Founding the Collections
For the first half of the 20th century, banks’ art collections were largely assembled in piecemeal fashion—oil portraits of board members joined decoration for conference rooms and lobbies, accompanied by the occasional painting put up as collateral by insolvent clients.

That changed in 1959 when Rockefeller established Chase Manhattan Bank’s Art at Work collection, setting a new standard for the dedicated acquisition of contemporary art.

“At the same time, you see serious corporate collections being founded in Europe,” says Pictet. “Finance was a very big part of it. [Banks] produce services that aren’t tangible or visible, and so inscribing your history into art is a way of telling your company’s story.”

It’s also, she continues, a means of “showing expertise, by way of managing wealth right up to what you put on the walls.”

In the same way that many of the world’s largest banks are the product of a series of mergers and acquisitions, some of the great corporate art collections are an agglomeration of smaller, earlier efforts.

“Our collection is made up of several different collections,” says Mary Rozell, the head of UBS Group AG’s 30,000-piece art collection and the author of The Art Collector’s Handbook. “As institutions merged together, the three primary collections were from the Union Bank of Switzerland, the Swiss Bank Corporation, and then Paine Webber.”

Same goes for Bank of America Corp.’s collection of 50,000 artworks.

“Where our collection is concerned, it came to us from all of these [smaller] banks, and it represents different parts of the country,” says Rena De Sisto, the global executive for arts and culture and women’s programs at Bank of America. “That art that was collected by Midwest banks tends to be from Midwest artists.” Northeastern banks, including the former Fleet Bank and BankBoston, tended to collect impressionist artists, she continues. “That seemed to be the traditional thing.”

Others are more singular.

In Spain, the Caixa foundation, a creation of CaixaBank, began in the 1980s soon after the country became a democracy.