To speak of British art’s transformation in the 1980s without acknowledging Doris Saatchi is to tell half the story. Born Doris Lockhart in 1937, the Glasgow-raised advertising copywriter would become the less visible but equally formidable half of the Saatchi duo and the seismic reshaping of contemporary art’s landscape.
Her early career at J. Walter Thompson honed a razor-sharp instinct for cultural currents, skills she later deployed with quiet precision. When Charles Saatchi cofounded Saatchi & Saatchi with his brother Maurice in 1970, the agency became synonymous with disruptive imagery. But it was their parallel plunge into art collecting that revealed Doris’ singular eye. While Charles dominated headlines, Doris operated differently: she sought out artists not for shock value, but for their ability to articulate unease.
The Saatchi Gallery’s early exhibitions—Young British Artists I (1992) and Sensation (1997)—bore her fingerprints. She championed Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost (Destroyed 1990), a plaster cast of a Victorian interior’s negative space, funded by Artangel. She tried to have it moved to the Saatchi gallery, recognising its haunting resonance with memory and loss. She pushed for Jenny Saville’s visceral nudes when others flinched. Her selections often exposed the body’s vulnerabilities, a counterpoint to the YBAs’ brashness.
Doris’s approach defied art world orthodoxy. She collected not to accumulate prestige, but to construct narratives. Her 1985 The New Spirit in Painting show at the Royal Academy subtly challenged the era’s neo-expressionist fever by including Francesco Clemente and Anselm Kiefer—artists whose work wrestled with history’s weight rather than market trends.
The Saatchis’ 1990 divorce fractured their public partnership, but Doris’ influence persisted. She retreated from the spotlight, yet continued advising collectors with a focus on overlooked female artists. Her 2008 Paper exhibition in London spotlighted Lisa Yuskavage and Marlene Dumas, underscoring her enduring belief in painting’s subversive potential.
In later years, Doris became an enigmatic figure—rarely interviewed, never self-mythologising. Her 2013 Modern Women project at Christie’s revealed her late-career preoccupations: dispersing 50 works by Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Alina Szapocznikow, artists who turned personal trauma into universal language. The sale wasn’t an exit, but a redistribution—a final act of curation.
Doris Saatchi’s legacy lies in what she refused: the bombast of her contemporaries, the easy gravitas of a “tastemaker” title. She understood that actual influence operates in whispers, not auctions. The artists she backed now define eras; the questions she posed about gender and power still hang in gallery air.
Artists Langlands and Bell commented on Instagram,
Very, very, sad indeed to hear Doris Lockhart, formerly #DorisSaatchi, passed away early this morning. Doris came into our lives at a pivotal moment and had a major influence on our development as artists. We first met her when @maureanpaley brought her to our Whitechapel studio, a small warehouse building that we had just finished restoring from a ruin with our friend @ashleyhicks1970 in 1989, where we had recently completed several new sculptures.
Following her decisive influence in shaping the hugely influential Saatchi Collection in Boundary Road, and her divorce from Charles Saatchi, Doris decided to continue collecting contemporary art on her own, but to shift her focus away from the established North American and Continental European artists she and her former husband had collected, to emerging young British artists. 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
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. We became good friends and remained so up until her death. We shall miss her kind and generous spirit, her wit and wisdom, and her acute judgement of art, architecture and design.
Top Photo: Robert Mapplethorpe