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It's paintbrushes at dawn. The Stuckist movement is
at war with Charles Saatchi after the art supremo took the credit for
discovering the nightclub stripper Stella Vine when he bought her controversial
portrait of Princess Diana. Charles Thomson, co-founder of the anti-Britart
movement, tells me he's furious because he feels the art tycoon has
been stealing their identity as he tires of the Britart scene. Thomson
can fairly claim to have discovered Vine, who was a protégée
of the Stuckist movement that so despises Saatchi's, and the Tate Gallery
director Nicholas Serota's, strangehold on the modern art market. Until
six months ago, she was also Thomson's wife. "When I met Stella,
she was painting ordinary portraits and still-lifes in an evening class,
with no expression or emotion," says Thomson. "When I saw
her doodles
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of
strippers and nightclubs, I told her that was where her talent lay.
All her work is now Stuckist through and through." The Stuckists
have been a thorn in the side of the Saatchi-Serota axis since their
inception in 1999. Believing the conceptualist art that dominated the
Turner Prize was "lost in a cul-de-sac of idiocy", they have
staged their own "Real Turner Prize" shows for which Vine
has been nominated. Vine is not the first Stuckist to sell out. Tracey
Emin, who used to step out with the Stuckists' co-founder Billy Childish,
has been taking the Saatchi shilling for several years. The Stuckists
were once derided by Time Out's art critic Sarah Kent, who said,
"These vociferous opportunists are... a bunch of Bayswater Road-style
daubers." Now that Saatchi is following their every move, she might
have to revise her opinion.
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