Selling Cigarettes, Art and Peace: Overlapping and Mutually Exclusive Goals behind Corporate Collecting for the Stuyvesant Collection

The history of corporate collections is almost always related to the 'invention' of an enlightened captain of industry, and as an expression of an intrinsic interest for art. There is more to be said about this, especially in the light of policies of national and international organizations to promote art, and through it, cementing European social coherence – and thus peace – in the aftermath of World War II. The various organizations that promoted corporate collecting, however, had different goals at different levels that not always coincided, and this led to a specific dynamics of corporate collecting, in which the 'healing' power of art was turned into an improvement of corporate reputation and a means of creating publicity. Thus, in the context of the Stuyvesant Collection, the initial ideological concept of 'cultural encounter' went up in smoke. This paper will therefore try to show that corporate collecting was actually rooted in the historical context of post-1945 international cultural politics, and how inter-cultural encounters in the end predominantly supported the creation of international business networks.