‘An incredible instinct for contemporary art’: Doris Lockhart, the overlooked figure behind the Saatchi collection, has died aged 88 – The Art Newspaper

Doris Lockhart, the US-born art collector credited with changing the UK contemporary art scene in the 1970s and 1980s with her then husband Charles Saatchi, has died aged 88. With Saatchi, Lockhart brought leading postwar US artists to the fore and was also instrumental in recognising and boosting the notorious Young British Artists (YBAs) of the 1990s. Sources close to Lockhart confirmed that she died in the early hours of 6 August.

She was born Doris Lockhart in 1937, in Memphis, Tennessee, the daughter of a Russian emigrée mother and a US journalist father, and was later educated at Smith College, Massachusetts and the Sorbonne, in Paris. She and Charles Saatchi met as colleagues at the advertising agency Benton & Bowles and lived together for six years before marrying in 1973.

Warhol, Johns and Rauschenberg

“It is Doris who has been credited with rechannelling Saatchi’s collecting instincts from Superman comics and juke boxes to contemporary art, and the most rigorous of art at that: their first purchase, made in 1970 was a Sol LeWitt drawing,” wrote Louisa Buck in 2003, as the Saatchi gallery opened in west London.

The couple’s collection, which expanded as Charles and his brother Maurice built up the world’s biggest advertising agency, moved in 1984 to a former paint factory in Boundary Road, St John’s Wood, which became London’s answer to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The focus initially was on artists emerging from America at the time.

“We were so excited about the pop artists such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg,” Lockhart told The Sunday Times in 2017. When Tate mounted a 1982 show of 13 paintings by Julian Schnabel, 11 were lent by the Saatchis.

Her own eye—and her own money

After she and Charles divorced in 1990, Lockhart continued collecting and curating, backing artists such as Damien Hirst and Gary Hume. In 1997 she addressed a historic jibe: “Doris had the eye and Charles the wallet.”

“I had my own money,” she told The Independent, “and he had both an eye and a quick mind…I think the Saatchi Collection came about because the two of us happened to collide…We had an uncanny sense of agreement about things.”

According to The Independent, in 1993 nine works by young artists from Doris’s own collection were spotted in a Christie’s sale by a sharp-eyed Art Monthly correspondent. “I don’t see any problem with selling if your eye has changed,” she said.

“People’s sensibilities do alter. I collect because I’m a born collector. Collectors feel compelled to do it. We may all be as neurotic as hell, but there’s no plot.”

Lockhart’s collecting scope later expanded, encompassing architectural models and architects’ drawings. In 1997 she backed an auction in aid of The Architectural Association, enthusing about drawings by Le Corbusier and models by Herzog & de Meuron. When she split with Saachi, she hired the minimalist architect John Pawson to completely reconfigure a 2,500 sq ft house on Hay’s Mews in London’s Mayfair, just behind Berkeley Square.

However, she was reportedly forced to sell the Mayfair house after a stalker, mesmerised by Robert Mapplethorpe’s haunting 1983 portrait of her, threw a brick through her kitchen window. The famous image is now in the permanent collection of London’s National Gallery.

“An iconic person”

The artist duo Langlands & Bell paid tribute to Lockhart on Instagram, highlighting that, following her divorce, she shifted her focus away from the established north American and continental European artists that she and Saatchi collected. “In this regard she was well ahead of her erstwhile husband in recognising the talent of many of those who were soon to be known as the YBAs,” the pair wrote.

Langlands & Bell first met Lockhart in 1989 when the gallerist Maureen Paley brought her to their Whitechapel studio. They recalled: “Two of the three sculptures she bought from us that day, Adjoining Rooms (1989) and Conversation Seat (1986), are now in the collections of Tate and the Norwegian National Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, while she kept the third sculpture, Museums in Motion (1989), in her own collection at home in Eaton Square [her final residence].”

Paley wrote on Instagram that Lockhart was “an iconic person”. Other figures paying homage include the writer Simon Grant who said: “she was wonderful and had the most incredible instinct for great contemporary art.”