London Fire Destroys Artworks

LONDON, May 26 � A fire that began on Monday and ripped through a
warehouse in east London has destroyed millions of dollars worth of
work by leading contemporary British artists, dozens of them from the
vast collection of Charles Saatchi, the warehouse's owner and Mr.
Saatchi said on Wednesday.

Among the works that have been lost are pieces by Damien Hirst, Sarah
Lucas, Chris Ofili, Tracey Emin, Rachel Whiteread and Jake and Dinos
Chapman, all part of the influential and showy Young British Artist
movement championed and sustained by Mr. Saatchi for the last 15 or so
years.

Well-known works destroyed in the fire, which raged for two days and
leveled the warehouse, included Ms. Emin's "Everyone I Have Ever Slept
With 1963-1995," a tent on which she had stitched the names of dozens
of past lovers; and the Chapman brothers' "Hell," a series of nine
miniature landscapes depicting the horrors of war that took them two
years to make and that, according to some reports, cost Mr. Saatchi
�500,000, or about $905,000.

The fire broke out early Monday in an industrial park full of small
businesses, spreading from another building into a warehouse belonging
to Momart, a company that specializes in handling, storing and
transporting art and antiquities. A spokesman for the Metropolitan
Police said that the fire was being "treated as suspicious" � which is
routine in such cases � but would not confirm reports that it had been
caused by explosions in gas canisters stored in a building adjoining
the art warehouse.

In a statement Momart, whose clients include Tate Modern, the Tate
Britain, the National Gallery and Buckingham Palace, said that it had
lost 5 to 10 percent of the artwork it stores. It declined to estimate
the cost of the works that had been destroyed, but news reports
speculated that the pieces were worth millions of pounds.

Momart is highly respected in London and, according to its Web site,
www.momart.co.uk, has handled most "major exhibitions in the U.K. over
the past 20 years."

In its statement issued late Wednesday Momart said the fire was so
fierce that company officials had not been allowed onto the site,
known in Britain as an industrial estate, and thus had been "unable to
ascertain the exact condition of the works that were stored there."
The company said however that "it would appear that all the buildings
on the estate have been destroyed."

Momart also said that confidentiality agreements meant it could not
provide details of the works that had been destroyed or the clients
who owned them. But it said, "We can confirm that the facility
contained works owned by a wide range of commercial galleries and
individual collectors."

Details of the works that were destroyed trickled out all day
Wednesday, though. A spokeswoman for Mr. Hirst, Jude Tyrell, said that
Mr. Hirst had lost a number of pieces from his personal collection,
including 16 of his own paintings depicting butterflies and "spinning"
designs, as well as works by Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas and Angus
Fairhurst. "Charity," a 22-foot-tall bronze statue by Mr. Hirst owned
by another collector, which news reports said was worth more than �1
million (about $1.8 million), was also destroyed, Ms. Tyrell said.

Mr. Hirst, best known for work like his dead shark floating eerily in
a tank of formaldehyde, is one of the most important figures in the
Young British Artist movement. To the extent that the movement had a
specific beginning, it was when he commandeered an abandoned warehouse
in 1988 and organized "Freeze," a show of his and his friends'
taboo-breaking works in video, sculpture, painting, collage and
photography that investigated themes like life, death and the angst of
existence.

A number of pieces from "Freeze" were destroyed in the fire, said Will
Paget, a spokesman for the Saatchi Gallery.

Mr. Paget said that Mr. Saatchi had lost about 100 pieces but that his
collection was evenly spread out among six warehouses, only one of
which had been destroyed. But Mr. Saatchi was said to be devastated at
the loss of so much of the collection he had lovingly and cannily
built up.

"Many of these works are great personal favorites of Charles Saatchi
and works he considers to be completely irreplaceable for the history
of British art," Mr. Paget said.

In a statement Ms. Emin said she was "very saddened" at the loss of
works that "had great personal and emotional value and are
irreplaceable." She added, "It is a great tragedy for British culture
that so much art was destroyed in the fire."

Several of the artists, including Ms. Emin, Mr. Hirst and the
Chapmans, are represented by the White Cube, a gallery that, as much
as Mr. Saatchi, is strongly identified with the Young British Artist
movement.

Jay Jopling, the gallery's director, said he did not yet have a
complete list of which works had been destroyed. "A number of our
artists have been affected by this terrible tragedy, and everyone is
in a state of profound shock," he said.

As for the Chapman brothers, whose depictions of mutilated plastic
dolls with extra limbs and genitals in strange places have attracted
attention and opprobrium, they reacted to the fire by telling The
Daily Telegraph that "Hell," the piece that was destroyed, was "only
art" and that they could make it again.

The work, depicting scenes of disaster and chaos, was made from 5,000
figures portraying skeletons, Nazis, soldiers and deformed humans that
had been cast and hand-painted by the artists.

Although he later said that "on a scale of 1 to 10 of how annoyed I
am, I'd say about 11," Jake Chapman also joked to The Telegraph that
the work "can't be burned, because it's hotter in hell than it is in
there." He added, "I suspect, in fact, it will, in fact, have gone up
in value if it has been burned to death."