Corporate collections: The greatest art you can’t see

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I am standing in a private dining room on the seventh floor of the London offices of UBS, the global financial services firm. A table is set for lunch, with a menu promising bresaola with caponata followed by roast lemon sole. Before the powerful guests arrive, though, I am whisked away. As I go, my eye is drawn to some art hanging on the wall: a pair of rare, large watercolours by the contemporary Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. These are just two of the 32,000 objects that make up the UBS Art Collection, which includes paintings, photographs, drawings, prints, video works and sculptures from the last 50 years.

Corporate art collections are hardly a new phenomenon. In the late 1950s, the American plutocrat David Rockefeller decided that Chase Manhattan Bank should start acquiring art. A decade later, Flemings bank, which was eventually sold to Chase Manhattan in 2000, began building up a notable collection of Scottish art, now housed in the Fleming Collection in London’s Berkeley Square. Today, Deutsche Bank boasts the largest corporate art collection in the world, with more than 57,000 paintings, photographs, prints and drawings, including Gerhard Richter’s Abstract Painting (Faust), which hangs in the firm’s lobby on Wall Street.

But the UBS Art Collection, which contains an artwork for every two employees in the firm’s global workforce of around 60,000 people, is recognised as one of the most impressive corporate art collections of them all. Insured for hundreds of millions of dollars, it has many highlights, including major paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lucian Freud, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden and Christopher Wool. Aspects of the collection have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Tate Modern in London.

Art for art’s sake

Combined with an extensive sponsorship portfolio, including support of the annual Art Basel fairs and collaboration with the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation, the UBS collection ensures that contemporary art is an essential component of the company’s public identity. But what I want to know is: why do companies such as UBS bother with collecting expensive modern and contemporary art at all? What’s in it for them?

“Art gives the business personality,” explains Stephen McCoubrey, one of the curators in charge of the UBS Art Collection, over coffee. “When you walk into these rooms, they are pretty much all done by the same handful of fit-out architects from one company to another. What makes them unique – what makes this the UBS office and not the Credit Suisse or Goldman Sachs office – is the art on the walls and the people sitting here.”

McCoubrey says that the collection is divided in two parts. One consists of lower-value artworks decorating regular office space in UBS’s 850 buildings around the world. The other comprises swankier art shown to clients whom UBS wishes to impress.

“Imagine you want to send out a simple message that you have good taste,” he says. “You could do that with 19th century paintings, good design – all sorts of visual cues. But contemporary art represents a company as dynamic, active and growing – as being part of the world today – and it sends that message to everybody who comes in.”

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