The Art of Business

Artists need buyers, and patrons need artistic objects that reflect their status. Historically, the great patrons have been powerful individuals in societies whose dynamism created surplus wealth: Lorenzo de’ Medici for Leonardo da Vinci in Renaissance Florence, or the British shipowner Frederick Richards Leyland, who in 1876 commissioned the designer Thomas Jeckyll and the painter James McNeill Whistler to create a “Peacock Room” for his London home. American patronage initially followed this individualistic pattern—in 1943, Peggy Guggenheim commissioned Jackson Pollock to paint his largest picture yet for her Manhattan townhouse. After 1945, however, a new form of artistic patronage arose, reflecting the rise of that icon of midcentury capitalism, the American corporation, and creating a new genre: what Alex J. Taylor calls “corporate modernism.”