Smoke gets in your eyes

Next week, tobacco advertising will be banned. So, is it the end of an art form? Maurice and Charles Saatchi reminisce on their years behind the fag packets to Michael Glover

It's not difficult to find a photograph of Pablo Picasso brandishing a cigarette. He seems to have held one almost as naturally as he wielded a paintbrush. Nor is it difficult to find images of smoking in 20th-century art in general. Many Cubist collages feature fragments of cigarette advertising; Magritte's famous Ceci n'est pas une pipe showed a huge pipe floating horizontally through the air; pipes feature in still lifes by Braque – he himself used one; there are many, many images of smoking scattered throughout Surrealism. One of the greatest 20th-century depictions of the painter as smoker is Max Beckmann's Self-portrait in Smoking Jacket (1927), which will be found amid the great exhibition of his work at Tate Modern from 12 February. And more recent examples include a huge crushed cigarette butt by Claes Oldenburg and Damien Hirst's ashtray brimming over with the filthy things.

But could it be true to say that tobacco companies ever inadvertently created art when they advertised their products? Innumerable historic examples of tobacco advertising, from cigar labels and cigar boxes to posters and cigarette cards, are on display in small, specialist museums around the world. It was Columbus who was said to have seen Cubans exhaling cigar smoke through their nostrils, and by the 19th century, the manufacturing of cigars and cigarettes in Cuba was a huge and lucrative industry. By the 1870s, Cuban cigar labels were as elaborate and luxurious as they ever became – bronzed, gilded, embossed. In 1875, the first major tobacco promotion scheme got off the ground in the USA – cigarette cards, which existed both to protect the cigarettes and to buy customer loyalty. They could be pasted into scrapbooks.

In the 20th century, the poster became a dominant selling-aid. Were any of the posters great art? No, not really. They tended to be produced in the styles prevalent at the time – art deco, art nouveau etc. One famous tobacco poster features a hazy, belle époque Renoir-esque nymph holding a fag up in the air. You immediately see it for what it is: some advertiser is chasing the fashionable, the sophisticated image to establish dreamy associations with wealth, luxury, ease, sex and art-collecting.

All in all, it's a kind of interesting, unexacting sub-art. And it's a sub-art that became increasingly sinister, the harder the tobacco companies tried to sell their products. In the mid-1920s, George Washington Lucky, president of the American Tobacco Company, conceived this ingenious advertising slogan: "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet" (from the 1920s to the 1950s, sales of Camel, Lucky Strike and Chesterfield accounted for about 80 per cent of all sales in the USA). Candy manufacturers hit back hard. Pall Mall lied even harder through its stained teeth: "Guard Against Throat-Scratch", read one poster caption of that era.

Gradually, as the evidence in support of the destructive effects of tobacco mounted, the screws began to tighten. Maurice Saatchi can remember those halcyon days of the 1950s when the cigarette manufacturers were still getting away with murder. He found it interesting precisely because there was nothing artistic or creative about the work being produced. It was just pure hard sell for tobacco, an open invitation to smoke because it was good for you. It makes you gasp to see it now.

And then, in the 1980s, cigarette advertising changed, qualitatively, largely as a result of three classic campaigns: for Hamlet, Benson & Hedges and Silk Cut, all Gallaher brands. The Silk Cut campaign was the brainchild of Maurice Saatchi's brother, Charles. In 1984, Charles drew a cut on the back of an envelope and handed it to the client, Gallaher. The idea looked too simple for words, even trite. "What Charles did was to turn the idea of Silk Cut into a visual image of cut silk," Maurice explains. The great years of the campaign, which garnered innumerable industry awards, were 1984–97. Its witty swansong will be a final poster campaign launched on Sunday. "What we did", says Maurice, "was an ultimately pure form of advertising. It was nothing but a visual image. There was no company name and no brand name, no copy whatsoever. Advertisers usually like to see their names in lights. On this occasion, there could be no arguments about the size of the company logo."

Charles devoted himself with quiet fanaticism to the campaign. He oversaw all annual presentations to Gallaher. All 50 creatives in the agency were expected to produce material for the presentations. Every year, five poster campaigns were launched. The images from that long-running campaign, which linger in the memory to this day, always involved a fragment of purple cut silk, but the way in which the silk was deployed became increasingly bizarre, and the links between advertising and high art were increasingly accentuated: one, codenamed The Rhino, brings to mind a famous image by Dürer that is currently on display in the British Museum; another seems like an echo of creatures from a painting by Yves Tanguy; a third is a take on Picasso's Weeping Woman. She is weeping tears of purple silk. This is a man who knows his art.

What is undeniable is that the ads were selling cigarettes in a way that they had never been sold before. "I think that one of the reasons for this", argues John Stezaker, painter and senior tutor in the humanities at the Royal College of Art, "was that by this time smoking was taboo, increasingly so, and this, for whatever reason, brought about a great surge of creative energy."

Maurice agrees with that. "All advertisers were increasingly having to deal with restrictions on what could be shown and said," he recalls. "It was a question of: how do you get round those problems? You had to go for increasing subtlety and cleverness."

But was it art? "No, I don't think so – and precisely because it has a commercial purpose. It cannot be art if its purpose is to serve some client's interests. Perhaps you could say that it was a place where art and commerce touched most closely."

And why was it so effective as advertising? "Its success relates to the poster as a medium. There's no time to enjoy a poster. The viewer does not have the luxury of a 30-second TV commercial. It's not like the press, where there's lots to read. It has a split second to do its work, to give a précis of the message. And this is the whole of the art: the skill to distil a complex message into a second. The mantra of Saatchi is this: brutal simplicity of thought. We respect simplicity. It is the outcome of technical subtlety."

There is much more to talk about in this campaign than simplicity and instant response. There is the often-disturbing link between the image and the severe health warning. One of the images features a length of barbed wire,wrapped in purple silk, beneath which hangs the stark, official message. All this is titillatingly, almost sado-masochistically, sinister.

John Stezaker again: "There must have been a real difficulty here. What image could you put with the heavy text underneath? You could call that an overdetermined situation, the inevitable link between smoking, suffering, death. The creative urge does have a kind of death wish built into it. It is not entirely surprising that many visual artists are heavy smokers."

And what opinions did Charles Saatchi have on any of the issues? "Silk Cut advertising was memorably striking," he says. "The tobacco industry provided a breath of fresh air." Charles smokes cigarettes. His brother prefers cigars.