the times | Monday October 5 2020 1GT 3
times
outlets. “But this is very boring,” he
insists when I ask more about it. “It’s
in the past now... We don’t look back,
we only look forwards.”
His wife, by contrast, could hardly
have grown up more steeped in art.
“Both my parents loved it, and though
they haven’t been together for 20
years, both were still involved in the
art world in different ways. Both were
just as passionate about it and about
introducing me to it,” she says.
Art was part of the furniture for
a girl who just had to walk into her
father’s house to find a Duane Hanson
hyperrealistic sculpture of an old man
in the hall. “My school friends would
always say ‘hi’ to him and chat to him;
they used to call him my grandfather,”
she remembers, laughing. This is the
girl who grew up with Damien Hirst
sheep in her drawing room, who
would dunk her fingers into Richard
Wilson’s oil tank, who had a Martin
Maloney painting in her childhood
bedroom and who adored Paula Rego
like a grandmother.
County Hall, where in 2003 her
father opened a gallery, was the place
where she and her friends would hang
out at weekends and after school. “But
I didn’t take it all very seriously. It was
play. It’s really wonderful for your first
experience of art to be play,” she says.
“That’s what we are still doing,” her
husband interjects. “That’s what we
are trying to do for the gallery.” She
nods and smiles. “But I can’t pretend
that I looked at art and had profound
experiences,” she adds. “I grew up with
it in an innocent way. Innocent...
but, in retrospect, really magical.”
When Saatchi Yates finished
school she enrolled on a film course
at Ealing Studios in west London. “I
just wanted to do something creative
and practical; I wanted to be on my
feet using my hands all day. I didn’t
want to do an art course — I can’t
paint for my life — and I thought
film was such an interesting subject;
you could do writing, directing,
managing a team. And the course— it’s my turn to cause a sensation
was also only two years. That
was important. I wanted to finish
and move on and get out into
the world.”
Starting their gallery was a pipe
dream that the couple had toyed
with for some time. But it began to
take shape three years ago, on a
late-night Easyjet flight home from
a business meeting in Bulgaria. “We
had had too much halloumi and red
wine,” Saatchi Yates says. “And we
talked and said let’s just decide to
open a gallery and we can then
spend as much time as we need
figuring out how we can do it, how
we can make it work, make it
different; how we can do something
that we will be passionate about for
the rest of our lives.”
“Phoebe has effectively been in
training for 25 years,” her husband
says, but together they decided to
start learning more seriously from
her father. “We already had one foot
in the business — we had been
working with Charles’s collection and
managing it, buying and selling,” Yates
says. “Now we wanted to learn from
the ground up. We really spent a long
time shadowing Charles, learning the
business, meeting the collectors,
meeting the institutions... It’s taken
a long time.”
“Dad has taught me everything”
Saatchi Yates says. “And Saatchi is
definitely a very helpful name to have
above the door. But we want to stand
on our own feet and be something
new,” she insists.
“We want to feel comfortable that
we are not just trading off the back
of the name,” her husband says. “We
are trading off the top of our own
relationship too, using our own money
that we made from dealing.”
“And not just dealing from my dad’s
collection,” Saatchi Yates says. “We
have been sourcing works for
ourselves a long time.”
“And we have collectors who
have promised to support us,” Yates
interjects. “Private collectors we have
had long relationships with, whom we
really know and trust and who really
know and trust us and our eye.”
“Of course, my father is very
involved,” Saatchi Yates concedes.
“He advises us and pushes us.”
“Its an incredible privilege to work
with him,” her husband adds dutifully.
“He will be part of the process,”
Saatchi Yates says. “We have to have
three ‘yeses’ for every artist that we
choose — like The X Factor — that’s
always our rule... and the third ‘yes’
will always be Dad’s.
“But the art world is a completely
different place now to what it was
30 years ago. Then you could count
collector numbers on one hand. Your
address book was tiny, but powerful.
Now there’s always someone you
haven’t met or heard of, always
someone doing something exciting.
This gallery is the start of what will
be a long journey.”
“But we are ready for it,” her
husband says, resolute in the face of
Covid and Brexit. “We’re ready to
stick a finger up at problems and go
straight on ahead.”
Saatchi Yates will open at 6 Cork
Street, Mayfair, London W1, on
October 15works move. It even works on the
catalogue images, apparently; iPads
are lifted to demonstrate a strange
dreamy, swirly bubble-blowing
effect. To be honest I can’t quite
see the point of it. But it certainly adds
a novelty dash.
“We wanted to maintain the Saatchi
narrative of showing artists young,”
they explain, although the talents that
they have booked in (one every six
weeks until next October) will be
varied. They will be very international.
And they will range in age from young
students to mid-forties. “The idea
of giving new artists full-scale
presentations is really important,”
Yates says. “Unknown artists don’t
usually get the opportunity to do
shows like this.”
“But more importantly,” his wife
chimes in, “we have chosen them
because we really believe in them. We
love them. We want to marry them.
We want to stay with them for the
long haul and nurture their careers.”
Arthur Yates and Phoebe Saatchi
only got married themselves last year.
Their rings — each wears an enamel
portrait of the other on their finger —
were exchanged at Lake Como in Italy.
But their conversation interleaves as
effortlessly as that of some long-wed
couple. “I’ve dated Arthur since before
my A-levels,” Saatchi Yates says.
They met at a friend’s birthday
party. He, part Indian (on his mother’sside), part Estonian and part English,
does not think of his London
upbringing as remotely arty, although
it turns out that his family owned
original Matisse drawings. At school
he was more of a jock than the arty
type, his wife says with a giggle, and
when they first met he was running
his own clothes manufacturing
business. He had started it at the
age of 18. Having dropped out of his
French course at King’s College
London to pursue it, he was very
successfully selling to high streetSaatchi is
definitely
a very
helpful
name to
have ab ove
the door
COVER AND BELOW: RORY DCS. DAVE M. BENETT/GETTY IMAGESl “Btthi isveryboring”he
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Above right: Phoebe,
right, with her former
stepmother Nigella
Lawson and stepsister
Cosima in 2004.
Left: Filter 3 (2019)
by Pascal Sender