Corporate Art Collections: A Handbook to Corporate Buying

By Charlotte Appleyard

This volume in the series of Handbooks in International Art Business published in association with Sotheby's Institute of Art offers a timely guide to the history, nature and importance of corporate collecting and the different reasons for starting and maintaining corporate collections, including investment, cultural cachet, and asset diversification. Based on interviews with the curators, consultants and investors who run such collections, and more extended case studies of important collections, the book concludes with an examination of when corporate collecting becomes a liability and the market-impact of de-accessioning, looking ahead to the future of corporate collecting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lund Humphries
• Release date: Jun 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781848221093

Book preview

Robertson

PREFACE

In October 1988, one year after Black Monday when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell nearly 23 per cent in a single trading session, the international market journal Art & Auction introduced its annual corporate art edition with the troubling headline: ‘Is Corporate Collecting Dead?’. Given the parlous state of the economy, and the blow to corporate confidence delivered by the latest Wall Street panic, the query was more than fair, and Art & Auction was not alone in wondering. At first glance, the editors seemed to have answered it for their readers by virtue of context: the question, in blood-red capitals, lies splashed across a detail of a lavish nineteenth-century landscape painting, in the foreground of which a woman lies dying while her assailant is falling – index-like – into a ravine. But was the magazine making a rather more subversive point?

It would have taken more than a casual observer to note that earlier in the same year Christie’s New York had offered the same painting, Thomas Cole’s 1826 Landscape with Figures: A Scene from Last of the Mohicans, as a highlight of its American paintings sale. Soaring above its initial $250,000–350,000 estimate, the work (now with Chicago’s Terra Foundation) was hammered down to Berry-Hill Galleries for $1,045,000. More importantly for journalistic purposes, however, the underbidders included, quite openly, agents acting on behalf of corporate collections, eager to include this masterpiece of the Hudson River School amongst the holdings of major American businesses – just seven months after history’s worst stock market disaster. Great art, even in an era of economic uncertainty, was still great art, and great corporate collections were continuing to acquire it aggressively in the most public of arenas. Something about the corporate passion for cultural investment seemed to have become so ingrained that it transcended the contemporary climate of financial scrutiny, and allowed for conspicuous consumption in a way that might have been seen as indulgent or rash only a half-generation before. Corporate collecting, it turns out, was not dead at all.

Two decades later, has anything changed? As we prepare this book for publication, the global economy is still affected by a crisis that far overshadows the 1987–88 disaster. Nevertheless, around the globe, the principal players have continued to maintain and actively develop corporate collections that in many cases rival the world’s finest museums and private holdings. Instead of the handful of institutions, principally banks and family-owned firms, that collected seriously in the middle of the twentieth century, there are literally thousands of companies across all industries which have made art an integral part of their portfolios. To be sure, in the face of an uncertain economic future concessions have been made to the baying of the media hounds: when Goldman Sachs unveiled its new New York headquarters in late 2009, for example, the multimillion-dollar commissioned murals by Franz Ackermann and Julie Mehretu (plate 2) received considerable press attention, in part because they were interpreted as a gift to the city by virtue of their positioning and visibility, despite being kept at a slight remove from the masses. To call the murals ‘public art’ would be an exaggeration, but Goldman, after months of abuse for its deceptive practices during the last market bubble, nevertheless managed to avoid criticism for in-your-face spending while New York proverbially burned. But it is the rarity of such criticism that signifies the essential nature of corporate collecting for art market and business culture alike. More often than not, the art acquired and sequestered by major corporations is viewed as a net positive both internally and externally, a source of pride, public relations and profit for the savvy investor and a fundamental niche of the wider marketplace.

This book seeks to examine the many reasons why institutions take the plunge into an asset class that is usually very far from their core businesses. The history of patronage is nearly as old as art itself, of course, but the shift from a model dating from the Renaissance, in which merchant-princes and captains of industry used the fruits of their labour to purchase or commission superlative art either for their private residences or for the benefit of the public (or of God and the Church), is surprisingly recent. In considering this transition, however, it is important to isolate ‘modern’ corporate collecting from another great but much older tradition, the hanging of decorative works and portraits of founders and directors to beautify a boardroom and honour a firm’s standing and reputation. This approach can certainly result in a collection of magnificent art, but by and large such assemblages are not what we generally consider ‘great’ corporate collections, unless good luck, good taste and generous budgets were all available to those making ‘business relevant’ acquisitions. Instead, the model of today’s leading corporate collections tends to reflect the identity of the firm and value growth potential and artistic merit above subject matter. There is not an overwhelming demand for scenes of bankers at work – excepting perhaps Andreas Gursky’s photographs of trading floors, which have appeared in the artistic holdings of companies everywhere from the Deutsche Börse to, until lately, Lehman Brothers – but there is an overwhelming demand for first-rate art that spans genres and periods. With the caveat that subject matter need often be workplace-friendly, the top corporate collections in development today are more diverse, ambitious and quality-conscious than ever before.

Why have so many companies, large and small, chosen to collect at this level? The reasons are as varied as those for collecting personally, but generally fall into one of several camps. The earliest, famously pioneered by Chase Manhattan under the direction of David Rockefeller and IBM under Thomas J. Watson, Sr., tended to be the offshoots of an owner’s or chairman’s intense personal interests. The scepticism and accusations of frivolity that once greeted Rockefeller’s endeavour in particular have long since faded, but this is in some ways the most enduring public understanding of the essence of corporate collecting, and one that was subsequently reinforced by Malcolm Forbes’s splendid, and widely publicised, collecting for Forbes Magazine. But there are also the niche collections, possibly best described as offshoots of a corporation’s interests, so much as this is possible to quantify. The Campbell Collection (now at Winterthur) is an exceptionally literal take on this, consisting exclusively of soup tureens, as is the Folger’s Coffee Collection (of English silver coffee pots), but one also finds their legacy in the pastoral scenes of the John Deere Collection at Deere & Company, the American tractor makers. Then comes a broad and ever-expanding category of companies with the foresight and wherewithal to enliven their properties with pieces that have both investment potential and prestige value, either internally or externally or both. From the perspective of the bottom line, it makes much more sense to buy art that has a reasonable chance of appreciation than to buy decorative works: faced with bare walls, particularly in areas used by guests or senior staff, a company can choose either to spend small sums on an asset that, like the furniture, will eventually grow tired, or to invest in promise and quality and hope to add both beauty and a source of future capital to their workplace. That generation of future capital has been the primary goal for some collections, such as the British Rail Pension Fund, but some of the most famous corporate collections have only become known to the world when their owners found themselves in precarious positions. It is then that the directors and shareholders – or, in the most unfortunate circumstances, the creditors and the courts – can go back to the international art market with preserved assets from better times to generate quick cash.

While the art is in situ, however, it is the public–private conundrum that forms the most controversial aspect of this part of the collecting world: do companies have a responsibility to make their works available to those beyond their walls? This is a double-edged sword for many institutions, particularly those in high-exposure industries like investment banking. Loans and public display let the wider world enjoy the art, and can result in good publicity for the firm which supplies or makes possible a blockbuster exhibition, but public display can also arouse the common suspicion that corporations use vast profits for their own glorification. The investment value of art can be difficult to defend in the wake of marketing disasters like the 2008 redecoration at Merrill Lynch, in which the CEO famously purchased for his office a $35,000 ‘commode on legs’. While the object was familiar enough to anyone in the trade as a low cabinet of the sort popularised by the eighteenth-century French court, news story after news story pilloried the company for wasting money on what was widely misinterpreted as an antique toilet. The outrage expressed over a $35,000 piece of furniture can easily transfer to a $3,500,000 painting, or a $350,000 one for that matter, and there can be some embarrassment when a firm’s tastes appear too good, or too expensive. This can be mitigated by loans to institutions, though, and the attachment of a company’s name to a museum exhibition tag must do more good than harm, given the number of major exhibitions made possible only through the generosity, both financial and artistic, of art-conscious firms.

Such inclination towards publicity proved immensely helpful to us when approaching curators and advisors in the preparation of this volume. To be sure, we were met with as wide a variety of reactions as there are types of collections. In the end, however, many collections not already public made the decision to open their doors to us, and by extension to you. Although businesses are always businesses, and must make decisions accordingly, companies that choose to acquire significant or exciting groups of material tend to be bound together by a common appreciation for the aesthetic and intellectual stimulation that comes with seeing great art, as well as a general belief that art is something to be shared. Those who oversee the collections do so because they love the material, and are more often than not quite justifiably proud of the work they do. Spending a company’s money is easy, but doing it judiciously in a field as notoriously unpredictable as the art market requires tremendous talent.

It is that talent that we wanted to showcase. There are a number of fine coffee-table books and volumes of theory on the corporate collecting landscape; this book is primarily a tool for the student or connoisseur who is interested in the professional mechanics of corporate collecting: How are the great assemblages of 2012 operated and run? What drives their owners and their caretakers? And, perhaps most practically, how does one gain entrance into the field? We hope that you enjoy discovering some of the world’s finest examples of corporate collecting as much as we have, and that this book reveals a section of the market that relatively few people can easily access and enjoy. From Canary Wharf to Midtown Manhattan, there are some great museums hidden from view.

Charlotte Appleyard and James Salzmann

London, 2012

INTRODUCTION:

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN CORPORATE COLLECTION

There is no better place to begin our survey than JPMorgan Chase, owners of probably the most famous, and arguably the most influential, of all the corporate art collections. JPMorgan Chase remains a powerhouse in the market, but it is also legendary as the place where corporate collecting in the contemporary sense first began.

In 1959, the venerable Chase Manhattan Bank – a then-recent merger of Chase Bank, a nineteenth-century institution, with the Manhattan Company, founded in 1799 – moved its combined headquarters to Wall Street. David Rockefeller, scion of America’s first family of industry and philanthropy, was nearing the top ranks of the company, which his relatives had long controlled. As a director of the bank and a long-term art enthusiast, Rockefeller suggested that the company might begin an art collection to decorate the offices and inspire its employees.

The Chase Manhattan art collection began in part by chance … Having been exposed to beautiful works of art in my parents’ home since childhood, and having been involved at an early age in planning for the Museum of Modern Art, of which my mother was a founding member, I had more than a casual interest in the visual arts.¹

Rockefeller’s typical understatement does not mask the fact that, as is still frequently the case, the germ from which the collection grew was essentially the passion of a senior figure at the firm – in his case, one with the resources and influence to shape policy at the highest level.

Although a banker by profession, Rockefeller came to the industry filled not only with enthusiasm for his mother’s family business of finance, but also for her personal passion: a much more daring variety of art than most of the mid-century plutocracy would have championed. He also knew from the start that he wanted to marry these two interests. In his keynote address to the National Industrial Conference Board in September 1966, Rockefeller expounded upon the ideals which had driven him for the better part of the last decade:

The arts are a vital part of the human experience, and surely our success as a civilised society will be judged largely by the creative activities of our citizens in art, architecture, music and literature. Improving the condition of the performing and visual arts in this country calls, in my judgement, for a massive cooperative effort in which businesses must assume a much larger role than they have in the past. The corporate community as a whole has a long way to go in accepting the arts as an appropriate area for the exercise of its social responsibility.²

That statement, delivered for what was itself the fiftieth anniversary of the conference, could easily be seen as a summation and blueprint for corporate collecting and corporate social responsibility for the next fifty years.

The premises to which Chase Manhattan transferred were a modernist building designed with Bauhaus-inspired functionalism; there was very little ornamentation or decoration built into the architecture of the building itself. Discussions about the interior design and the environment within the new building were part of the conversation from the earliest planning stages of the architecture, and records of those discussions show that Chase Manhattan and its architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill were working far ahead of their time in terms of their attitude and approach towards the importance of an inspirational workplace. When asked by James Fox, the bank’s Vice President for Public Relations, about the ‘economic or human’ impact of the design for his company’s clients, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s project team framed their answer in terms of both human resources and financial common sense. ‘What we are aiming at is to provide a pleasant place for employees where they can do their jobs happily,’ said Skidmore’s Walter Severinghaus. ‘Everyone is sensitive to his surroundings. Hopefully if we have done a good job, you will have less labor turnover and better productivity than in a cluttered place.’ His colleague Davis Allen concurred; with their spectacular 1951–52 Lever House project, there was ‘a big reduction in turnover of personnel.’³

In his essay ‘Work Places for Art’ in Art at Work: The Chase Manhattan Collection, Severinghaus explains that with this entirely new office and the boundless space it presented, Chase was going to have to come up with a system