Inside the Saatchi studio

ONE is undoubtedly privileged in viewing a "private" gallery, and it is difficult not to resist the temptation of becoming more fascinated by the collector than by the collection itself. But be prepared to take in the collection as a whole at the Saatchi's warehouse in Boundary Road, St John's Wood, North London, rather than appreciating each exhibit piecemeal.
Here perspectives shift as you move through "the space", across cunningly sloped floors: one canvas looms whilst another recedes; reflective surfaces arc juxtaposed with textured materials — even the flat diptyches and triptyches by Brice Marden are hung so that from different angles they appear to show more than one dimension.
How is this "space" created?
he converted warehouse retains its skylights and iron girded roof structure: it feels like an artist's studio, Very few shadows fall as a result of the conjunction of natural and artificial light from overhead, and this produces a rather strange relentless brightness.
The place used to be a paint warehouse, though there are few signs of it now — a white-walled shell having been constructed inside the original shell of the building.
The floor is concrete, also painted (light grey), and the whole space is only broken up by the steps and a large pillar, which from one end of the gallery dissects Andy Warhol's Monroe into two halves.
Donald Judd's minimalist sculptures are displayed in the first phase of the gallery and, in fact, the whole section is a composition in itself. The pieces (his materials range from plywood to copper, from stainless steel to jade-laquered iron) are arranged so as to complement and contrast with one another, and their relative positionings alter subtly with different perspectives.
My favourite, a hallowed-out cube wrought in clear anodised aluminum and violet piexiglass, undergoes a beautiful metamorphosis as one draws closer to it. From a distance it is a partly transparent and partly reflective figure — at close range it is gradually infused from the base upwards with violet until it becomes a solid, opaque, block of colour.
Up some steps into the next phase of the exhibition: a room full of Warhols which spill over into a smaller adjoining gallery. The three "disaster" canvases are arguably the most haunting — The Electric' Chair is a silk screen print filled with electric blue light, charged with terror, whilst in Atom Bomb the familiar mushroom cloud is etched in black against a deep red glow, which in successive images darkens away to almost unbroken blackness.
Other canvases are more iconographical, portraying Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis, Liz Taylor, Elvis and even, in a smaller painting, a single soup can from Campbells.
The huge Mao is hung on a wall shaped like a gable, and all on its own. It is the most recent Warhol on display, dating from 1973, and marks a departure in style, suggestively splashed with paint, whilst the bust of Mao looms, curiously insubstantial, a kind of chimera about to disappear.
Two further side galleries house a dozen works each, by Cy Twombly and Brice Marden. It is at this point that one glimpses more than obsession in the Saatchi's penchant for collecting lots of works by one artist; to see these blackboard surfaces, pencilings, scribblings and oil-and-wax-covered panels all together at least helps one to approach them.
Perhaps it is something of an art collector's private joke to
pile up seemingly homogeneous and repetitive works by these minimalist artists, confounding the visitor with canvases where he cannot really see development or variety, but only the confirmation in multiplied examples of particular techniques and one particular mode of expression.
Brice Marden tends to title his works (for example, The Sea spans two panels — grey/green as horizon meets water) and this sets imaginations the task of leaping from the referential in title to the abstact in the canvas.
Twombly offers no such programmatic promptings for appreciating his impenetrable and sprawling graffitis.
But behind all the pieces on display lurks the temperament of the collector. Surely personal taste far outstrips the interest any "patron" could have in becoming an arbiter of public taste? Whatever the accusations of stockpiling and cornering the market against Charles and Doris Saatchi, and however one feels about private patronage of the arts, the Saatchi Collection, which will change every three months to display the works of a total of 45 artists, is as astonishing as it is personal.
Lucy-Jean Lloyd
* The Saatchi Collection is on display at 98A Boundary Road, London NW8, and is open to the public on Friday and Saturday from 12 to 6pm, Bank Holiday weekends excepted, and on other days by appointments, 01-6248299/4290.