When, in 1998, Doris Lockhart Saatchi was asked to put together her own fantasy art collection as part of a fundraising drive, her choices raised eyebrows in the art world.
Lockhart Saatchi’s name, with that of her ex-husband, the advertising guru Charles Saatchi, had become synonymous with the Young British Artists (YBAs) – a term newly applied to a group that had first shown together a decade previously. Rather than selecting Damien Hirsts or Tracey Emins, though, Lockhart Saatchi, who has died aged 88, chose Simone Martini’s Uffizi Annunciation, from the 14th century, together with works by Francisco de Zurbarán and Nicolas Poussin. The only modern paintings on her list – commissioned by the National Art Collections Fund (NACF, now the Art Fund) for a lecture series – were Andy Warhol’s Triple Elvis and a canvas by the American minimalist Brice Marden.
At the time, her unexpected choices seemed to be a shot across the bows of her ex-husband. When Lockhart had met Saatchi in London in 1967, both were advertising executives at the agency Benton & Bowles. Lockhart was six years older than Saatchi and married to the racing driver Hugh Dibley. By the end of the year, she had left Dibley for Saatchi, whom she would marry in 1973.
The couple went on to build a hugely influential art collection and transformed the London art market, before separating in 1987 and divorcing three years later.
Initially the pair had seemed ill matched. Where Saatchi had trained from the start as an ad man, Lockhart, an American, had studied art and art history at the Sorbonne in Paris before taking a degree in the subjects at Smith College in Massachusetts, one of the so-called Little Ivies.
Saatchi was famously hot-tempered, but Lockhart was the embodiment of Wasp sangfroid. She described herself as a Dom Pérignon Democrat; he would later run the ad campaign that helped get Margaret Thatcher elected. Her tastes ran to American minimalism, his, at the time, to Superman comics.
All this changed when the pair got together. In 1969, Saatchi bought his first piece of art, by the American minimalist Sol LeWitt. The following year he and his brother, Maurice, set up their own agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, the walls of which were soon hung with paintings by the likes of Robert Mangold, another US minimalist, with many of them labelled “Bought by Doris Saatchi”.
By the mid-80s, the collection, then mostly of American pop and minimalism, was large enough to merit its own space, and the Saatchi Gallery – opened in a disused paint factory in north-west London – became a destination on the art map.
When the couple split, Saatchi quickly sold most of these American works, replacing them with ones by the YBAs. Lockhart’s role in the discovery of the group was quietly sidelined.
In fact, her part in the YBA phenomenon had been crucial.
Two of their number, the collaborative duo Langlands & Bell, recall her as having been “well ahead of her erstwhile husband in recognising the talent of many of those who were soon to be known as the YBAs”.
And while it was Saatchi who bought Hirst’s celebrated 1991 work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, it was Lockhart who had supported the artist in making it.
“On one of my visits to see Damien, he asked if I could lend him some money,” she recalled. “He said he wanted to get a shark sent from Australia. So I said, ‘Yeah, sure, how much do you need?’”
“It was so amusing,” she told the Independent in 1987. “Whenever I visited one of the new young galleries that were springing up in out-of-the-way places such as Peckham, I was told that Charles had either just left or had arrived just after I had. We were discovering the same art with the same excitement within days, or even hours, of one another.”
Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Doris was the daughter of Nina (nee Tall) and Jack Lockhart, then a journalist and later a newspaper executive. The family moved to the smart New York area of Scarsdale, where Doris went to high school. She graduated from Smith in 1958 and worked for a period at the advertising firm J Walter Thompson in New York, before moving to the UK and marrying Dibley in 1965.
In the years after her divorce from Saatchi, the distinction between Lockhart the woman and Lockhart the collector seemed increasingly to blur. Her houses doubled as galleries for shows she curated, often highlighting the work of female artists such as Lisa Yuskavage whom she considered overlooked, or those, such as Louise Bourgeois, who made art out of personal pain. Her first house, in Mayfair, central London, was designed by the minimalist architect John Pawson. The second, in Battersea, was to a large extent her own work. Both were shared with a varying company of cats.
After 1992, Lockhart largely stopped collecting contemporary artworks, instead concentrating on architectural drawings and models. While continuing as a sometime presenter on the BBC TV series The Late Show and judge for art prizes, she took on the job of contributing editor on the architectural magazine Blueprint. From 1987, she served on the council of the Architectural Association; she was also art consultant for the Millennium Dome Mind Zone, designed by her friend the architect Zaha Hadid. “I do have a lot of money; I’ve been very lucky,” she said. “But I feel obliged to say that I have worked very, very hard.”
For her own part, Lockhart was careful to differentiate herself from the work she had once collected. A 1983 photograph of her by Robert Mapplethorpe, now in the National Portrait Gallery, had seemed to show her as made of glass. “Mapplethorpe totally objectified me, dehumanised me, almost,” she remarked to the Sunday Times in 2022. “When I look at his portrait, I don’t see myself. I see Robert Mapplethorpe’s wonderful photograph.” In truth, Lockhart was reticent rather than brittle, and perhaps a little shy.
Two of the paintings she chose for her 1998 NACF collection were portraits of women, one of them Isabella d’Este and the other of the Roman goddess Diana. Of the two, Lockhart identified herself, surprisingly, with the latter. “Isabella was a classic rich, powerful woman,” she said. “A matriarch, the head of a grand family. I don’t see myself like that at all. I’m more like Diana. As Artemis, she lived on the mountain tops. But she also lived alone. I guess that’s a description of me.”
Lockhart Saatchi is survived by her brothers, Richard and Jeffrey.
• Doris Lockhart Saatchi, art collector, born 28 February 1937; died 6 August 2025
