Few other figures have shaped the cultural life of London as much as the retired dealer Anthony d’Offay. His art gallery in Mayfair’s Dering Street, which closed in 2001, held significant, mostly museum-quality shows dedicated to artists such as Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter in the 1980s and 1990s, making it an essential reference point for the capital’s contemporary art connoisseurs.
In 2008, he became one of Britain’s most generous philanthropists, and a regional cheerleader, with the launch of his Artist Rooms initiative, when the Tate and National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) jointly acquired d’Offay’s blue-chip Modern and contemporary art holdings for the much reduced price of £26.5m (selections from the collection have now been shown in 76 galleries across the country).
The Tate Modern extension will include a dedicated gallery for Artist Rooms on the fourth level, showing a changing annual display of works. D’Offay’s Artist Rooms foundation is making a financial contribution towards the £260m extension.
The Art Newspaper: What was the key to your success at the Dering Street gallery?
Anthony d’Offay: We wanted to bring the greatest artists to London and put on breakthrough exhibitions. We wanted to try to make London a place where people came for contemporary art.
And somehow you pulled it off?
Everything worked together. It coincided with the YBAs, it coincided with Charles Saatchi. Do you remember Boundary Road [Saatchi’s former gallery in St John’s Wood]? Wasn’t that a wonderful thing? Those early shows of his were astounding, with magnificent masterpieces of post-war art. And when you think about what we think of as Tate Britain today, it’s very difficult to imagine that [it would have] included contemporary art.
And what was your thinking?
What we tried to do was put on great exhibitions and then sell things to museums. In the last year that we had the gallery in 2001, something like 55% of our sales were to museums. We showed Beuys, Richter, Baselitz, Polke. I think for them it was very useful to have an exhibition where they could take risks, which they would be loath to take in a show in New York because they’d think that if the reviews are negative, they wouldn’t get invited back again.
But haven’t dealers always been the least valued part of the art world hierarchy?
If you were interviewing Gagosian gallery, for example, you’d find that their concerns are less to do with museums and more to do with material success, should we say. Also, things are so incredibly expensive now.
Why didn’t you just call Artist Rooms, the ‘D’Offay Collection’?
First, as I expect you’ve noticed, art collectors have horrible names: [Greek businessman] Dimitris Daskalopoulos, [London-based] Anita Zabludowicz. The last thing you want to do is saddle people with a problem. And I’m not interesting; it’s the art that’s interesting. Artist Rooms already describes what it is and suggests what it does.
Why launch the new Artist Rooms gallery at Tate Modern with a show dedicated to Louise Bourgeois?
She’s a French woman who becomes American, and she gets better and better, and better. Try living up to that. How many men become much better in their 80s and do some of their greatest work aged 98 and a half? It will be strengthening for young women to see her incredible imagination and these unbelievable things she’s done. An extraordinary self-portrait [1946-47] will be twinned with a vitrine she made at the end of her life [2010].
And you’ll oversee the development of this permanent hub?
I owe the Tate a very, very special vote of thanks because it was Frances Morris’s Bourgeois exhibition [at Tate Modern in 2007-08] that made me realise I’d never seen a proper museum show of hers [Bourgeois] before. It was a marvellous show. Morris is terrific, and it’s lovely she was made the boss [director of Tate Modern]. The exhibition is on for a year. This is the window of the room [points to an image of the gallery]; you can see the giant spider there.
Works continue to be added to the Artist Rooms collection. What is the acquisitions procedure?
What happened was, the collection was valued by Sotheby’s at £126m. We received back what we paid for it. Some of the things had been bought 20 or 30 years before, so we got back £25m—and jolly useful it was, otherwise we couldn’t have bought the Joseph Beuys room [at Tate Modern, until 31 December], and things like that. Then we added to the collection another 20 rooms. We had one painting by Agnes Martin—now we have seven.
So you acquire the works and then you give them to the project?
Some of them are held by the Artist Rooms foundation. To make it work, we have this foundation that will give things at the right moment to Tate and NGS, but holds them in the meantime.
Have you ever wanted to open your own museum?
No, not at all. Not in the tiniest bit. I just wanted young people to be able to see the art of their time and be inspired by that, to start thinking in a new, creative way.
Interview by Gareth Harris