To what extent does the art that a financial institution collects reflect its personality? In an era of branding, where companies spend millions on unifying their message, the art within its walls should surely be a reflection of the core values of a bank. Yet art is part of the creative process, and controlling it or shaping it is generally an unattainable goal. The unexpected ideas, thoughts and discussions provoked by art are just as much fun.
One institution that has done its best on the conceptual front is Deutsche Bank.
“Deutsche is the bank that has thought most about art,” says Alistair Hicks, its art adviser. That may sound arrogant, but few would dispute it.
Although the bank had been collecting art throughout its 130-year history, it was only in the late 1970s that a vorstand (supervisory board) member with the enchanting name of Dr Herbert Zapp hired a couple of professors and developed an art concept for the bank. Its essence was that art should make the work environment more stimulating and the bank should help support contemporary artists. The works of art bought by Deutsche Bank, mainly works on paper which are more accessible, along with spectacular ones for the main receptions “are categorically not for investment,” says Mr Hicks. The bank has about 50,000 works of art worldwide and one of the best post-1960s collections of works of art on paper.
But the art world is a backstabbing place. An art consultant at another bank says: “Deutsche… bought the obvious and quite expensive. They bought Anish Kapoor and Damien Hirst but once [they were] established. In the internal rooms [the art] is very boring. They have not broken new ground.”
This seems an unfair judgement, for, as Mr Hicks points out “for every [Lucian] Freud we have 50 or 60 younger artists whose work is not nearly as valuable”. The average purchase price of Deutsche’s works on paper is under £1000.
In its London headquarters, Deutsche Bank has 52 rooms all named after artists. On the eighth floor, for instance, the Bacon room has three lithographs of bullfights by the artist and a catalogue of his work. This systematic ordering of the rooms is both educational and entertaining – unlike the rather gimmicky decision to name each floor in its Frankfurt headquarters after a German artist, ranging from the eldest artists at the top to the youngest at the bottom.
Germans have always had a penchant for systems. Quite unlike the English. And the epitome of the latter is the Bank of England. As well-respected and technocratic as the institution stands, its collection, accumulated art over three centuries, is a delightful hotchpotch ranging from a William and Mary silver tankard bequeathed by legendary US banker John Pierpoint Morgan and brought back to the UK by the even more legendary economist John Maynard Keynes, to a 100 troy ounces gold bar given by NM Rothschild on its 200th anniversary to mark its long association with the Bank of England and the gold market. Rothschild provided much of the gold to pay the British army in the Peninsular Wars, which started in 1793.
Why, though, does the Bank of England – the second oldest central bank in the world, after Sweden’s – have no equivalent of the eight Francisco de Goya masterpieces at the Bank of Spain?
“We got on with the business of banking,” says John Keyworth, the delightful curator who joined the bank in 1962, rather crisply, on his whistle-stop tour of the bank.
But then, with old clocks ticking loudly in the carpeted rooms where the governor has his meetings, he muses: “Or maybe it was the protestant work ethic.”
With commercial banks, the extent of the corporate art collection has often depended on the whims of one board member. Former chairman David Rockefeller was the founder and inspiration behind Chase Manhattan’s collection. His retirement in the 1980s did not spell the end of the collection because art world veteran Manuel González took it into the 1990s over his two decades with the bank.
But, following his retirement last year from JPMorgan Chase – the new incarnation following a few mergers – the bank no longer has the same collecting vision, although with around 13,200 works, many of them renowned, some would argue it was time to stop.
“Usually, the spirit of a collection is driven by one person’s passion, someone who collected almost for himself,” says David Leiber, a partner at New York’s prestigious Sperone Westwater Gallery.
Along with Mr Rockefeller, Donald Marron, the former ceo of PaineWebber, was one of the great bank collectors over a 30-year period. His purchases now form the backbone of the UBS collection, since the Swiss bank bought the American one in 2000. But an art adviser argues that UBS’s much weaker collection has diluted the impact of the original one, something that happens regularly as banks merge.
Promoting art
This makes the thought process behind the Deutsche Bank collection all the more impressive. As part of its remit to encourage contemporary artists it sponsors the Frieze Art Fair, an autumn extravaganza in London’s Regent’s Park. This year it brought in 1000 clients from abroad to attend the hottest opening in the global art world plus some of the fair days – an image that fits with its ever more successful London-based investment bank, although somewhat less so with its retail and corporate arms.
Although the bank likes to say the Anish Kapoor “Turning the World Upside Down” sculpture in its London lobby has become almost like a second logo, just as iconic is Tony Cragg’s “Secretions”. The molecular-like structure made out of dice by the former scientist is a reference to “the discourse between Lukasiewicz and his theory of interminability and Einstein’s desire to disprove it,” writes Mr Cragg, proving he could well find employment as a rocket scientist in the bank’s structured finance division. To the uninitiated, however, the thought of gambling and of Deutsche’s proprietary trading desk comes to mind.
Coincidentally, UK bank Barclays also has a Tony Cragg sculpture in its main entrance, despite being a very different bank from Deutsche – except perhaps in Barcap, its aggressive investment banking arm. “Constant Change” is the name of the stainless steel piece that dominates the lobby of Barclays’ 2005 glossy new headquarters in Canary Wharf. It is not the bank’s official motto but one which staff might well recognise.
Out with the old...
Operations manager Mary Moss notes that Mr Cragg’s piece – made specifically for that space – was self-funded by selling art and furniture from the old headquarters, proving that the push on costs – the bank’s cost/income ratio is down to 57% from 64% at the end of 2004 – is alive and well throughout the bank, even while it retains its ambitions. Matt Barrett, the current chairman, reportedly said: “We could have gone bigger,” when he first saw the sculpture in place. (As an interesting aside, one curator said: “[Bank art] is about feeding the ego of the chairman.”)
Barclays has not totally dispensed with its 300-year old heritage. The oldest picture in the collection is of the Great Fire of London and was painted in 1666, while the bank’s founding families from the East Anglia region of the UK collected landscapes of the region. The portraits of past chairmen line one passage, including Andrew Buxton grasping a dagger – perhaps a symbol of the troubled times he oversaw when heading the bank in the 1990s.
The need for not just a collection but an icon is one with which the London Stock Exchange is familiar. With its sights set on competing with the other exchanges and a move to a new building, the LSE needed the equivalent of the NYSE’s opening bell, rung by the great and the good and those listing a new company. It commissioned “The Source”, a collection of white plastic balls which generally move randomly to form patterns or words, except at the start and finish of the day’s trading when they show with an arrow whether the markets have closed up or down, plus the opening or closing price of the FTSE 100 Index.
Publicity stunt
This piece was specially designed by Greyworld, a collective of London-based artists. The heads of newly listing companies get to push the starting button so that the balls position themselves into the company name. A cute publicity stunt which, however, lacks the portentousness of the opening bell of the NYSE.
But then, the LSE’s independence looks far from assured: bids from Deutsche Börse and Euronext may have failed but most commentators expect it to be taken over, though not necessarily by Macquarie Bank, which launched a bid as The Banker went to press.
Meanwhile, a tour of Deutsche’s art collection reveals violence, nudity, attacks on consumerism and capitalism, a contemporary take on Pablo Picasso’s Guernica – which was a protest at the Nazis’ bombing of the Basque town of the same name. None of these are the most obvious themes to have in a bank.
“We are not in the business of supplying wallpaper. That would be counterproductive,” says Deutsche’s Mr Hicks. “ It is not about censorship but about the big debates.”