When the Swiss banking giant UBS bought his rival Credit Suisse 2023, he received about half a trillion of dollars of property, as well as customers and offices around the world. He also took over the fleet of model ships and more than 13,500 works of art, including pieces of Swiss artists Ferdinand Hodler and Félix Vallotton, as well as piles of decorative posters.
UBS has taken over Credit Suisse after failing to be under the weight of scandal and loss – including corrupt loans in Mozambique,, Rogue a private banker and loss more than $ 5 billion When the client started. In the integration process, UBS connected some subjects, moved clients into their systems, unloaded property and reduced jobs.
There is still an extraordinary thorny integration of this whole credit suisse art. Key questions for the UBS department are whether they are stored, displayed, sold or donated it.
Artistic executives help in a free truck full of Credit Suisse art stuck in the Swiss mountain passage. – Member of UBS Art Collection Team
The artistic outing has brought the total size of its collection to more than 40,000, which is estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars before integration. The art of Credit Suisse was mostly from local Swiss artists-she did not fit into the UBS collection, which has a global approach, with names of names such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein and Lucian Freud.
There is no “never boring moment,” said the Global UBS Art Collection Chief, Mary Rozell. An artistic lawyer and historian who grew up in a small town near the Adirondack Mountain in New York, Rosell leads a team of approximately a dozen people in charge of art integration.
One day last fall, high in the Swiss Alps, a half -kamion full of fine arts ceased to have stopped at a narrow mountain passage. The UBS employee came out in a snowstorm and surrounded by steep cliffs, tried to help free the snow and ice truck.
A few hours later, the truck returned to bandages and turning the passage of Fluel and finally reached Davos. He retreated to the small UBS office, which emptied art executives to the bank while November sun was setting. Dozens of paintings, photographs and prints, which are estimated to be worth thousands of dollars, were taken from the closed office of Credit Suisse in St. Moritz.
This delivery has been a normal day in Switzerland for the UBS Art Tim, said Rozell, whose days often include the crossing of the US, Europe and Asia to decide which art of the bank acquires, shows, sales or donates. Much of what is happening in UBS Art Collection these days “would not occur to anyone,” she said.
Global banks like UBS, Deutsche Bank and JPMORGAN Chase have some of the most prestigious art collections in the world, full of blue chips from old masters to modern arts. They depict parts on the walls of the hallway, office and conference halls of the Bank, and also borrow art in museum exhibitions. Sometimes the works donate to museums.
Art helps banks grow rich clientele. The most exclusive works are often hanged within their private banking wings. Banks give artistic loans to clients high networks or those who have at least $ 1 million in the investigating property. They also Woo clients with relationships with art world and VIP approach to exhibitions around the world. For these clients, their own art can be collateral to the loans that the bank gives them.
Art is also a big deal in the C-packet, where the selection of paintings for the office is considered to be a higher executive rite of passing.
The first big problem that Rozell faced in integration was to identify all the art for which she is now in charge. The Credit Suisse database started on different software, mostly in German and had gaps when it came to key information. The artistic team expects that it will still take months to clean that database that covers the location, dimensions, estimates, the history of sales and more.
Credit Suisse offices planned by UBS – many in Switzerland because of the overlapping of the home bases – they were full of art. The Rosell team must determine which art remains and goes from every office and where to keep it in the meantime.
“There is still an art that will be found somewhere, in a closet in Shanghai or the like,” Rozell said. “Or things that were not calculated.”
Banks keep an art in expensive, very safe and temperature content, and the industry can privately exhibit works or even intermediary offerings. But UBS has run out of its available space in professional warehouse companies with which he works in New York, London and Zurich. Because of this, some of the less valuable arts from the collection pushed into additional rooms within his offices, the temperature dropped to protect the works.
Some of what ended up in front of Rozella, and her team was not art at all, at least by UBS collection standards.
Take hundreds of decorative posters that UBS found in Credit Suisse. The framed views of everything, from landscape to abstract, the posters were not a material to collect UBS. The bank decided to sell posters to employees, who jumped on the opportunity to buy them. The sale was so popular that it ended the day before.
“There is a picture of a guy, if there are eight pictures under his arm,” Rosell said. “You could say that he was decorating his entire bachelor in one rapture.”
And then there were the ships of the model, the entire fleet, trapped by Credit Suisse after his download of the First Boston in the late 1980s. UBS found ships presented on special shelves in Credit Suisse offices from London to New York, and each estimated that hundreds of up to thousands of dollars are valid. Elsewhere there were other nautical motives in the collection, filling on Wall Street, such as historical photos of ships.
The miniature wooden vessels were not exactly UBS’s style, but there were so many that the bank could not be resolved immediately. The ships instead had to slowly be auctioned so as not to flood the market. Three of them were sold in London last week.
Rosell did not say exactly how much credit suisse art could be resolved, but she estimated that it could ultimately be hundreds of pieces.
The art he keeps from this collection will be kept mainly in Switzerland, throughout the offices and a hotel in Zurich, which UBS has acquired in the agreement. Some will be shown in exhibition salons at art fairs.
Art collectors sometimes need to get a permit from an artist to destroy the work, either because of local laws, contractual terms of the commission or as kindness. UBS had to consider these things with Credit Suisse offices in Switzerland, for example, where the bank ordered art for certain spaces.
The E -Poruke have been pouring into UBS from current and former employees who want to buy art from the collection in the last two years.
The bank makes a decision on sale in the case of a case, but the answer is often not. For example, it cannot sell art that is a fundamental collection. It also refuses to sell the art through a certain value directly to employees, because it is not a private art salesman. (Employee sales revenues are donated to various charity organizations, according to the bank.)
“The bigger the person, the more pressure is,” Rosell said. “You have to be very diplomatically regarding that.”
There is a list of ruble rules that the bank has to deal with in order to donate an artwork, which is classified as a charity contribution and can be taxable. (The UBS Art Tim said he usually does not seek tax deductions when it brings donations).
For example, a high level of depth zeal is required to organize the recipients and his guardians, and the protocols against monitoring of money that will take into account. One past donation of UBS, more than 150 19th-and-20th centuries of American landscape photographs, the National Art Gallery in Washington, DC, lasted five years.
UBS also had to deal with the complicated past of art in Swiss banks, whose activities from World War II I. faced surveillance through the unpublished funds of the Holocaust victims.
Recently discovered documents from banking archives showed that Credit Suisse, in particular, had Nazi links that lasted deeper than previously known, Previously reported Wall Street Journal.
UBS and third experts searched the Credit Suisse collection for any art with Nazi connections, as part of their wider duty procedure. “According to our research and external authorities, no artwork is subject to any issues of origin,” the Bank states.
When one set of ordinary steel statues, every about 2 meters, came to UBS, with them a sense of Déi Vu came.
The statues were sold by UBS years ago. In the end, they bought them Credit Suisse. In fact, more than a dozen artwork that have been sold previously sold in its collection through the same circle.
Other parts of the two bank collections clashed in public. The UBS collection style is what Rosell calls “the art of our time,” compared to a relatively narrow Swiss approach to Credit Suisse.
In the UBS exhibition to its headquarters in New York on Midtown Manhattan, there can be only one artwork from the Credit Suisse collection: the chromogenic print of Swiss artist Beat Strauli. The old Credit Suisse building near the Madison Square Park narrates a similar story. The UBS Collection Artwork fills the walls of space facing clients, while the inherited collection of Credit Suisse is mainly in common spaces such as conference fat and hallway facing employees.
