A broad brush

Karen Wright, editor of Modern Painters, has US readers in her sights – and some big names to help out, says Louise Jury

It is the kind of party you might expect for a film premiere. But in a New York art gallery this evening, Steve Martin, David Bowie and Mick Jagger will be toasting an art magazine, not a movie. Modern Painters is a quarterly that, at £5.99, sells just fewer than 20,000 copies per issue worldwide. But with a contributors' list stretching from the Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney to David Hockney and Bowie himself, it has a cachet and influence beyond any stark circulation figure.

The cause of tonight's celebration is the decision by Karen Wright, its editor, to make a determined assault on the American market. The title already sells 8,000 copies there but Wright believes there is scope for more. And she is founding an American friends of the magazine organisation to support the financing of the glossy title.

It already has plenty of friends on an informal basis. The distinguished novelist Paul Auster and the photographer Peter Beard (famed for once carousing with Truman Capote) are hosting the party in New York. The magazine's editorial board in Britain includes the novelists William Boyd and Howard Jacobson, the trendy critic Matthew Collings and Charles Saumarez Smith, the director of the National Gallery.

Karen Wright works by spotting people whom she believes to have an eye for the visual arts and asking them to write for her. She is always looking for new blood and hopes to encourage a new clutch of good writers through a prize she is establishing. "It's remarkably easy to see whether people are visual or not – it shines through the page," she says. She never asks anyone simply because they are a big name. When the gallery owner Bernard Jacobson originally suggested that David Bowie should get on board, she was sceptical. It was only after they met and spent an hour perusing a catalogue of a Tate Picasso show to choose a cover for her next edition that she was convinced. "He's a guy who really takes his art seriously," she says.

None the less, the list of contributors is starry, partly because the magazine has earned a good reputation and partly because of an early coincidence. After post-graduate studies in art history at Cambridge, Wright stayed on to found a small art gallery herself and became friends with a young student, Bill Buford, who became her lodger. When he needed an office for his new magazine, Granta, she offered him space if he would organise some literary events. Writers from Ian McEwan to Martin Amis and Graham Swift ended up sleeping on their sofa. Some of them now write for Modern Painters.

The magazine was founded 15 years ago by Bernard Jacobson, for whom Wright was then working, and the prominent critic Peter Fuller, who asked her to be his assistant. "There was no good writing on the visual arts. There were magazines but they were full of art-speak and you had to understand that to read them. Peter believed that you should be able to teach people," she says. "Artist interviews, for example, are something that can really illuminate the way an artist works. The magazine's meant to be didactic, but without pain."

When Fuller was killed in a car crash three years later, it was Bill Buford who was the first to suggest that she succeed him in the editor's chair. It has been her passion ever since. The original plan for the title was very modest, she says. "We would sell a few thousand copies and talk about the same artists over and over again and make them famous. The litany of artists in those days was artists like Maggie Hambling and John Bellany. Our business plan was very naïve."

Even now, she admits it is a tough business to juggle. Maintaining the quality, particularly the reproduction of works of art, is terribly expensive. But since those early days when it was very English, it has moved towards more of an international perspective, epitomised by the new edition which has taken an American theme designed for the assault on the US market. Future editions will focus on other parts of the world, starting with Germany. A re-design has finally made it easy to spot the most important features.

None the less, the British market for art magazines is quite crowded at the moment. Wright pithily describes the long-established Art Review as the "Hello! of the art world" with its people-focused coverage. Frieze is "so hip it's about being hip and not about the visuals". And she was surprised at the revamped Tate magazine, which is now being produced by the upmarket publisher Condé Nast. "It's hidden its intelligence under a bushel and is trying to be a style mag," she claims. "But it's new and it will find itself. I think there's room for all of us."

AND THE COMPETITION...

The new bi-monthly Tate magazine (£4) was a logical result of the massive public interest generated by the new Tate Modern. It is a revamped version of the journal that has been sent to Tate members for years, but is now produced by the glossy publishers Condé Nast. About 60,000 of the 90,000 copies printed are for members, and the rest will be sold at news-stands. Sir Nicholas Serota, the Tate's director, believes that it can have broad appeal as well as authority under its new editor, Robert Violette, formerly a publisher of art books.