Grayson Perry, the Turner prize-winning artist who, according to Wikipedia, is "known mainly for his ceramic vases and cross dressing", says: "When I was younger, I was always really envious of the artists who were with Victoria Miro." Perry had been with the Anthony d'Offay gallery in the 1990s but had "been feeling a bit left on the shelf" when the painter, Peter Doig, recommended him to Miro.
"I would always hear good things from her artists about how well she treated them," he says, laughing, "and I can now confirm that everything I heard was true. She is not interested in neophilia, the insatiable hunger for the new that is one of the terrible afflictions of contemporary society. She takes the long view, which is what an artist really needs from a gallerist."
Victoria Miro is the quiet woman of British art: visionary but not in the grandstanding way of some of her more famous counterparts. Or, as Grayson Perry puts it, "not tainted with the hoo-ha and the celebrity glitz that, at the height of the YBA era, almost consumed the art". Her gallery began life in 1985 in 750 sq ft of space on Cork Street; it now takes up 17,000 sq ft on the edge of Hoxton: a metaphor, then, for the trajectory of British art over the last three decades.
She is currently celebrating, albeit in a quiet way, her gallery's 25th – and her own 65th – birthday. In acknowledgement of these landmarks, she has decided for the first time to give an in-depth interview. ??First, though, she insists on walking me around her latest exhibition, In the Company of Alice, a wonderful group show that features portraits by the late figurative painter Alice Neel, and responses to her work by the likes of Chris Ofili, Doig, Chantal Joffe, Marlene Dumas and Elizabeth Peyton.
Although she died 26 years ago, Alice Neel, who has become something of a feminist icon because of her bohemian lifestyle and her unflinching dedication to her work, is Miro's current passion. "We put on the first European show of her work in 2004," she says, proudly, "and, in the six years since, she has come in from the cold." This is indeed the case, as evinced by the Whitechapel gallery's career-spanning Alice Neel retrospective that opened on 8 July.
Her decision to take on Neel's artistic estate was made after much thought, and it says much about Miro's way of working: her combination of a deep love for, and knowledge about, art and her sharp business acumen. "She really does care about art in an almost old-fashioned way," elaborates Grayson Perry, "But her aesthetic judgments and her ability to nurture demanding people are matched by a very astute business sense. She's low-key but she has always made some incredibly smart moves."
Among those smart moves was Miro's showing of the Disasters of War series in 1993, the first solo show by Jake and Dinos Chapman, which she later sold to the Tate. In 2002, her gallery was selected as one of the 18 most important international art galleries by the Royal Academy for its Galleries Show. Miro's keen eye for new talent was highlighted when, in 2004, she hosted the first London show of a recent graduate, Raqib Shaw. The entire show – 18 drawings and five paintings – sold out. Her stable now includes Doig, Ofili and Perry as well as the film-maker Isaac Julien, the painter Chantal Joffe and the conceptual artist Idris Khan. She also represents one of the world's leading art photographers, William Eggleston.
And, although the name Victoria Miro has not impinged on the public consciousness in the same way as, say, the name Jay Jopling, she has had the odd – utterly unwelcome – moment of media controversy. Way back in Cork Street in 1987, just two years into her career, and two years after Charles Saatchi had also opened his first groundbreaking gallery on Boundary Road, north London, Miro hosted a show by the German artist and political activist Hans Haacke in her small gallery. Entitled Global Marketing, it consisted of a large black cube on which Haacke had detailed Saatchi & Saatchi's various business dealings in apartheid-era South Africa.
"Charles walked though the gallery in silence as I recall," she says, "but various friends of his came and they were all very angry. Charles never set foot in the gallery again for seven years and, to this day, he has never mentioned the show."
With the benefit of hindsight, does she think it was a good idea to give Haacke's fervently anti-corporate imagination such free rein? "Oh yes. Artists do what they have to do. And I think Charles would understand that. As a gallerist, you can advise them but you cannot ever get in the way of the work."
In 2005, Miro found herself in the middle of a media firestorm when she sold a series of paintings by Chris Ofili called The Upper Room to the Tate for £705,000. It was revealed that Ofili was also a serving trustee of the Tate, and in the ensuing controversy, a newspaper published a private email from Miro to Tate director Nicholas Serota. It acknowledged the "sensitive" nature of the transaction and laid bare the kind of hustling that is common when private galleries do business with major institutions, but which is usually conducted in secret: "There is also extra pressure as Chris is getting married next week and I suspect he may be less willing than previously to wait for an extended period in terms of finance."
The work did go to the Tate, though only after Miro, at Serota's request, raised £300,000 towards the purchase from five different sources, all of whom insisted on anonymity. The Daily Telegraph's art critic attempted to put the purchase in perspective, describing it as "the bargain of the century" and congratulating Miro and Ofili for "acting not in their own interests but for the public good". In 2006, however, the Charity Commission censured the Tate for breaking its rules over the purchase – though it cleared them of breaking any criminallaw.
Now that the dust has settled, what is her view on the sale of The Upper Room? "It is a masterpiece and it had to be placed in a major public collection." she says, "Despite huge interest in the work internationally, Chris and I wanted it to remain in this country. There was no way the works could be split up. Naturally I did all I could to help secure its long-term future. It belongs to the nation now, and long after you and I are gone, it will continue to give pleasure and inspiration to generations to come."
This may sound a trifle disingenuous but, looking at the purchase in purely monetary terms, the Tate, despite Miro's hard bargaining on behalf of her artist, does seem to have landed quite a bargain. Two weeks ago, a single painting by Ofili sold at Christie's for almost £1.9m.
We have lunch in a large, airy space designed by the architect Claudio Silvestrin to complement Trevor Horne's adjacent two-storey gallery, looking out over Miro's landscaped portion of the stretch of canal known as the Wenlock Basin. ??It is difficult to believe you are in inner-city London just a stone's throw from the noisy City Road.
In person, Miro lives up to her reputation as the "grand dame of British art". She is soft-spoken and effortlessly charming in that understated way that betokens a particular kind of well-bred, upper-middle-class, English background.
Surprisingly, her father was a stallholder in London's old Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market and she was educated at Copthall grammar school in north London. Her parents were art lovers, and the annual family holidays were cultural forays to Rome, Venice and Florence. She was "obsessed with making art even as a child" and eventually attended Slade art school with ambitions to become a full-time painter.
"The artistic urge is that one has to do it however much of a struggle it is, but I did seem to lose that urge somewhat once I had children," she says, wistfully. "Unlike today, where people seem to miraculously do everything, I was immersed in family. The creativity just seemed to disappear. It was a very quiet period for me, but I liked that, too."
She has been married to her husband, Warren Miro, a businessman, for 40 years. He is not directly involved in the running of the gallery but oversaw the building design of the place we are sitting in. They have a son, Oliver, and a daughter, Alex, who were once babysat by Jake Chapman and Sam Taylor-Wood. Last year, Miro became a grandmother when Alex give birth to a daugher, Sophia.
For a while in the early 1970s, Miro taught art in secondary schools in Slough and Battersea. "I quite liked teaching but, looking back, I can see that what I was really fascinated by was gallery life in London. I used to go to all these strange little galleries that are now long gone – Beaux Arts, Robert Fraser – and think that maybe someday they might be interested in my work."
The memory of that time and those strange little places haunts her still, but not in the way you might expect. "I always remember that feeling of optimism I had back then when I see students come into my gallery with their work. They are always so interested and hopeful. In a way, I have come to see that well of expectation as very sad somehow."
She sighs and sips her mint tea. You wonder, just for a moment, how she negotiates the cut-throat world of global art dealing, but sense, too, the self-belief, the steeliness that attends her famous intuition. "It really is a harsh world, the art world, much more so than it was when I started out," she says. "You have to be incredibly strong and ambitious as well as gifted." Or, I think, you have to employ someone to be strong and ambitious on your behalf.
In 1985, when she took over Robert Fraser's gallery space in Cork Street, the London art world was, she says, "a very small world, almost a village". Fraser, though, who had hung out with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the late 60s, and is the subject, alongside a handcuffed Mick Jagger, of Richard Hamilton's famous painting, Swingeing London, was one of its bohemian aristocrats.
"I met him when he was dying from Aids, alas. I remember that, when he handed over the keys, he said: 'You'll never make a contemporary art gallery work in this country.' It was very sad, his sense of disillusionment."
Miro initially concentrated on what might be called conceptual minimalism with artists such as Richard Tuttle, Antony Gormley and the late Ian Hamilton Finlay, a close friend whose artistic estate she still oversees. She tells me how the famously difficult Finlay successfully sued the famously opinionated critic Brian Sewell, for writing that he was not a real artist because other people made his work. "Given all that's passed between, it seems almost quaint, doesn't it?"
Finlay also took objection to a negative review by the art critic, Waldemar Januszczak, and insisted Miro ban him from the gallery for ever more. "It's not an ideal situation for a new gallery to have to ban a reviewer, but Ian was adamant," she says, giggling. "Waldemar took it quite well, considering, but he does remind me of it every time we meet."
In the late 80s, Miro opened a second gallery in Florence where, she says, "there were no other big contemporary art galleries to tread on the toes of". In 1990, though, as the recession hit hard, she was forced to close it order to survive. "I tried my best to keep it going but, in the end, I had to close it to keep the London gallery going." How bad was that recession for the art market, exactly? "Oh, very bad. The buying and selling just stopped. Then the Japanese art market, which had been so buoyant, collapsed. It was very severe. An absolute shock to the system."
Is she worried for the current gallery as we enter another what looks like being another prolonged period of austerity? "Oh, it's very different now," she says jauntily. "There are so many strong markets internationally: Korea, China, Hong Kong, South America. The art market is truly global now and is changing constantly. And the gallery is much bigger and more secure. Back then, it was just myself and my assistant, Clare, who is still with me. We had to watch the budget so closely that we could never afford to have an illustration on our invitation cards, just plain text. People thought," she says, chuckling, "that we were being minimalist but really it was just being frugal."
In the 90s, of course, the British art world changed dramatically and in a way few could have predicted. Signalled by Freeze, the now famous group show curated by Damien Hirst in July 1988, the coming of the YBA era saw the London art "village" that Victoria Miro operated in suddenly become a market-driven megalopolis. "I was aware from the beginning that a change was in the air," she says, "mainly because I had Jake (Chapman) working as technician for me and he'd come to art fairs with me to install and you could just sense something was stirring. What, exactly, was hard to say. Initially, there was this incredible energy and then that started translating into work of real substance."
In the era of White Cube and Gagosian, Saatchi and the shark, did she feel at all pressurised to keep up, to go global and simply follow the market? She shakes her head,
"I suppose my progression was more organic and definitely artist-driven. I moved from Cork Street because the artists felt limited by the small space. They even took an active part in looking for, and helping to make, the new space. Then, I took on a partner, Glenn Scott Wright, in 1997. It was all very much artist-led. It wasn't me thinking, Oh, Jay's getting a bigger space and Larry's coming over. No, that's not really my way."
In her time, Miro has seen the London gallery scene change in two ways. Commercial galleries like her own, once the haunt of dealers and insiders, now attract visitors in much the same way as their bigger, state-funded galleries do. (One of her early group shows in Wharf Road attracted 4,000 visitors.) Post-Saatchi, too, the way galleries do business has not just become more global, but more competitive, more combative and more macho.
"It's so market-driven now and most of the mega-dealers are men, and some of them can be quite aggressive and persistent when they go after an artist. It's hard when you lose an artist to another, bigger dealer. You do feel wounded by the defection, but it's the nature of being a gallery and you just have to come to terms with it. I am what I am – a woman dealer. I know it's a cliché but I do think women approach the work on a much more intuitive level; it's less about market and machismo and more about artistic value."
The artist and film-maker Isaac Julien confirms Miro's view and stresses her commitment to her stable. "She is a rare breed in the sense that she has an almost cerebral relationship to the work that comes from a deep passion for art. And maybe that, in turn, comes from once being an artist herself. Her success is refreshing because it runs counter to the completely market-driven world we find ourselves in now."
I ask Victoria Miro, in conclusion, who has been her biggest inspiration? She does not hesitate for a second in answering. "Oh, Betty Parsons, definitely," she says, referring to the pioneering postwar New York gallery owner. "She was amazing, so single-minded. She had this incredible stable of artists at one point – Rothko, Pollock, Barnett Newman – but they had this meeting with her where they told her not to take on any new, younger artists. She just went her own way and continued to do what she wanted to do, so they all left. To me, she was the ideal gallery owner, always moving forward, always following her instinct, whatever the cost."
She sounds, I say, quite familiar. There is a smile and an almost imperceptible nod. The quiet visionary of British art remains, after 25 pioneering years, just that: quiet and visionary. Betty, you feel, would be proud.
