Artists want consumers, and patrons want inventive objects that mirror their standing. Traditionally, the good patrons have been highly effective people 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 house. American patronage initially adopted this individualistic sample—in 1943, Peggy Guggenheim commissioned Jackson Pollock to color his largest image but for her Manhattan townhouse. After 1945, nonetheless, a brand new type of inventive patronage arose, reflecting the rise of that icon of midcentury capitalism, the American company, and creating a brand new style: what Alex J. Taylor calls “company modernism.”
Mr. Taylor’s “Types of Persuasion” is a well-researched, revealing account of how avant-garde artwork and design crammed the “fishbowl foyers” of Midtown Manhattan, the imaginations of board members and the pockets of a fortunate few artists, together with Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist and Pablo Picasso. Mr. Taylor, an artwork historian on the College of Pittsburgh, rejects the still-popular fiction that the avant-garde artwork of the Sixties was within the vanguard of the political left, or that “sovereign statements of unbiased creativity” reminiscent of Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup” sequence have been “emancipatory expressions of resistance in opposition to the cultural norms of midcentury society.” Relatively, the writer suggests, company modernism was a collaboration between companies and artists: “enterprise artwork,” as Warhol later known as it.
