80 G rowth, growth, growth. This is the decade when British contemporary art began to become serious business and London could start to mount a challenge to New York as “capital of coolâ€. More widespread public interest, and yuppies with cash in their pockets thanks to Mrs Thatcher, meant YBAs could look forward to making a living like no previous generation. The dealer was king. Anthony d’Offay, destined to be one of the biggest, launched his eponymous gallery in London in 1980. In 1984, the Tate Gallery launched the annual Turner Prize to reward an artist under 50 working in Britain. If it seemed a bit of a joke at first, it was to give enormous publicity and endorsement to contemporary art as well as turning many winners into household names. And in 1988, in a derelict building in London’s docks, a young art student from Leeds curated his first exhibition – of his work and that of his fellow students at Goldsmiths College. It was called Freeze. His name was Damien Hirst.
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH ART
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The Vampire who dealt for the nation He wasn’t always liked, but the shrewdest and biggest London contemporary art dealer in the Eighties was Anthony d’Offay. His nickname was The Vampire, not because he was bloodthirsty but because he had an air of bloodlessness about him. His years of wheeler-dealing — he dealt in blue chip Americans such as Jeff Koons, Joseph Beuys and Jasper Johns before picking up new British talents such as Howard Hodgkin, Rachel Whiteread, Gilbert & George and Richard Long — have had an astonishing spin-off for the nation. With new kids on the block snapping at his heels, like Jay Jopling, Damien Hirst’s dealer, d’Offay closed his gallery in 2001. However, in a complicated deal struck in March, he sold his huge private collection, valued at £125m, to the nation in exchange for £26m — the total of the prices he originally paid — plus a tax deal worth £14m. It is a huge boost for the Tate and the Scottish Museum of Modern Art who will share a total of 725 works, including 232 paintings, drawings and photographs by Warhol. Other notable works include a Damien Hirst pickled sheep, Away from the Flock and Koons’s Winter Bears.
Gillian Wearing, a winner of the Turner Prize
And the winner is... very seldom a painter It has been attacked as “an ongoing national joke†and “the prize for the Emperor’s New Clothes†but the daily round would be poorer without the annual Turner Prize, started in 1984 and run by the Tate. Some forget that the first two winners, Malcolm Morley and Howard Hodgkin, were painters. The controversy in the first year was only that Morley, an expressionist who had learned to paint while in Wormwood Scrubs for housebreaking, lived in the US. But it took off thereafter. Madonna, when asked to present the prize, used the F-word on live TV, Tracey Emin was drunk at one dinner and swore a lot too — and then there were the entries. In 1998, Chris Ofili spiced up his pictures with elephant dung, Gillian Wearing won in 1997 with a video in which actors dressed as policemen had to stand still for the camera for 60 minutes, the Chapman Brothers entered a sculpture of two blow-up sex dolls in 2003 (they were beaten by Grayson Perry, the transvestite potter who decorated vases with rude bits). The whole thing drove junior arts minister, Kim Howells, to distraction. He left a note in the 2002 exhibition saying it was all “cold, mechanical, conceptual bull****â€. The note didn’t win.
Anthony d’Offay Gallery
Saatchi starts his super spending spree A modern-day Medici, buying the work of unknown now married to domestic artists cheaply, showing goddess Nigella Lawson, them in his galleries, selling Charles Saatchi was at a huge profit and then to become the most trying to identify the next powerful collector of wave. In this way he British contemporary amassed the most art of his iconic pieces generation, produced by the visiting littleYBAs. Most known galleries have now Charles Saatchi and studios, been sold on. The advertising millionaire started buying in the early Seventies, apparently at the behest of his first wife, Doris Lockhart, and opened his first gallery to show his wares to the public in a disused paint factory in 1985. He then moved to bigger premises in London’s County Hall and, in October 2008, to a larger gallery off King’s Road. COURTESY OF SAATCHI GALLERY, LONDON © RICHARD WILSON, 2008
Hoping to tap into a new zeitgeist, his first exhibition there is of Chinese artists. Though Saatchi is thought to have paid for Hirst to make some of his early works, the pair apparently fell out around 2003 when the artist said of the collector/dealer: “I’m not Charles Saatchi’s barrel-organ monkey... He only recognises art with his wallet.â€
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Wilson strikes oil Anything but a YBA, the sculptor Richard Wilson, now 55, created one of the most striking installations of the Eighties — a room full of sump oil. Described as “a breathtaking masterpiece†by several critics, it is called 20:50. Owned by Charles Saatchi and not exactly mobile, it was for several years at his County Hall gallery. Visitors entered a room and were shocked to find that the room was flooded with oil, but they also felt a quiet serenity as they looked across its dark reflective surface. An artist who says he likes to “interrupt†buildings, Wilson once sunk a billiard table into the floor of a London gallery and created a seventh “pocket†by cutting a concrete “well†through the baize and slate.
20:50 — Richard Wilson
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH The Daily Telegraph Saturday, October 25, 2008 telegraph.co.uk /gordonsgin In association with
The envy of the art world F ROM Hockney and Hirst, to Bridget Riley and Tracey Emin, the past 50 years of British art have been a roller-coaster ride of styles and tastes, coloured along the way with stunts and hoaxes, rows and fights and a good many eccentrics. This supplement, the second in a se
60 I t wasn’t just London’s King’s Road that was swinging. Emerging from the post-war austerity years, British art was in the vanguard of change as youth demanded that its voice (and tastes) be heard. The new art was a giddy mix – Pop Art, Op Art, a fresh wave of abstraction, art “happenin
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH ART © RICHARD HAMILTON. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, DACS 2008 ICA gets stuck In 1968 the ICA, the forcing house of the avant garde, moved to its new home in The Mall, lost its way and, seemingly, never looked forward again. Founded in the basement of an Oxford Stre
70 E verything and anything seemed possible. Conceptualism flourished, as did performance art, and artists could be Post-minimalists, Neo-expressionists, Installationists, or even Neoists specialising in pranks, fakes, plagiarism and paradoxes. The careers of the big-name painters – Hockney, Bacon
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH ART Moments of Decision/Indecision, 1975 — Stuart Brisley Brisley gets grisly In an era of eccentric British performance art, Stuart Brisley was the godfather. His 1972 work 10 Days, performed in Berlin, involved sitting at a table for 10 days. The food he
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80 G rowth, growth, growth. This is the decade when British contemporary art began to become serious business and London could start to mount a challenge to New York as “capital of coolâ€. More widespread public interest, and yuppies with cash in their pockets thanks to Mrs Thatcher, meant YBAs c
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH ART C-PRINT, 152.4 X 121.9 CM, EDITION OF 3, ©SARAH LUCAS, COURTESY SADIE COLES HQ, LONDON Kapoor goes large He has been called the new Henry Moore, though his sculptures are more monumental still. Anish Kapoor, the Indian-born but Britishbased artist, rose
90 W illiam Wordsworth, a century before, could not have put it better. “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!†he wrote in The Prelude. And for Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Rachel Whiteread, the Chapman Brothers, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn (they were not all f
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH ART © DAMIEN HIRST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, DACS 2008 Space Girl and Bird — Banksy Laughing all the way to the Banksy In the Nineties, uncommonly witty graffiti slogans and paintings appeared overnight in Bristol, London, then the world. Most are attributed
© MARC QUINN, PHOTO: MARC QUINN STUDIO, COURTESY JAY JOPLING / WHITE CUBE (LONDON) 00 rt is the cherry on top of capitalism,†Dinos Chapman, one half of the Chapman Brothers, the artists best known for creating child mannequins sprouting genitalia, declared recently. For those who needed it ramm
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH ART Now, and into the future PHOTO COURTESY THE ARTIST AND VICTORIA MIRO GALLERY, LONDON © GRAYSON PERRY Win £500 to spend on art, plus a year’s supply of Gordon’s Feel inspired by this romp through the defining moments of modern art? Then enjoy a piece
