Walk into any lobby in London's financial heart and the change is clear: the City's giants have dropped the Old Masters and are embracing contemporary art instead in the battle to impress clients and inspire employees.
Ditching Thames landscapes, London's powerhouses have developed a taste for cutting-edge work, collecting emerging artists, often on modest budgets, as the corporate focus shifts from promoting gravitas to portraying a bold, fresh outlook.
Many now own world-class collections, with Deutsche Bank, for example, showing off works that stretch from a Damien Hirst and an Anish Kapoor in its London lobby to R.B. Kitaj, Bridget Riley and Lucian Freud in the meeting rooms upstairs.
The shift to contemporary art has also run parallel to a need to bring corporate collections into the company structure - to reflect the brand, and contain the cost.
Where in the past, pieces were often accumulated by enthusiastic executives whose spending could run into millions, the average amount now spent on pieces of art is closer to 10,000-20,000 pounds.
Collections are also professionally handled, with items more often than not picked by freelance curators or outside advisers.
"It is about competition and it's about showing they are sophisticated and modern," said Prue O'Day, a director of independent art adviser Anderson O'Day, who has worked with dozens of corporate clients from Ernst & Young to WestLB.
"London is a cultural mecca and that has really affected the way people view everything. To say nothing of the drip effect of the Tate Modern and the Frieze art fair," she says. "And of course, we are a much more visual culture now."
Wealthy bankers and industrialists have long flirted with the arts - from Henry Tate to U.S. coke and steel magnate Henry Clay Frick and David Rockefeller at Chase Manhattan Bank - passionate patrons who amassed some of the world's most important art collections.
But the culture of enlightened investments of passion largely ended after the excesses of the 1980s, which famously saw a Japanese insurance magnate snap up one of Vincent Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" paintings for a record 25 million pounds.
The aim now, companies say, is to engage the wider community, using art committees and professional curators.
"Businesses have become more outward-looking. They have been forced to keep in touch with generation X, generation Y," said Chris Turner, chairman of the London arts committee at law firm Clifford Chance, referring to people born after the 1960s.
"We see art as connecting us with new ideas, artists representing the new generation. It is very easy in some professions to get a bit remote from what is going on."
FLASHING THE CASH
The taste for the contemporary has boosted firms' appetites to promote up-and-coming artists, often sponsoring exhibitions and prizes as well as buying their work. HSBC launched a cultural sponsorship programme last year and runs cultural art exchanges, reinforcing its brand as a local bank.
