© Olivia Harris/Reuters
Charles Saatchi: 'He's like a kid in a sweet shop – he just wants it now.'
Charles Saatchi: 'He's like a kid in a sweet shop – he just wants it now.'
When the art collector Charles Saatchi wants something, he knows how to set about getting it. Gallerists and curators are full of stories about the way he walks into an exhibition, fixes on the single best work of art on show and rushes towards it - in the words of one acquaintance, "like a heat-seeking missile". Those who have seen him in action say that when he likes a piece of art, he will do everything he can to have it for himself. For Saatchi, worth a rumoured £135m, the price is irrelevant.
"He doesn't care whether it's worth £100 or £100m," says a friend. "It's all about the impact of the work when it is in front of him. When he wants something, he will pay on the day for it. More than that, he will have a truck waiting outside the door. It's a kid in a sweet shop and he just wants it now."
But what happens when he doesn't get what he wants? It's a question that many were asking after photographs emerged last weekend of Saatchi, 70, sitting at an outside table of his favourite restaurant, Scott's in Mayfair, with a hand around the throat of his 53-year-old wife, the television chef and former Observer columnist, Nigella Lawson.
In some respects, it was difficult to know what to make of the pictures: there was no context for them and no sense, either, of what might go on within their relationship. The next day, Saatchi dismissed the incident as "a playful tiff" and later accepted a police caution because, in his words: "I thought it was better than the alternative of this hanging over all of us for months."
Comment: Charles and his brother Maurice Saatchi were instrumental in selling Margaret 'The Witch' Thatcher to the people of Britain in 1979.
The toxic influence of such nasty people really does permeate everything:
The Plot Against Art
Spitting Mad Jews and Angry Artists