Parker script, was filmed as SWALK. This 1971 film is also known as Melody, under which title Halliwell's film guide describes it as a "tough-sentimental teenage comedy-drama of little interest to adults". But wait. We have barely got into the 1970s and the plot starts to thicken. When I read about Charles's almost-happened film career in The Brothers, Ivan Fallon's 1988 business history of Saatchi & Saatchi, I was fascinated. It raised the possibility of another Charles Saatchi altogether, the life that might have been - and as it has entered the Saatchi mythology, it does seem to have been a possibility. I asked Parker how he remembers it. Very differently from the received version, it turns out.

"In 1968-9," Parker said, "Charles and David Puttnam had aspirations of going into the film industry. Charles and Puttnam took me to lunch at a Greek restaurant in Charlotte Street and told me their notion of getting involved with film and persuaded me to write a script. Charles was going to write one as well. I duly wrote my screenplay and Charles wrote his. Puttnam and Charles eventually went to the US to sell the scripts. My script was picked up; Charles's wasn't. Hence Charles was instantly disenchanted with the film business and announced that he would start an advertising agency with his brother. "The rest is history. Charles did not write the 'scenario' for my script. He had no involvement with it. He might have had some involvement financially in the film due to his relationship with Puttnam, but by the time it got made, he had long since lost interest in any notion of being in the film industry." Once again, the Saatchi story turns out to be slippery. But perhaps the most fascinating thing about Parker's recollection is the abrupt change of heart that he says Saatchi had when his first film venture failed. That was that. This is a theme that recurs in Saatchi's story and, spectacularly, in his art collecting: radical and absolute changes of direction that are then presented as the new reality, with a denial that history exists or imposes any responsibilities. Bold self-invention. When I meet Saatchi at County Hall, I discover yet another life that might have been: he sometimes wishes he had gone into journalism instead of advertising. He reads the papers for a long time every day, apparently - all the papers - and re-edits them in his head. It's one of his favourite pastimes.

But it was as one half of the advertising partnership Saatchi & Saatchi that he became famous in the 1970s. Combining Charles's creative expertise and his brother Maurice's brilliant business sense, Saatchi & Saatchi became known as the hardest- hitting agency in Britain. Edward Booth-Clibborn, who chaired the advertising industry's D&AD awards (won again and again by Saatchi) saw Charles as a genuinely creative copywriter: "For a long time advertising was saturated with Americanese, but he used our own language with English colloquialisms. He is a very talented writer. He ran two sorts of accounts - one sort where he made his name, and others that were the hard business." The high-profile accounts included the Health Education Council: the anti-smoking posters warning "You can't wash your lungs clean"; the image of a pregnant man used to promote contraception.

Saatchi & Saatchi got the ultimate account, however, when they were hired by the Conservative party in 1978, the first truly professional use of advertising by a British political party. In the summer of that year, amid Tory fears that James Callaghan's Labour government was about to go to the country on the back of relatively good polls, Saatchi & Saatchi came up with their notorious poster of a dole queue with the slogan Labour Isn't Working. It was a riotous success and may have contributed to Callaghan's decision to delay, thus blundering into the winter of discontent.

Once again, Saatchi's path crossed that of Booth-Clibborn, who worked - voluntarily - as Callaghan's advertising man in the 1979 election. "I wrote a letter to Callaghan saying that with the arrival of Charles Saatchi the role of advertising in politics would change. I think what was revolutionary about Labour Isn't Working was that it summed up everything with a one-liner - it was a stunning poster. They really did change political advertising."

But all this seems a long time ago. By the end of the 1980s, Saatchi & Saatchi had lost a lot of their mystique; share prices fell, they rowed with the increasingly unhappy Tory party, and an attempt to buy Midland Bank was ridiculed by financial journalists as insane hubris. It was not until 1995 that Charles and Maurice were driven out of their own company and opened a new agency, M&C Saatchi, but there is no question that by 1987-8 the Saatchi myth was dented.

At this time, too, Charles separated from Doris - Doris with her New York background, her east-coast and Sorbonne education, with whom Charles had built his collection of American art and opened his American-style gallery. It was at this moment that he made the alliance with a ragtag group of artists barely out of college and showing their work in East End warehouses - work he immediately recognised as the biggest revolution in British culture since punk. To Saatchi, Young British Art is very like punk, which he remembers fondly, though he no longer listens to the Clash (does that mean that White Riot was on the stereo as he worked to elect Margaret Thatcher?). Origin myths are a universal phenomenon, and Young British Art has its own Genesis, its own memory of birth. In 1988 Damien Hirst curated Freeze, an exhibition with fellow Goldsmiths' College art students and recent graduates including Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas and Michael Landy in an east London warehouse. In art-world legend it has become the equivalent to Picasso's painting of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, or the Dada cabaret in first world war Zurich.

In reality, says the critic and curator Carl Freedman, who was an intimate part of the tightly knit group that created Young British Art (he co-curated the key exhibitions with Damien Hirst and even helped to make Hirst's vitrines), it was a glorious time when they were all friends, but virtually no one came to see Freeze. "It would be interesting to know how many people saw it," he muses. And yet a lot of people remember being there. They include Charles Saatchi. The story goes that he first encountered Hirst's work when he went to see Freeze in 1988. Saatchi was impressed not by the work - the only good things were Gary Hume's hospital door paintings and Mat Collishaw's photograph of a gunshot wound; Hirst only showed some corner constructions composed of painted boxes - but by the attitude. Freedman can't confirm that Saatchi saw the show: "I don't think so." His memory is that Saatchi "was taken round the degree shows by Michael Craig-Martin [artist and Goldsmiths' professor] and he certainly was aware of Damien's drug cabinet pieces". But he didn't buy anything then, or at Modern Medicine, the show that followed Freeze. The first acquisition Freedman can recall was from the next show, Gambler (1990). But the recent history of British art is fictive in a more profound sense than just who saw what when. British art is still living off the reputation it made at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, at the fag-end of the Tory years, when a grim vitality, a harsh poetry seemed to emerge in several media and generations. There were a lot more things going on at that time than just Hirst's Freeze; nor was Goldsmiths' the centre of everything.

In 1987 Richard Wilson's installation 20:50, a reflective sea of sleek black oil, was shown at Matt's Gallery in the East End; since 1991 it has been on permanent display in the Saatchi Collection. This was a work by an artist with a concept of architectural intervention very different from Hirst's interest in potent objects. Another classic work of the period was Lucian Freud's series of portraits of the club star and lead singer of Minty, Leigh Bowery, a collaboration between an older artist and a youth culture star that was parallel to, yet different from, the Hirst generation. The paintings were shown at the Whitechapel Gallery and you could walk from there to see Rachel Whiteread's House, a concrete cast of a house standing alone and desolate in an East End "park". What all these artists had in common, in the years from about 1987 to 1993, was an anger, a sense of the capital as place of bitter chill and violence. After the Thatcher revolution and the abolition of the Greater London Council, Roy Porter concluded in his 1994 book London: A Social History that London was a city "yielding to disintegration. There is a new pessimism, a new anxiety about the future." Perhaps Saatchi is aware of the irony of opening his new gallery in what was once the seat of London's local government, until Margaret Thatcher's government did away with the GLC. Or perhaps he has no sense of irony at all. As we climb the steps he taps on a rough sleeper in a tatty sleeping bag. It rings metallic and hollow - a simulacrum by artist Gavin Turk, a brand new item in the collection. All the classic art made in London at that time - Freud's portraits of a man heroically facing death, Whiteread's monument to the demolished East End house, Hirst's shark swimming as efficiently as Saatchi himself through the waters of the free market - emerge from this London. And it was Saatchi, the man who advertised Thatcher's Conservative party, who grabbed many of the artworks that so icily described the new Britain.

Saatchi's claim to be the most daring and generous collector of this art is indisputable. He provided the perfect cool white stage in his north London gallery; he visited all the new shows and bought a huge swathe of young artists' work, some of it now forgotten. Saatchi is clearly frustrated with the Tate curators, whom he views as whingeing bureaucrats in their timid attitude to acquiring new art. He modestly believes anyone would have championed Hirst after seeing his first work - but only he did. And that's why it is Saatchi who is opening his own art museum. The old Saatchi Gallery, the one that is now gone and forgotten, opened in 1985. It was like a space station orbiting the earth. To enter that white, curving, extensive space was to step out of the surrounding streets and be at the magic centre of the absolute present - whether Manhattan, or Mars. The absent lord of the place was therefore, by extension, imagined as a silent, remote controlling mind. It was here that Saatchi staged a series of exhibitions entitled Young British Artists, starting in 1992. It was for this space that he helped Hirst to hire an Australian fisherman to catch a 12ft tiger shark for the work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. In 1997 the power and excitement of this art was summed up for a larger audience by Sensation: New British Art from the Saatchi Collection at the Royal Academy, which subsequently toured to Berlin and New York.

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