New show reveals quality and breadth of corporate art

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jan/12/corporate-art-book-show

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On the 42nd floor of a steep mountain-shaped office building in the Shinjuku skyscraper district of Tokyo, visitors can see some breathtaking paintings, including a Gauguin, a Cézanne and one of Van Gogh's Sunflowers. Ninety minutes away in Hakone, you can venture underground in pursuit of works by Monet, Renoir, Chagall and Picasso.

Both are outstanding examples of corporate art collections, the sort that are the subject of a book published on Monday and of a new show running at the auction house Bonhams in London for two weeks.

The show will include works lent by companies including HSBC France, Statoil in Norway, E.ON in Germany and the law firm Clifford Chance in the UK. Among the artists on display are Tracey Emin, Otto Dix, Cornelia Parker and Richard Hamilton.

What both the exhibition and the book reveal is the remarkable scale and breadth of the art that has been collected by corporations since the Renaissance, when the Monte dei Paschi bank in Siena decided it needed nice things for its walls and established what is thought to be the first corporate art collection, in 1472.

Peter Harris, who co-authored A Celebration of Corporate Art Programmes Worldwide with Shirley Reiff Howarth, said: "What I thought was amazing – and bear in mind I saw hundreds of arts programmes – was that each one was different. They've all got a different rationale, different ideas, different ways, which makes it really interesting."

Japanese companies seem particularly keen for the great art they collect to be seen. As well as the museum run by Sompo insurance group in Shinjuka and the Pola Group's subterranean galleries, there is Panasonic's Shiodome museum in Tokyo – the place to go for anyone interested in the French fauvist Georges Rouault (it has 230 works by him) – and the Shiseido gallery, which has a fine collection of Japanese contemporary art.

Harris is a longtime advocate of the benefits of corporate art. "The company wins because it promotes itself to the world and its employees; the artist wins because he or she has a new audience."

An example in Britain is the Fleming-Wyfold art foundation, which emerged from the family-run Flemings bank, sold to Chase Manhattan in 2000. The foundation has around 800 works of Scottish art in its collection, from Samuel Peploe to Elizabeth Blackadder, which can be seen free of charge in its London gallery from Tuesday to Saturday.

There are other British firms in the book, but not many. "We certainly aren't up there among the Japanese and the Germans and the Spanish and the Americans," Harris said. "Germany has this great tradition of supporting contemporary art and music. We're just not quite there, I'm afraid."

Harris believes an art collection says something about a company. "It's for image. It is to tell the world and their employees things about them. If you go into any office before the staff arrives these days, they all look roughly the same: rows and rows of computers – and you think, what is this company all about? The answer is, it's on the walls."

Or sometimes on the floor. The Swiss bank Pictet & Cie has a collection of large, brightly coloured fibreglass mushrooms by Sylvie Fleury on one of its office floors; and the Belgacom Group in Belgium has a splendid Sol LeWitt geometric wooden sculpture in front of one of its windows.

Much of a corporate art collection will often not be seen by the public but many now offer virtual tours, such as Saxo Bank in Denmark, which has a fine collection of contemporary art including an Elmgreen and Dragset sculpture of a young boy about to leap from a diving board in the company HQ atrium.

Harris says that if the art they explore were found in one museum, it would be the finest in the world.

All proceeds from the book will go to the Wapping Arts Trust, chaired by Harris, which is celebrating 25 years of rewarding companies that promote art in the workplace.

<em>Highlights from Corporate Collections, Bonhams, 101 New Bond Street, London W1S 1SR, 13-24 January</em>

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