Jackie Wullschlager shows how to do corporate collecting right in the Financial Times with this review of the Fleming Foundation show of Scottish Colourists:

Lehman Brothers favoured dynamic American prints: following the company’s collapse, works by Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Indiana that once adorned its offices were sold off at auction in November. The Royal Bank of Scotland’s collection, the largest corporate art holding in Britain, speaks of a 250-year-history of dignity and canniness pierced with 21st-century ineptitude: from rare portraits by Johann Zoffany to David Hockney to a Callum Innes painting discarded after a cleaner doused it with ammonia, and a Frank Auerbach sold because it was deemed too difficult for employees to live with. Following RBS’s rescue in 2008, the future of its 2,000 art- works, most never shown publicly, is uncertain.Continue Reading