The Art Of Management

 

Ten years ago, the two founders of a New York City-based executive search firm spent their first retainer on three prints from a gallery in Greenwich Village instead of on salaries for themselves. Since then, the collection and the company have grown extensively. "We both come from families with art backgrounds," says the company president. "Why should our 'home away from home' be any different?"

The president of a venture capital firm in Des Moines collects contemporary art in part, he says, because it gives his office a "colorful and vibrant tone, one that says our company is aggressive and progressive and likes to take risks."

At the warehouses of a small industrial distributor of pipes, valves, and fittings, the company president has collected more than 100 pieces of avant garde works from inner-city Detroit artists. One of the paintings on the warehouse wall is a 60-foot-by-32-foot oil of an industrial pipe. "It's rather aggressive art," the company president admits. "A lot of it is made from wreckage of the city. That's not particularly appealing to a lot of people, but it is to me."

Although large corporations such as IBM, Hallmark Cards, and Chase Manhattan Bank are among the better-known corporate art collectors in the country, smaller companies recently have gained a reputation for some of the more imaginative collections on view today. The reasons for collecting art are as varied as the photographs on the following eight pages. Some chief executive officers say they seek out the works of relatively young and unknown artists as a way of helping entrepreneurs like themselves. Others see art as a way of expressing the nature of their business to both the company's clients and its own employees. Perhaps the majority of CEOs, however, collect art simply because they love it and want to be surrounded by objects that reflect their own taste.

Part of the joy for these small company executives is in the collecting itself. One company's executive relies on both the suggestions of a New York City art consultant and his own diligence in following art media. Another company deliberately set out to build a collection that expresses the heritage and ethos of the region in which it is located.

Although the collections in this essay range in value from $20,000 to $2 million, most CEOs don't see their art primarily as an investment. Nor do privately held companies have to justify art expenditures to stockholders or directors who may be as concerned about the image the art projects as they are about the prudence of the investment. The result is more freedom for CEOs to collect whatever they like, for whatever reasons they choose. As one CEO says about his art: "The big reason it's there is because I enjoy it -- and I'm president of the company."

PACESETTER CORP.

It took Philip Schrager, chief executive officer of a home improvement products company in Omaha, several years of just looking at art before he decided to make his first purchase. Since then, he has acquired about 150 paintings and sculptures that are now valued at over $2 million. In the process, Pacesetter Corp., a $50 million public company, has come to look more like an art gallery than a business -- a comparison that Schrager openly welcomes. "Our collection sets us apart," he says. "It's an example of the company spirit."

A visitor walking through Pacesetter's main building, located in an industrial section of the city, would find himself confronted with an assortment of abstract contemporary paintings, including minimal art that can look, to the inexperienced eye, like a jumble of splashy colors, geometric shapes, and sculptures that some would say belong as props in a science-fiction film. The minimal period of art, Schrager acknowledges, is "pretty difficult to get into and appreciate. But once I did, my appreciation kept growing."

Schrager relies on a New York City art consultant to recommend pieces, but, in the end, it is Schrager who decides which pieces to acquire. Schrager's collection spills over into a factory next to the main office, his home, and even his Lear jet, whose exterior was painted by a minimalist artist whose works figure prominently in the company's collection. "Art collecting is a passion for me," Schrager says, then adds jokingly, "Let's put it this way. If it came down to a choice between certain paintings and certain employees, I would choose the art."

EDWARD W. DUFFY & CO.

The two warehouses of Edward W. Duffy & Co. -- a small industrial distributor of valves, pipe, and fittings -- are hardly the place where one would expect to find an art collection so impressive that it was recently included in an anthology of corporate art collectors.

But within the warehouse space, located in southwest Detroit, are more than 100 pieces of what James Duffy Jr., president of the company, calls "aggressive art." Almost without exception, the sculptures, paintings, and murals are done by artists from Detroit's inner city, who have taken both their materials and their inspiration from the city's deteriorating neighborhoods. In addition to sculptures that are made from such components as old pipe, jagged wire, rags, plywood, glass fiber, plastic, epoxy resin, and various metals there are three murals, one of an empty rowboat 22 feet long and 10 feet high, and another, three times that big, of an industrial pipe. "I have been here many years, and the property represents me in some sense," Duffy says. "So does the art. It's certainly of our time.

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