Charles Saatchi
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Charles Saatchi (born 9 June 1943) (Arabic: تشارلز ساعاتجي) was the co-founder with his brother Maurice of the global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, leading the world's largest agency until they were forced out in 1995. In the same year the Saatchi brothers formed a new agency called M&C Saatchi.
Many large clients followed, and their new agency quickly overtook their former agency in Britain's top ten. Charles is also known worldwide as an art collector and owner of the Saatchi Gallery, and in particular for his sponsorship of the Young British Artists (YBAs), including Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.
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[edit] Life
Charles Saatchi was born into an Iraqi Jewish family in Baghdad, Iraq ("Saatchi" means "clockmaker", from the Arabic -ساعة / ساعت sā'ah / sā'at, "clock", and the originally Turkish craftsman's suffix جي -çi, here transliterated chi). The family moved to Hampstead, London, when he was four and he attended Christ's College, a secondary school in North London. During this time he developed an obsession with US pop culture, including the music of Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. He also manifested his enthusiasm for collections, building up from Superman comics to jukeboxes. He has described as "life changing" the experience of viewing a Jackson Pollock painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He then progressed to study at the London College of Communication.
In 1970 he started the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi with his brother Maurice; which by 1986 had grown to be the largest agency in the world, with over 600 offices. Successful campaigns in the UK included Silk Cut cigarettes and the promotion of the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher through the slogan "Labour Isn't Working". Eventually, he and his brother Maurice departed the agency and together founded the rival M&C Saatchi agency, taking the huge British Airways advertising account from their former company.
He is a notorious recluse, even hiding from clients when they visited his agency's offices, and has, until recently, never granted interviews. His first wife, Doris Lockhart, became known during their marriage as an art and design journalist, with particular knowledge of minimalism[citation needed]; his second, Kay Hartenstein, was a Condé Nast journalist. He married celebrity cook Nigella Lawson (his third wife) in 2003 and they live in London with her two children Cosima and Bruno by journalist John Diamond.
In 2009 he published the book My Name Is Charles Saatchi And I Am An Artoholic ISBN 0-7148574-7-5. Subtitled Everything You Need To Know About Art, Ads, Life, God And Other Mysteries And Weren't Afraid To Ask, it presents Saatchi's answers to a number of questions submitted by members of the public and art fraternity.
[edit] Art
He bought his first painting in 1973 on a visit to Paris with his first wife, Doris Lockhart. This was a realist work by David Hepher, a British artist, and was a detailed realist depiction of suburban houses. He established the Saatchi Gallery in 1985 at Boundary Road in St. John's Wood, London. His taste has mutated from "School of London", through American abstraction and minimalism, to the YBAs, whose work he first saw at the Freeze exhibition. His renown as a patron peaked in 1997 when part of his collection was shown at the Royal Academy as the exhibition Sensation, which travelled to Berlin and New York causing headlines and much offence (e.g., to families of children murdered by Myra Hindley) and consolidating the position of the YBAs.
[edit] Cultural references
Artists including John Keane and Paul Harvey have painted pictures of Saatchi.
[edit] Notes and references
[edit] Further reading
- Supercollector: a Critique of Charles Saatchi by Rita Hatton and John A Walker (Institute of Artology, 2005) ISBN 0-9545702-2-7
