The General Electric Company Corporate Art Collection was founded in the early 1970s as the company moved to its new world headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut. From the outset, the main purpose of the collection was to enrich the GE work environment. The artwork that was henceforth assembled was of a wide aesthetic spectrum with visual styles ranging from gestural abstraction and pastoral landscapes, to contemporary photography. Presented in a full variety of mediums, the collection showed strong visual appeal, complimented by a sense of the quality, skill and commitment exhibited by the selected artists.
At its height, the GE Collection contained over 4,000 objects. It included works by contemporary masters Robert Motherwell, Joan Mitchell, David Hockney, Helen Frankenthaler, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jasper Johns alongside many others. With the objective that less than 10% of these works be in storage at any given time, the pieces were installed across General Electric’s corporate offices, including 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the sixty-acre campus in Fairfield, Connecticut, the renowned Management training center in Crontonville, New York and international locations such as London, Munich and Bangalore. Key pieces were also exhibited for public viewing in the Corporate Galleries and loaned to various museums.
This collection of artworks served to create a visual landscape that reflected and supported the values of GE and its employees. It promoted a sense of curiosity and creativity that encouraged viewers to take a moment out of their day to engage in new dialogues or simply revel in the limitless possibilities of the world and the cultures within it.
