Doris Lockhart Saatchi obituary: revered collector of British art

Times

15 hours ago

Many great works of art have a Rashomon quality to them — the more well known they become, the more muddied the story of their origin. So it was with Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. According to Doris Lockhart Saatchi, one of Britain's most revered contemporary art collectors, Hirst had asked her for a loan on one of her visits to his studio in the late 1980s: the aspiring young artist wanted to pay a fisherman in Queensland to catch a tiger shark 'big enough to eat you', ship it back to England and soak it in a tank of formaldehyde — but he didn't have enough to cover the shipping costs. 'I said, 'Yeah, sure, how much do you need?' ' recalled Lockhart in an an interview for Faster Than a Cannonball: 1995 and All That by Dylan Jones. 'And I gave it to him and forgot all about it.'
According to Hirst, the piece had already been commissioned and paid for by Doris's husband, Charles Saatchi, though he recalled Doris visiting his studio to buy him lunch, option some of his artworks and offer tips about navigating the mechanics of the art world, including the mantra to 'question everything'.
It was not unusual for Doris to be written out of history. She was less well known than Charles, who became the face of the collection they built together — the boldest in contemporary art that Britain had ever seen — after their divorce in 1990. Many people said she was the 'eyes' behind the collection, that she had curated it, in effect, by herself. Doris was always at pains to puncture that particular myth, arguing that it was a collaboration; others saw it differently. 'I always felt that while Charles had the money, she had the vision,' recalled the architect Amanda Levete. 'I don't know why she shied away, I think he just took the limelight and she's naturally shy. She knows what she did'.
The Physical Impossibility of Death was exhibited two years after the Saatchis' divorce in the gallery they had founded together in St John's Wood, northwest London. A converted paint factory with 30,000 sq ft of gallery space, it was a hub of cultural activity that attracted Mick Jagger, Elton John, Francis Bacon and the like — guests had to press a half-hidden buzzer on which the words 'Saatchi Gallery' were inscribed and were usually greeted by Doris in an elegant trouser suit and her smooth, Southern drawl (Charles rarely showed up at the openings). It was the space that had inspired Hirst to create such a large, provocative work in the first place. 'I remember feeling snow-blindness when I walked in because it was so big and white,' he said. 'Once you make work on that size, suddenly the world takes notice.'
Doris and Charles had in many ways engineered the environment in which such an ambitious work could thrive. Before the 1980s, British art was surprisingly conservative: few galleries showed contemporary art — the Tate Modern wouldn't open for another two decades — and those that did stuck to British painters such as Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon or abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock.
The Saatchi Collection, curated initially by Doris's eye, would revolutionise art much in the same way music and fashion had exploded two decades earlier. It introduced British audiences, often for the first time, to neo-expressionist painters such as Anselm Kiefer and Julian Schnabel, the Sixties-style minimalism of Andy Warhol and Donald Judd and the Young British Artists of the Nineties, spearheaded by Hirst. 'We need him [the new artist] in a risky world,' said Doris, 'to risk for all of us the humiliation, the frustration, and the mighty exhaustion of self-expression. We need him to show us how to feel.'
Born in 1937, Doris Jean Lockhart grew up with her two brothers in a chaotic ranch house in Memphis, Tennessee. Her mother Nina was an émigré who fled Ukraine as a child — they had a difficult relationship — and her father, Jack, to whom she was close, was an investigative journalist from Chicago who inspired his daughter's love of writing and collecting. When they died — her father from suicide — she was left with a generous inheritance.
She spent a year at the Sorbonne in Paris before moving to London in 1965. That year she met Saatchi at the London office of Benton & Bowles, the advertising firm where Charles was a junior copywriter and Doris, six years his senior, group head. She was married to Hugh Dibley, a racing driver and commercial pilot who was abroad a lot for work. By 1967 they had divorced and Doris had moved in with Charles. They lived together for six years before marrying in 1973, by which time the advertising agency Charles had started with his brother, Maurice, only three years earlier had become a humming business.
Doris and Charles were, on the face of it, rather different. She was an Ivy League-educated American with what one friend described as a Greta Garbo beauty: inscrutable blue eyes, platinum-blonde hair and a tendency 'to disappear' for weeks on end. Charles, an Iraqi-born advertising mogul, was visionary and bold but on occasion domineering and ruthless.
He was less intellectual and knew less about the art world than Doris, a minimalist enthusiast who educated him in contemporary art and encouraged him to invest. Weekends were spent excavating the art scene of New York. They would walk around a gallery in opposite directions then reconvene at the entrance to discuss what they had seen, at the start rarely disagreeing on a purchase. 'Not only would we agree as to whether we wanted to buy that artist's work,' she said, 'but we would even agree on which works in the exhibition we wanted. It was absolutely amazing. And it was great fun.'
Under Margaret Thatcher's ethos of entrepreneurialism and individualism — and the patronage of Charles, her 'favourite ad-man' — the British art scene was soon shifting towards market-driven painters such as the Young British Artists. In 1988 Hirst, still a student, organised the infamous Freeze exhibition, held in an empty building in London's Docklands.
Doris and Charles turned up to the exhibition in a Rolls-Royce. 'I remember everyone saying, 'My God, the Saatchis are coming',' said Hirst. 'It was this big mythical thing.' The collectors became their patrons and in 1992 the landmark Young British Artists show was held at their gallery, though they had by that point divorced.
It never bothered Doris that she had to retreat from the limelight, but she was disappointed when Charles sold most of their collection ('The market was overheated,' he said, after ditching his Warhols for cheaper British artists). Towards the end of their marriage their tastes had begun to diverge anyway, and Doris grew disillusioned by the commercial turn of the art world. 'In 1988 I lectured at the Royal College of Art and I was appalled at how careerist the students had become,' she recalled. 'They all wanted to get work into the Saatchi Collection, so they were making huge things to fill all those huge spaces. We live in a time that is heavily influenced by advertising and, as we all know, Charles Saatchi is a master of that discipline. The influence is felt in much of the art made today and, for me, it's soft at the centre. I don't want narrative, but there's a lack of rigour in it.'
She continued to collect, turning her eye to minimalist architecture. Her pièce de résistance was a house in Hays Mews, Mayfair, which she designed with the godfather of minimalism, John Pawson. The inside was cubic and abstract, the walls blindingly white and bare. There was no visible storage. 'My mother was an untidy person,' she said. 'It forged in me a need to have a place for everything.'
She was forced to sell the house after a stalker tracked her down and put a brick through the kitchen window at 4am: he had reportedly been obsessed by a photograph Robert Mapplethorpe took of Doris in 1983, now hanging in the National Portrait Gallery's permanent collection, in which her porcelain face floats mid-air, her eyes piercingly wide. It captured something of her enigma. 'He totally objectified me, dehumanised me, almost,' she said. 'When I look at it, I don't see myself, I see Robert Mapplethorpe's wonderful photograph.'
There were never any children — she used to say that she was 'too busy having fun' and that they would have caused her too much anguish — but there was her treasured collection, which included a work by Hirst called The Only Way Is Up. Here, once again, recollections differ. According to Hirst, she bought the work on one of her visits to his studio. Doris claimed he gifted it to her as a thank you for the loan she gave him to import his tiger shark — she wouldn't accept the money so he had said she could take whatever she wanted from his studio.
'Well, I couldn't turn that offer down but I didn't want to pick anything big, because I didn't want to seem greedy and horrible, because his work was starting to make money,' she said. 'So I picked something that I could actually carry away and I have it to this day, a piece called The Only Way Is Up. If my place started to burn down, that's what I would take. Yes, I'd get my cat, but I would actually also get the work that Damien gave me.'
Doris Lockhart Saatchi, art collector and writer, was born on February 28, 1937. She died on August 6, 2025, aged 88