Scotsman Review Interview: Anthony d'Offay - Opening the hoard

ANTHONY d'Offay spreads his hands. "Everything you want in the world is in this room," he says. We're standing in a room full of Andy Warhol's stitched photographs, made in his final years, looking at images of beauty, sex, food, death, celebrity, freedom.

"There you are," he says. "Liberty and enlightenment, Sunday brunch, good-looking ladies with their clothes off, good-looking gentlemen with their clothes off…" A mischievous smile plays around his unreadable eyes.

D'Offay is installing the Edinburgh section of Artist Rooms, part of the collection he amassed in his 30 years as one of the country's most prominent art dealers, and which he gifted last year to the joint ownership of National Galleries of Scotland and the Tate – 725 works by 32 artists are being mounted, from Stromness to Bexhill-on-Sea, in one of the most ambitious art shows ever.

Edinburgh's allocation of six artists, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, is one of the largest, and has one of undoubted coups of the collection: five rooms of work by Damien Hirst. D'Offay is clearly pleased about this. He fell in love with Edinburgh while at university here in the early 1960s, and since he closed his London gallery in 2001 has thrown his energies into helping to stage blockbusting Scottish exhibitions of Warhol, Ron Mueck and Jasper Johns with NGS.

He has reserved a room of its own for Hirst's Away From The Flock, the seminal work of a lamb pickled in formaldehyde, which is one of his personal favourites. "It will look beautiful there, with its art-historical and religious references. It's a very good way to look at Damien's work, in two opposing traditions, classical and iconoclastic, breaking all the rules, and making great classical things. Look at that cabinet. They just put the door on and already it looks sexy."

The D'Offay gift was described by Tate director Nicholas Serota as "one of the most generous gifts that has ever been made to museums in this country". He accepted cost price for the works, about a fifth of their commercial valuation of 125 million.

However, the gift came with a strict list of conditions regarding its use, and d'Offay continues to take a hands-on interest. As he threads his way among the packing crates and gaffer tape, a cup of Japanese tea cradled expertly in his hand, members of the installation team stop him to ask questions. He carefully applies his eye to Hirst's Pain Killers photographic series, which is hung two inches too high: "Down, down, down just a fraction… perfect." He smiles benignly: "It's very nice of the curators here to lend me their ears."

D'Offay is an enigma in the world of art. His gallery was one of the driving forces in the reawakening of contemporary art in Britain, showing international names: Beuys, Warhol, Richter, Hodgkin, Rothko, Gilbert & George and more. While the epicentre of BritArt was Jay Jopling's White Cube, the d'Offay Gallery was its incubator. Jopling bought his first work from d'Offay; Damien Hirst worked for him as a gallery assistant.

But he shunned the limelight and is portrayed as a dark, serious figure skulking in the background, causing artist broadcaster Matthew Collings to describe him as "dark and pale with a vampire air". He shows a refreshing lack of interest in money or celebrity. But his coolness conceals an immense personal warmth and a passion for art which is unashamedly romantic.

He is sending Artist Rooms around the country because regional museums can't afford to buy cutting-edge contemporary art. "It seems to me cruel and inappropriate that you can see Damien Hirst on the front page of the paper every ten days, but the opportunity to see his work in museums in almost non-existent.

"Our future depends on the creativity of young people. And how to do you stimulate young people? By getting them to ask questions of themselves. This work is a battery of ideas, as Joseph Beuys would say, which can recharge and fire the batteries of young people."

The next few months will see openings around the country – Bruce Nauman at Tramway in Glasgow, Robert Mapplethorpe in Inverness, Richard Long in Belfast, Diane Arbus in Cardiff, Bill Viola in Stromness, Ron Mueck in Aberdeen – a feat made possible only with the support for the Art Fund and the Scottish Government, whom d'Offay describes as "the fairy godmother to the whole thing".

Why so many? "Where were you born?" D'Offay pins me with a dark eye. Aberdeen, I say. "OK. I was born in Leicester. So it's for you and for me."

In Edinburgh, Warhol and Hirst are set alongside names less familiar: Ellen Gallagher, Vija Celmins, Alex Katz and photographer Francesca Woodman. "She took her own life at the age of 23, yet she managed to produce an extraordinarily important and moving body of work about herself, and about light and space and courage and loneliness."

"I was a never a collector," d'Offay says. "A collector very carefully chooses a picture and puts it over the sofa. I never had any idea of that whatsoever. I had the idea of putting together rooms with the purpose of inspiring young people. We had certain things at the gallery that somehow we just never offered to anyone, because we felt there was some other purpose.

"I don't like the class system," he says, quite suddenly. "One of things I try to do in museums all over the world is engage with the people installing the work, ask them what they think the height should be; you get such intelligent replies."

And he slips behind the cordon in among the crates and the packing tape to find the next Damien Hirst.

• Artists Rooms, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 14 March to 8 November.