THE SPIRIT OF THE ‘60s LIVES AT SAATCHI’S

Almost any amount of bother is rewarded by one more look at the tragic magnificence of the Elgin Marbles, or a bask in the cozy grandeur of Trafalgar Square. All the same, potential visitors should be advised that London has been swamped in people of late. A spate of nice fall weather after a wet summer caused Britons to crowd the parks on recent Sundays. Hotels were so jammed with tourists and businesspeople taking advantage of still relatively cheap pounds that a visitor could spend a couple of hungry hours looking for dinner before a kindly head waiter took him in.

A shift in the weather or the money market could change all this, but London is crowded at even the worst of times, so the need for a moment of calm contemplation always arrives. The perfect--if somewhat disquieting--answer to that inner call is a curious private museum that opened in February in the quiet London neighborhood of St. John’s Wood.

The gallery’s location is so understated that it’s virtually mute. Citizens could walk by its gray-gated entrance daily and never know that this is the fabled Saatchi Museum that has so captured the attention of the art press. They say the 50-artist, 500-work collection adds up to the greatest contemporary cache in private hands. They say the industrial building revamped to house it is the sine qua non setting for such art.

If you can find it. The entrance identifies itself only as “98a Boundry Road.” Most people could be forgiven if they were more taken with the nearest cross street. Oh boy, Abbey Road. Where are the Beatles of yore?

Well, to some extent, the spirit of their decade is alive and living in the Saatchi Museum. Not since the ‘60s has the art world attracted such glamorous, high-rolling and controversial collectors as Charles and Doris Saatchi. He is 43, lean, dark and handsome, a son of an Iraqi Jew who immigrated to England in World War II. She is lean, blond, glamorous, American-born and contributes articles to art journals. At least that’s the way they look in photographs and printed biographies: They don’t see reporters or give interviews, guarding their privacy with a firmness worthy of Howard Hughes and Greta Garbo. That, of course, just whets everybody’s curiosity.

Speculation as to their motives for collecting has been rife, and sometimes hostile. Conceptual artist Hans Haake produced a documentary work that made dark innuendoes of links between the Saatchis’ politics, collecting and influence on state-subsidized art institutions. Charles’ advertising firm of Saatchi & Saatchi handled the publicity campaign that helped put Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives in office in 1979. He served on key councils at the Tate and Whitechapel galleries and was a major lender to their exhibitions. Such generosity is invariably greeted in some quarters with the suspicion that institutional prestige is being used to drive up private prices.

A kindlier estimate sees the pair simply as passionate connoisseurs who find an idealism in art that may be lacking in the advertising business. Whatever their motives, no one seems inclined to deny that they have put together a private cache of astonishing quality, depth and scope. They are said to spend some $2 million a year on art made largely after 1965. It’s concentrated mainly on artists of the Minimalist persuasion but branches into Pop, Neo-Expressionism or offbeat talents like those of Jim Nutt or Leon Golub.

The Saatchis collect in depth, rarely having fewer than six works by an artist and often a couple of dozen. Their only near rivals in the field are Italian Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo and German chocolate magnate Peter Ludwig. According to Whitechapel gallery director Nicholas Serota, the presence of the Saatchi collection is a particular boon to England, which lacks regular deep exposure to international contemporary art.

Before gaining its own showplace, the Saatchis’ collection was known mainly through institutional loans, such as a selection seen in Los Angeles in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s inaugural collectors’ exhibition, “The First Show.” (Characteristically, the Sphinx-like pair were the only ones of eight collectors who declined to be interviewed for the catalogue essay.)

The Saatchi Museum has particular significance for MOCA. Superficially, the two have similar showplaces in industrial buildings. About the only lesson for MOCA in that is a suggestion that they just leave Temporary Contemporary alone; it is just fine.

The Saatchi holdings, on the other hand, set a standard for MOCA that will be difficult to equal. But it is encouraging to note that first-rate works of contemporary art remain in private hands, still potentially accessible to public institutions. (MOCA can also congratulate itself on its purchase of blocks of earlier contemporary art from the Panza collection; it is clearly an intelligent way to demonstrate individual creative growth.)

Now that the Saatchis have established 98a Boundry Road and Rizzoli has published a four-volume catalogue called “The Art of Our Time,” the substance of their holdings is clearer. Even at that, it all remains a bit of a fan dance. The museum is open only on Friday and Saturday and just four or five artists are shown at a time. Rotation is at the whim of the collectors. By now, for example, the quartet of Americans that was on view during my flying visit has in all likelihood been changed.

Never mind. The issues raised by the Saatchi showplace go well beyond the offering of the moment. They bear on sometimes troubling questions currently in the air concerning the relationship between the art system and art itself. Sometimes it seems that princely collectors and dramatic showplaces are of greater interest than the work of art and what it has to say. Circumstances set us to wondering if art is not now used as fuel to drive the art system--a vice which is properly versa.

The museum is ideal, according to a ‘60s-to-’70s dictum that held that contemporary art was best displayed in a “neutral” setting of blinding white walls and “tough” concrete floors. The idea stands in stark contrast to the aesthetics of the Post-Modernist ‘80s with its belief in character-laden museum architecture such as that of the new Picasso Museum in Paris. The contrast of ideology makes 98a Boundry Road and its art look a little dated at first, but make no mistake, this museum is a child of its time.

As designed by British architect Max Gordon, the museum is more properly called a “space” than a building. The structure, once a market garden, then a paint warehouse, has been so severely neutralized as to have no apparent architectural character, but beware: Californians bred on the light-and-space art of Irwin, Turrell and Wheeler know perfectly well that a supposedly empty space can have strong subliminal effect. Thus Gordon’s forecourt is not “neutral” as much as dramatically empty.

Inside, the space has been so impeccably calibrated as to take on a pristine, autocratic character of its own. This is the modest white gallery gone baroque. Some 30,000 square feet of space is divided into just five galleries, each with saw-toothed skylights and metal trussing in high-tech style. Such care has been exercised that the floor of Gallery One was lowered four feet to increase the ceiling height to 14 feet. And the 173x59-foot space is not rectilinear, tapering to 39 feet at the narrow end.

Thus we have a room with a false perspective of high spatial drama even when it is dead empty. It has its own visual priorities, and they will either heighten or diminish the resident art. During my visit, the room was occupied by the rigorously Minimal sculpture of Donald Judd. Some of his best work was on hand, including an 80-foot-long plywood structure and several puritanically sensual monumental cubes. Nothing, however, survived co-optation by the space. The room flowed on and Judd just seemed to sit there and grunt.

Which is not to say the Saatchi Museum is hostile to art. It is to insist that any one notion of an “ideal” way to display art has to be balderdash, and that the Saatchi Museum has such an ultimately authoritarian notion.

In practice, what happens is that some art looks its best or better, and some is just destroyed--deservingly, for all I know. Maybe Judd’s work is just too close to the vectors of this environment, maybe it’s just bad art unwittingly exposed as repetitious and didactic.

Andy Warhol, on the other hand, looked like the genius we all thought he was before he took to jet-set celebrity and self-parody. Two galleries devoted to his work played up the often-ignored Expressionist qualities of his modified silk-screen photos of electric chairs, auto crashes and mushroom A-bomb clouds, as well as a sense of epic tragedy which seeps from trashy media images of Jackie Onassis, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. The work has the angry sarcasm of vintage Bob Dylan. The Saatchis even managed to find a late Warhol of great quality, an immense 1973 portrait of Chairman Mao where agitprop style is transformed into heroic idealism.

Warhol’s success here certainly had something to do with the fact that Gordon’s setting minimized his coolness and magnified his normally weak emotional pulse.

And so it goes. One work each by Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman in the lobby looked splendid.

The other two featured artists didn’t fare nearly as well. A gallery sparsely hung with paintings by Cy Twombly is so aloof and aristocratic in proportion that his scribbly art looked as pointlessly eccentric and nervous as a doodled phone pad. Brice Marden occupied another smaller gallery where one of his muted rectilinear color abstractions seemed employed mainly to enhance a nice trapezoidal wall. Marden’s art requires long contemplation to realize the formal point of his crepuscular colors. It demands a good sit, but of course the museum offers no benches.

Just as the Saatchis might be viewed as ostentatiously enigmatic, so 98a Boundry Road succumbs to being described as aggressively reticent. The net effect of the museum derives from too many combined factors to have been planned. It seems to be a function of an alchemical irony that insists that people have to be what they are, no matter how hard they try to be something else. Charles Saatchi is an advertising man who with his wife forms a glamorous pair. No matter what is on view in their museum, only one name really sticks in the mind after a visit--and it’s not 98a. Whether they like it or not, the Saatchis have achieved excellent brand-name recognition.