Up in smoke

'Was it just rubbish?' some have asked of the works of art destroyed in this week's warehouse fire. Emphatically not, says Jonathan Jones - we have lost at least one irreplaceable masterpiece
A detail from Hell by Jake and Dinos Chapman
In ashes: a detail from Hell by Jake and Dinos Chapman. Photo: PA

The firefighters don't seem too heartbroken as they wait at the barrier on Argall Avenue in Leyton. Beyond the empty hoses lying like flat yellow snakes, a single wall of what was once a warehouse hangs in a puffing and billowing cloud of smoke. The roof has gone, and so has the interior. All that clings to the facade is a tangle of warped girders. It is a shock to see the fire still kindling, a day after it erupted. Something is still very hot in there.

I feel a bit embarrassed and awkward, standing by the red and white tape, and not merely because a policewoman is watching me as if I might be the Saatchi arsonist. (She does subsequently decide to interrogate me.)

It's just that everyone else here thinks it's a bit of a laugh. The fire brigade are entitled to their levity. After all, no one died, there were no horrific injuries, they successfully contained a fire that - you gather from the hoses right down the residential streets and into another industrial estate - they feared might spread much further. But the television crews think it's a bit of a laugh, too.

Later, a BBC researcher is on the phone, explaining that a feature is planned for this afternoon about whether the loss of all this contemporary British art matters at all. "Was it just a load of rubbish?" she wants to know. No one would contemplate asking that question about, say, all Zandra Rhodes dresses, or even a collection of Premier League football memorabilia, had they gone up in smoke. But contemporary British art disappearing in a fire - that's funny. The fact that most of it belonged to Charles Saatchi makes it even funnier.

I watch the gas and dust rise, and I don't feel like laughing. I'm not sure why this is. The researcher has a point. British art in the 1990s insisted on the here and now, never caring much about the future and perhaps never destined to exist there. In a way, this might be its best fate - to go up in a blaze of glory, never having to be exhibited in some provincial museum in 30 years' time, as dull as most 1960s pop looks today, to embarrass and bore our children. Now it can be remembered in the same way as James Dean - forever young; forever new. Wasn't that what everyone wanted?

Future generations are unlikely to mourn the lost masterpieces of the Saatchi Collection as we mourn the ancient manuscripts that perished when the library at Alexandria burned. But the point is, this generation never produced a great novelist, but it did create some striking works of art.

The Chapman brothers' Hell was arguably the greatest of these. It was definitely one of the ones you would have given an even chance of surviving - in art history at least. It was, I think, the best of all this generation's art, with the exception of Damien Hirst's vitrines - in fact, it was about the only work that built on Hirst, using his tanks in a way he never would, to make a picture. It was a pungent and individual fantasy, a convincing landscape of atrocity: funny, horrible and worthy of comparison with the visions of hell it quoted by Botticelli and Dante and Rodin and Francis Ford Coppola.

I can't prove it was great. But anyone who says it doesn't matter that it was destroyed has no claim to say they care about any art. It is exactly the same as someone gloating if Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon had been burned 90 years ago.

Back at the Saatchi Collection, I do a head count of the works of art. If it's here, I deduce, it wasn't there. The shark is safe, ensconced in fluid that is getting murkier as, I suppose, bits of shrivelled flesh dissolve into the liquid. The deterioration of the shark that Damien Hirst suspended in this tank more than a decade ago raises the question of modern art's capacity to endure in time. How long is art meant to last? Centuries? Decades? At any rate, the old grinning toothy monster will be with us for a while yet. No flames for him.

Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary may have ignited tempers in New York, where Rudolph Giuliano led Catholic protests against its exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, but the painting itself survives in the Saatchi Gallery. The first in Ofili's brilliant and hilarious Captain Shit series was, however, destroyed in the Leyton fire.

So let's not be hysterical. The whole of the Saatchi Collection did not vanish; not even a large proportion of it. The best things he owns are by Damien Hirst, and those are reportedly fine.

It is therefore an exaggeration, but one I can't resist, to say that young British art has ended in flames in an east London warehouse. The setting seems singularly appropriate for its Viking send-off. Leyton is part of the post-apocalyptic east London landscape this art always mythologised - this art born in industrial spaces in scrappy sidestreets of the capital, with a kebab shop across the road and Charles Saatchi's Rolls pulling up outside. Now, some of the best recent British art is ash where Lea Bridge Road opens on to the Dantean wastes of the Hackney Marsh. Ugly, crummy, the burned warehouse is just another eyesore. If it ever stops smoking, it will blend anonymously into its surroundings.

But the loss of art is a strange thing, in this instance conferring on this art that always seemed so hard and ugly and tough the beauty of something gone for ever. Loss can make the vanished object more, not less, meaningful. Art history is full of phantom masterpieces, some of which have a more real and powerful existence than many an unloved Old Master that survives in an obscure corner of a museum. Leonardo da Vinci's Battle of Anghiari and Holbein's Whitehall Mural both blaze in the memory.

Holbein's mural is part of the invisible topography of London. It was an awe-inspiring fresco of Henry VIII and his family - living and dead - standing as if real and alive in the heart of the Tudor palace that once stood on the site of today's government ministries. Visitors to Whitehall Palace in the 16th-century found Holbein's lifelike image of their unpredictable king physically frightening - as if they stood face to face with the fat Bluebeard himself.

The painting disappeared in the fire that destroyed Whitehall Palace in 1698. And yet it is still with us. Holbein's Henry was imitated and reproduced by so many painters, including Holbein himself, that it shaped the image of the Tudor king that fascinates us today: corpulent, piggy-eyed, monarchical to every pudgy finger.

As it happens, a version of Holbein's burned masterpiece hangs in a narrow wood-panelled corridor in the Saatchi Gallery at County Hall. Hiroshi Sugimoto's series of black-and-white photographs of Henry VIII and his unfortunate wives uncannily connects London's greatest lost artwork with the Saatchi fire. It's a weird thought - but could the unpicturesque corner of the metropolis where Hell perished now haunt us like the lost mural of Whitehall Palace? The smoking hulk of the devastated warehouse doesn't look much like a future landmark.

I find it hard to explain why I mourn the loss of a handful of paintings, a hut, a tent and a tableau. Perhaps it is that when we give life to art, it becomes an image of our own life. This is easier to explain if we imagine that a John Constable painting had been lost. Most of us find it easy to recognise a life in Constable's landscapes, a mirror of our own existence in the world. This sense of life is created by history, by the long intertwining of Constable's painted Britain and the real one. By comparison, some will say the works lost in the Saatchi fire are dead, lumpen things. But the fact is that an enormous amount of cultural energy has burned around those things: talk, argument, rows. Lots of people visited Sensation. Lots of people protested against the same exhibition. Now some of its highlights are ash.

But, as I say, vanished art has a habit of refusing to go away. There is no limit to how good a lost work can be. You can say anything about it, weave any legend. So let it begin here. I believe that the best work lost in the Leyton fire, Jake and Dinos Chapman's Hell, was a modern masterpiece. If you did not see it, you lost an opportunity. Photographs tell you nothing. You had to be there.

And now it is legend, like the Palace of Whitehall, burned into London. The toy Nazis gradually softened in the heat, as plastic trees began to spark and blaze. The little death camp chimney collapsed. The soldiers' faces ran and their grey-uniformed limbs gave way. They congealed in a bubbling morass.

Now there is nothing left but the smouldering ruin on the edge of nowhere. Two fire fighters venture towards the warehouse wearing breathing apparatus, watched by their anxious colleagues, as they approach the undead Hell.

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