“Business patronage of the arts has an ancient and honorable history, dating back as far as the Renaissance and the Medici munificence, and, more recently, to America’s Gilded Age, when individual business tycoons who amassed private fortunes seemed to develop en masse the acquisitive instinct for art. The ultimate beneficiaries of that acquisitive itch were American public institutions, libraries, and great art museums, whose collections were formed by such historically resonant family names as Morgan, Frick, Mellon, Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and many others…[T]he severe taxes imposed on private fortunes have discouraged patronage…But with the passage of the Revenue Act of 1935 [a legal sanction for corporate gifts, making 5 per cent of corporate income deductible as a charitable contribution] a new vision of the social uses of corporate wealth emerged… But it has only been in the last decade that corporations, as distinct from affluent individual businessmen, have begun to envision the world of art as a genuine source of inspiration and values as well as a resource for upgrading their own image in the public’s eye…
“Philip Morris Incorporated is one of a small, select group of a dozen corporate super-patrons of the arts that are spending a million dollars or more on the arts annually. The munificence of such public patronage, and its multiplying effect in encouraging matching federal grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the example of leadership it sets for other business patrons, make the study of Philip Morris’ corporate funding of the arts worthy of the general interest.”
Art in Business: The Philip Morris Story
Introduction: The Corporate Art Patron
Business Committee for the Arts
Sam Hunter
New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1979
