By Emma Crichton - Miller
Over the past 10 years corporate collections have been transformed from a secret pleasure enjoyed by employees of the leading banks, law firms and financial institutions to widely publicised cultural assets, used both to brand a company and build internal corporate identity and as part of a wide-ranging package of community and social responsibility activities.
This is partly because over that same period contemporary art has become so valuable. What began as a modest trend in the 1970s and 1980s for companies to start collecting the art of their own time has turned out to be a quite spectacularly good move, both financially and in terms of media visibility.
As the amount of business money flowing into the arts generally has increased, with UK business donations, exhibition sponsorships, mentoring programmes, corporate partnerships and so on totalling £600m last year, so the corporate collection has come to seem ever more the cornerstone of all such activity, the proof of cultural credibility.
From ad hoc participants in an activity largely led by important public galleries, commercial galleries and serious individual private collectors, large multinational businesses have become big players in the contemporary art world. With access worldwide to local art intelligence and with the capacity to act fast, they can now have a decisive impact on the increasingly global art market - able, even with quite modest purchasing budgets, to seize opportunities no longer possible for more bureaucratic public institutions. At the same time, by forging partnerships such as the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, a gallery founded jointly by Deutsche Bank and the Guggenheim Museum, or UBS's joint ventures with Tate and other museums worldwide, they can make their collections available to a much wider public.
Perhaps the oldest systematically conceived corporate collection is the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, founded by David Rockefeller in 1959, and now numbering some 30,000 works distributed through 450 global locations. Rockefeller established a handful of principles, among them: to buy the art of the time, from young, unknown or emerging artists; to use museum standards of conservation and stewardship and to display the art throughout the workplace for the pleasure and stimulus of the workforce.
The value of the works was a consideration - this is a bank, after all - and pieces are sold if they no longer suit but investment was never a priority and now employees and visitors can enjoy work by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Albers, Calder, Jasper Johns or Sam Francis that are separately worth millions.
It was this model that lay behind Deutsche Bank's decision in the 1970s to rationalise its own rather ad hoc accumulations. "The bank had been collecting steadily since the 1870s," explains Alistair Hicks, Deutsche Bank's art adviser. "And indeed we still have some lovely things from the earlier period by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Max Beckmann."
But various board members decided to take art activities away from the whim of a few and make them the responsibility of a committee of bankers advised by scholars. Now the largest corporate collection in the world, with 53,000 works in 75 different countries, its main motivation, besides creating a stimulating environment, is "to enable our staff to engage with the latest ideas".
For this reason it is almost entirely made up of works on paper, from the 1960s on. "Artists work out their ideas on paper. Works on paper are also generally cheaper, more accessible and easier to display in an office environment." Most were bought for around £1,000, although Hicks's budget at Frieze Art Fair, which Deutsche Bank sponsors, is £3,000-£5,000 a piece. He stresses that the bank has been anxious not to manipulate the market, "so it is an advantage for us to buy works of lesser value". They also buy across the board, following no single thread or fashion. The result is that Deutsche Bank has, as Hicks puts it, "one of the finest teaching collections in the world" of works on paper - although they break the rules when it comes to filling some of their buildings' dramatic atria. He is particularly attached to the large piece by Tony Cragg he acquired for their Winchester House headquarters. Called "Secretions" (1998) it is made up of thousands of ivory-coloured dice - "this piece leads in very well to the kind of art we look for: surprising, thought-provoking". It stands near to Anish Kapoor's monumental, polished stainless steel sculpture "Turning the World Upside Down II" (1996).
Deutsche Bank also lends widely and buys, Hicks suggests, conscious of "our duty to fill niches that museums and public institutions cannot fill". Five separate selections of work are currently touring the world.
Petra Arends, collection executive of UBS, reinforces the point that however desirable corporate collections are now to museums, "they start with the need to decorate an office". Indeed, at the current exhibition of UBS work at Mori Museum in Japan, the curators have built an office environment to display the work. So however ambitious some individuals within an organisation might be, "a corporate collection is rarely cutting-edge. You cannot have large-scale pieces or offensive pieces," she says.
UBS was first alerted to the value of its collection in 2000, when it acquired Paine Webber, the stock brokerage firm, along with a very interesting collection of contemporary American art. The strength was in late 20th-century European and American work. "We sold pieces that didn't fit the criteria - old Swiss masters, for instance," says Arends. Unlike other banks, however, UBS uses local curators throughout its worldwide network of offices, and a team of art consultants to advise them on new acquisitions.
"The beauty is that you do not have the handwriting of any one person.
It has a huge variety. We are now concentrating on Asian and Latin American work too as we have opened offices in these places," Arends says. Besides the desire to enhance the working environment, UBS uses the collection as part of a larger marketing and branding strategy that includes sponsorship of the Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach fairs. A few years ago they selected a core 1,000 works from the collection that are currently touring the world.
The collection of law firm Simmons & Simmons is very different. Until the 1980s the company hung the more staid 18th-century prints common to almost every other law firm in London. Then in 1981, Stuart Evans, a partner who has a passion for contemporary art ignited by childhood visits to Newcastle galleries, suggested that the firm do something to differentiate itself. He won the other partners round and "since the late 1980s I have been a committee of one".
In the early 1990s Thomas Dane, the gallerist and a friend, told Evans "that we could create the first significant corporate collection of Young British Artists. He helped me source work by Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin, Gary Hume and others." In those days Simmons & Simmons would offer legal services to artists whose work they bought as well, cementing long-term relationships. In 1996 Evans produced a catalogue. "We realised then it is not just the art itself that is important but the relationship the collection created for us with the contemporary art project, with these values of creativity, dynamism, thinking outside the box."
Evans continues to buy all the work, on an annual budget of about £25,000, and also to curate the displays of what is now a leading collection of British contemporary art in all 21 of the firm's offices. The initial scepticism among some of his colleagues has softened to pride.