The council hopes the artwork will reduce graffiti and vandalism

The council initiative involves using large reprints of paintings from the East Sussex city's art collection to cover windows instead of chipboard.

Councillor Geoffrey Theobald, of the environment committee, said the idea had come from California, where it had cut crime and anti-social behaviour.

The images will be re-used elsewhere when the buildings are re-occupied.

The first empty building to be transformed was an empty Cancer Research shop on New Road, near the Theatre Royal.

'Negative impact'

A window covered with chipboard and graffiti has now been replaced with a tough sheet of plastic, printed with a 12ft by 8ft reproduction of a painting called Brighton Front, by British artist CHH Burleigh in 1920.

The painting shows people promenading on the seafront, with the Metropole Hotel in the background.

Over the next few weeks empty buildings at Pool Valley and on St James's Street will also become works of art when The Seaside, a local 1920s coastal scene by Alice Maude Fanner, and The Ponte Vecchio, Florence, by Santoro Francesco Raffaelo, are installed.