More evidence that the worlds of business and art are increasingly intertwined comes from a recent US art exhibition. In golden hues, Vincent Van Gogh painted French farmers in 1888 gathering their wheat for a landscape he called The Harvest. Now, it's Andersen Consulting that hopes to do the reaping.

The $8 billion (€7.06 billion) global management and consulting firm was the sole corporate sponsor of the National Gallery of Art's popular three-month-long show, "Van Gogh's Van Goghs: Masterpieces from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam," a fact tastefully noted on walls at the gallery and in publications connected with the exhibition.

But for Andersen, the sought-after pay-off was not the occasional mention in a review of the show, which ended earlier this month, or even in whatever goodwill it might have engendered with 480,496 art enthusiasts who viewed the 72 paintings by the Dutch master.

The consulting organisation's goal in paying somewhat more than $1 million to put its name on the show was burnishing its image with the 1,096 corporate chieftains it invited to a half-dozen black-tie dinners and exhibition previews. They are the same Fortune 100 company executives who decide whether to pay millions of dollars to hire a consultant such as Andersen.