HomeNewsPressPress Archive 2005UBS Seeks to Enhance Image

Bloomberg News, 27.01.2005

UBS Seeks to Enhance Image With MoMa Show of Warhol, Gursky

Zurich's UBS AG, Europe's biggest bank by assets and the No. 1 money manager for wealthy people, is revamping its corporate art collection to enhance its appeal to clients. Already displayed online, the works by artists from Andy Warhol and Lucian Freud to Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, will have their first exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, starting Feb. 4.

"Wealth management and investment banking clients are all interested in the cultural,'' says Petra Arends, collection executive of the Swiss bank's art holdings and former deputy head of the UBS art banking team. "The statistics show that, in general, higher education and wealth go along with interest in museums, opera and so on.'' MoMa's show will feature about 70 works including 44 pieces that UBS has donated or promised to the New York museum. The bank's board is allowing Arends to trim the collection to about 900 contemporary works from 2,600 pieces bought by UBS and by Donald Marron, former chairman of Paine Webber Group Inc., which UBS acquired in 2000, Arends said.

Banks from Deutsche Bank AG to Royal Bank of Scotland Plc are using contemporary art to appeal to younger or wealthier customers who buy art. Royal Bank's Edinburgh head office is adorned with 18th-century portraits of chairmen and landscapes, while its new London building features young artists.

UBS's private-banking unit had 772 billion Swiss francs ($649 billion) in assets under management at the end of September.

Chairman Collector

Chairman Marcel Ospel is a collector of post-World War II art. UBS's Bahnhofstrasse headquarters in Zurich are lined with works by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, and the Swiss bank owns pieces by artists from Robert Rauschenberg to Damien Hirst and Edward Ruscha.

Germany's hottest photographers and painters are represented, too: Struth, Gursky, Gerhard Richter and Neo Rauch.

German-born Arends, 45, a lawyer by training with straight blond hair and a square jaw, won't say what the collection is worth. ARTnews magazine in May valued it as high as $150 million.

The holdings will grow: UBS curator Matthias Winzen, who is also director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden, Germany, was hired in September and the collection's advisory board is now considering his recommended purchases of photography, Arends says.

"We will add works to make a world-class and high-quality photography collection,'' she says. Recommended acquisitions include the who's who of contemporary photographers, such as Holland's Rineke Dijkstra and Japan's Nobuyoshi Araki, Arends says.

Advisory Board

Arends expects to follow recommendations from the collection's advisory board, though "the final decision will be made by us,'' she says.

Future acquisitions may focus on lesser-known artists or regions, she says. "If the most up-and-coming artists are in Asia or Latin America, we will buy them.'' Besides Marron, who bought many of the works remaining in UBS's collection, advisory-board members are Yoshiko Mori, co- founder with her husband of Tokyo's Mori Art Museum; German art expert Jean-Christophe Ammann; and Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, chairman of cultural foundation Fundacion Cisneros in Venezuela.

Marron, who was chairman of UBS America until 2003, now runs Lightyear Capital, a private-equity firm in New York.

Many companies collected art in the 1970s and 1980s because their chief executives had a passion for it, Arends says. That game ended with a 1990 art-market crash that cost shareholders money, she says. It left some big contemporary collections in the hands of corporations, and they now have a duty to share their art with the world, she says.

"We want to share the collection globally,'' says Arends.

"Only a few people have seen The UBS Art Collection. It was mainly for decoration and only sometimes shown outside the bank.''

Art Tour

MoMa has agreed to send the UBS show on an international tour featuring halts in major cities, which are now being negotiated, she says.

Art isn't just for the elite, Arends says. "MoMa in Berlin,'' a show of the New York museum's collection that ended in September at the Neue Nationalgalerie, drew more than twice the number of expected visitors, some of whom queued for 10 hours, and the museum made money from the show, she says.

Corporate Role

With government backing for the arts shrinking, corporations will have to lend a hand, according to Arends. She says she envisions a day when shows of corporate collections, online or in museums, may be seen by a broader public than some highly intellectual museum exhibitions.

"I don't want to minimize curated exhibitions, but in future I see more art shown in a way to attract more people,'' she says.

Some highlights of the MoMa show: Andy Warhol's "Cagney,'' a 1962 silkscreen print of a still from the 1931 film, "The Public Enemy,'' showing the movie star in a shootout. Rauschenberg's "Untitled,'' a 1958 painting with images of coins, buildings and a cow. Lichtenstein's "Crying Girl,'' a 1963 ink drawing in the artist's comic-strip style.

European works include Anselm Kiefer's 1982 watercolor, "To the Unknown Painter,'' showing a building designed by Adolf Hitler's architect Albert Speer, and Freud's "Double Portrait,'' completed in 1990, of a man lying with his dog.

MoMa curator Ann Temkin may change the lineup before the show opens, Arends said. MoMa has been promised "Cagney'' and "To the Unknown Painter'' as gifts, according to the UBS Web site.

Art Basel

Sponsorship is an older part of UBS's art mandate. Wearing a beige dress in the Florida heat, Arends last month attended the Art Basel Miami Beach fair, where UBS was the main sponsor.

UBS clients scouted for art and dropped into the bank's corporate lounge for lunch, or champagne. In Switzerland, UBS has sponsored Art Basel, the biggest contemporary art fair, since 1993.

UBS's show at MoMa, "Contemporary Voices: Works from The UBS Art Collection,'' runs from Feb. 4 to April 25.

by Linda Sandler

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