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Doris Lockhart Saatchi, 88, Critic and Collector of Cutting-Edge Art, Dies
Doris Lockhart Saatchi, an American-born collector of contemporary art and art writer who played a leading role in giving movements like Minimalism and Pop Art wide exposure in both Britain and the United States, died on Aug. 6 in London. She was 88.
Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her longtime nurse, Mary Ann Paydoen, who said the cause was chronic kidney disease and other ailments. Ms. Saatchi lived in the Belgravia section of London.
It was in the 1970s that she and her husband at the time, the British advertising executive Charles Saatchi, began assembling what The New Criterion magazine described in 1986 as 'one of the finest collections' of contemporary art in the world, buying hundreds of works by artists like Donald Judd, Brice Marden, Andy Warhol, Robert Ryman and Carl Andre.
A year earlier, in 1985, the couple had opened a museum for their collection in a converted paint storage warehouse in the North London neighborhood of St. John's Wood. It quickly became a leading showcase for contemporary artists on both sides of the Atlantic, from 'shallow-spaced and gleaming, smooth-surfaced art to an art of porous surfaces, flickering light, and a shifting space,' the art critic Sanford Schwartz wrote in The New Criterion.
With Mr. Saatchi's money — he had made his fortune in part as the adman who helped make Margaret Thatcher prime minister of Britain — and his wife's discerning eye, the couple had the resources to give modernist art exceedingly wide visibility in both Britain and America.
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