By ROBIN POGREBIN. PEOPLE admiring Thomas Moran’s tranquil “View of Fairmont Waterworks, Philadelphia” (from about 1860) or Childe Hassam’s bucolic “Old House and Garden, East Hampton” (1917) in the show on American Impressionism at the Millennium Gate Museum in Atlanta this summer might be surprised to learn the identity of the curator: Bank of America.
Since the 1960s, when Chase Manhattan Bank assembled one of the first major corporate art collections under the guidance of its president, David Rockefeller, banks and other large companies have been acquiring fine art as a way to give their offices a cultured, dignified aura. Over time many companies have expanded these collections — with in-house curators to oversee them — and lent works to museums and other exhibition spaces, mostly for marketing reasons.
But a few corporations, including JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and UBS, have occasionally gone a step further, lending out complete shows. And Bank of America has lately gone further still, creating a roster of ready-made shows that it provides to museums at a nominal cost to them— essentially turnkey exhibitions.
Traditionally museums have been loath to allow the sponsors of an exhibition a significant role in curatorial decision making — particularly when the sponsor is a corporation, given the potential taint of commercialization and artistic compromise. And most major museums still draw the line there.
“What is crucial is curatorial independence,” said Glenn D. Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, “the ability of a curator to make his or her own decisions about what would constitute an exhibition.”
Mr. Lowry said his museum would show a corporate collection only if the majority of what was on show was donated, as was the case with the museum’s UBS show in 2005. “That’s our safeguard,” he said. “We’ve had real input because it’s a gift to the museum. What’s going to be displayed is not going back on the market.”
Rodney M. Cook Jr., president of the National Monuments Foundation, which owns the Millennium Gate, said he was unconcerned about the potential commercial implications of mounting a Bank of America show. “Is there a problem with enhancing the value of a great collection?” he said. “The quality of this collection I would say enhances the museum more than the museum enhances the collection. It’s some of the greatest pictures in America history. If our new museum can improve on the value of the bank’s collection, God bless America.”
Given the economic downturn, which has forced the cancellation, postponement or prolonging of exhibitions across the country, more small and midsize art institutions may be increasingly open to ready-made shows.
“It relieves the pressure of having to always initiate shows,” said Holly Block, executive director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts, which recently mounted “Collected Visions: Modern and Contemporary Works from the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection,” featuring about 70 works by some 60 artists, to commemorate the bank’s 50 years of collecting. “It’s very costly, and there’s not a lot of money out there right now for exhibitions. Last year was very, very hard for us to raise money. So anywhere we can create partnerships and consortiums, it’s a win-win situation.”
Ms. Block said the show also allowed the Bronx Museum to fill two galleries that otherwise would have been closed during the show’s two-month duration because of budget constraints, and to exhibit work it would not have otherwise been able to obtain. “This was an incredible opportunity,” she said. “It’s the first time we had Andy Warhol at the Bronx Museum.”
In conjunction with the show JPMorgan Chase also donated Martin Wong’s 1981 acrylic on canvas, “Brainwashing Cult Cons Top TV Star.”
Started two years ago, the Bank of America program placed 12 shows in 2008 and has placed 10 so far in 2009, with 10 more scheduled for 2010 and 6 for 2011. And there is a waiting list.
“At first we were calling museums,” said Rena DeSisto, the bank’s global arts marketing and philanthropy executive. “Now the calls are coming in to us.”
Ms. DeSisto said the bank had initially hoped to place its shows in big museums, to build credibility, but has come to realize that its collection could instead play an important role in serving institutions with fewer resources.
“Smaller community museums with more need began to ask for our program,” she said. “They just don’t have the deep pockets, and they don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘We don’t do corporate collections,’ nor do they frankly have the snobbery about it.”
At the Millennium Gate, which opened a year ago, Bank of America’s Impressionism show, which runs through Dec. 6, was hugely important to efforts to build an audience. “It’s been a great way to introduce ourselves to the city,” Mr. Cook said. “Our curators would have had to start from the beginning to catalog everything and pack and ship it, whereas the bank has all of this already done.”
From March 8 to July 19 the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey mounted “The Wyeths: Three Generations,” an exhibition of work by N. C., Andrew and Jamie Wyeth that was put together by Bank of America. At the museum — a 95-year-old institution with a collection of some 12,000 works — the endowment is down 20 percent since last year, and there have been two rounds of layoffs.
Lora S. Urbanelli, the museum’s director, said the show allowed the museum to present work it otherwise could not afford. “For us to put together a show on Wyeth would have been very expensive,” she explained, given the high cost of shipping, insurance and education materials, practically all of which Bank of America covered. The show was one of the museum’s most successful, Ms. Urbanelli said, attracting more than 80,000 visitors.
“The fact that we were able to do this exhibition so easily, especially when we’re under financial pressure, has been great,” she said.
The Association of Art Museum Directors has no policy governing shows organized by corporations and “would not be against it,” said Michael Conforti, the association’s president, “as long as the people involved felt comfortable themselves that a show complied with their curatorial standards.”
What museums need to be conscious of, art experts say, is creating the impression that these exhibitions enhance the value of corporate collections that might one day come to market. “A museum has to think very seriously about taking those shows,” said John Ravenal, president of the Association of Art Museum Curators and curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. “The museum, by virtue of its stature and its public role, gives legitimacy or confers a certain kind of validity to these collections when it exhibits them.
“If the collection isn’t a promised gift to the museum, then there is the potential for the museum to be used to unwittingly increase the value of a collection, whether its individual or corporate.”
If a corporation is contributing funds to a museum that shows its collection, “then it looks as if the museum’s exhibition program is for sale,” Mr. Ravenal said. “They don’t want to look like they’re selling their reputation.”
As for concerns that a bank would impose its curatorial tastes on the museum, Ms. Urbanelli of the Montclair Art Museum said Bank of America selected the works in the Wyeth show, but the museum had some say in their installation. “We were able to filter it through our own curatorial staff,” she said. “I don’t feel like we made any kind of compromises at all. If anything, they provided us with a wonderful opportunity — helped us to do something we would not have been able to do ourselves.”
Richard Armstrong, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, said he would be unlikely to accept a show put together by a corporation in part because it supplants the role of the museum’s curators. “The reason the museum exists is to make exhibitions on its own,” he said. “You have people on staff who consider themselves to be historians with highly nuanced receptors, and it’s not healthy to duplicate that by hiring out to somebody else.”
To be sure, importing a corporate-organized show might be expected to create tension between the curators at the company and those at the host museum. But Sergio Bessa, the director of curatorial and education programs at the Bronx Museum, said that his institution’s collaboration with JPMorgan “was very collegial,” and that the show gave the museum access to blue-chip artists.
“We saw an opportunity instead of a takeover,” he said. “I actually have quite a lot of respect for their vision. I was amazed: How did Chase get paintings by this painter and that painter?”
The curators at corporations and museums may be equally qualified in terms of expertise, art experts say, but their responsibilities differ. “The point of a corporate collection is to burnish the reputation of a corporation,” Mr. Ravenal said, and corporate curators are therefore “involved in that agenda.”
Given the current state of the economy and the considerable expense of maintaining and storing art, corporations might be expected to want to sell all or part of their collections, and many smaller companies are doing some divesting. Bank of America considered selling off its entire collection of about 60,000 pieces — all gathered through acquisitions of other banks with art collections — even before the downturn. But the bank determined that there were other marketing benefits to be gained from the collection.
“We have determined that a sale would result in an overall loss or a break-even, and that it is better used as a community support and marketing tool,” the bank’s Ms. DeSisto said: associating the bank with arts patronage and charitable giving, providing access to prospective clients in museum trustees and donors, offering opportunities for client entertainment.
Bank of America said its cost per exhibition can range from $5,000 to $25,000, depending on how far the artwork needs to be transported, and Ms. DeSisto said the expenditure — which she declined to quantify — has paid off.
“The income we have generated through increased business is superior to any income we could generate from selling the collection,” she said. “Attracting even one individual client can cover the entire cost of lending a turnkey exhibition.”
“Art has a very emotional pull,” she added. “If you are an art lover who supports your local museum, you are going to become positively inclined to the company that helps your museum thrive.”
Other banks too have recognized the potential for such intangible dividends. “It’s not about collecting as an investment strategy,” said Gary Hattem, president of the Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation in New York, which administers the bank’s philanthropic activities in the United States, Latin America and Canada. “It’s really about being fully engaged in the communities in which we do business.”
Deutsche Bank, with a collection of about 56,000 pieces, has made art “a major part of our identity as a bank,” said Liz Christensen, the company’s curator for the Americas. Work from the collection, including pieces by prominent artists like Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist, is displayed in the public areas of the bank’s headquarters and in branches in 41 countries. And the reach of that identity is extended by its shows, like the coming “Beuys and Beyond,” featuring about 50 works on paper by Joseph Beuys and his students from the Düsseldorf Art Academy, which will travel over the next two years to museums in five countries, possibly including the United States.
Bank of America, which has four to five exhibits lent out at any one time, has a show of 30 watercolors of the American West painted by Alfred Jacob Miller in the early 1840s headed for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., next year. It is then bound for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, followed by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Peter C. Marzio, director of the Houston museum, said he was comfortable with the collaboration. “There are people in the art field who think that somehow businessmen are evil, and you shouldn’t deal with them, but they have no trouble taking their money,” he said. “I’ve always thought that was the ultimate hypocrisy. You almost can’t do a contemporary art show without borrowing from some gallery, and those paintings are for sale. So it’s the ultimate in commercialism, if you want to look at it that way.
“I’m a big proponent of it,” Mr. Marzio added. “I prefer to see the art out there.”
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