Bank Diversifies Into Culture

 

Bank Diversifies Into Culture
Milan: Branch 00200 of UniCredit — Italy’s largest bank by assets — is unlike any other. Sure, transactions are made: money is deposited, checks are cashed, bills are paid. But for some visitors to this bank in Milan’s central Piazza Cordusio, interest is calculated using cultural, not financial, parameters.
For the past year, the branch has been host to several exhibitions featuring young contemporary artists, a testament, bank officials say, to the group’s commitment to creativity and growth, in the broadest sense of the term.
“We began to focus on contemporary art a few years ago, as one way of looking toward the future,” said Carla Mainoldi, who heads UniCredit’s corporate giving and events department. “And working with young people gives us a strong sense of engagement, opening us to society and the tendencies of the moment.”
Art is also a unifying factor in a bank that has expanded rapidly in just over a decade through mergers and acquisitions of both East and West European banks. Art was seen as one way to create a strong cultural identity for an institution that now operates in 22 countries.
This philosophy propelled the creation this year of a new initiative to further consolidate the bank’s multinational mandate. On June 3, a winner will be announced of the UniCredit Venice Award, so called because the prize is to be given to an artist representing his or her country at the 54th Venice Biennale, which starts next week.
Competing for the €150,000, or $211,000, prize are artists from those central and east European countries where UniCredit is present. The winning work will become part of UniCredit’s collection to be loaned to a contemporary art museum in the prize winner’s country.
The biennale is a singular international showcase, said Walter Guadagnini, the president of the Scientific Commission of UniCredit for Art, a board — that advises the bank for the collection. UniCredit may have its roots in Milan, “but it now has an international breadth, and the occasion of the biennale seemed right,” Mr. Guadagnini said of the prize. In Milan, a more permanent showcase has been devised.
A designated exhibition space — aka UniCredit Studio — was carved out of part of the ground floor of the bank’s headquarters, an elegant palazzo designed by the Milanese architect Luigi Broggi at the turn of the 20th century.
Until this month, bank clients and passersby could ponder pieces by 10 young artists, all graduates of the Brera Fine Arts Academy in Milan. The next exhibit will open in June.
“Many artists see a bank as a non-place, vaguely threatening, but for me a bank is a place where many exchanges take place, financial and cultural,” said Alberto Garutti, an artist and a professor at Brera who curated the most recent show, “Branch 200.” “A bank has lifeblood, it activates the mechanisms of a city and is an intrinsic mechanism of a city. This exhibit is a manifestation of the full dialectic that exists between art and economy.”
Since last year, the bank has also had a so-called “UniCredit Project Room” at the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, an art foundation tasked with preserving and cataloging the works of the Milan-based sculptor, which is also involved in contemporary sculpture.
UniCredit “isn’t just a sponsor, the relationship is very much about exchange,” said Carlotta Montebello, who is in charge of the general coordination of the foundation. The “room” — actually part of a large open space — is now host to works by the Russian-born Siberian raised artist Olga Schigal.
The foundation chooses the artists for the UniCredit space, tending to favor Europeans in line with the bank’s predominant interest, when it comes to contemporary art, Ms. Montebello said.
If choices favor a European bent, UniCredit’s acquisitions policy does not serve a mercenary art-as-an-investment logic. Instead the contemporary art collection — which was officially sanctioned in 2004 — is being fashioned by the desire to interact with the here and now.
“We don’t want to follow trends, we’re starting with the idea that art dialogues with reality,” Mr. Guadagnini said. “Our principal commitment is to work with young generations. There are no constraints in terms of technique or media,” though photography and paintings have dominated recent choices because many of the works hang in bank branches and offices.
The bank does not disclose its acquisitions budget, but last year, Mr. Guandagnini said, UniCredit added 450 new pieces to its collection, directly financing several projects. Many go on long-term loans to contemporary art museums in various countries.
The 450 works swell a contemporary collection that hovers around 10,000 pieces, a significantly growing share of UniCredit’s core collection of some 60,000 works, which spans centuries and mediums to include works by late Renaissance heavy hitters like Tintoretto and Savoldo and more recent art by Gerhard Richter and Doug Aitken. The heterogeneous assortment reflects the acquisitions policies and vicissitudes of the various international banks — prominently HypoVereinsbank in Germany and Bank Austria, which had particularly strong contemporary collections — that over the years merged into the UniCredit group.
A selection of pieces now travels as part of “PastPresentFuture,” an exhibition of paintings from the collection that has been touring for the past two years.
UniCredit also works closely with several museums in Italy, as well as other countries like Austria, Germany, Romania and Turkey, financing among other projects museum programs to commission works by young artists.
“All banks are close to culture and art,” said Guido Palamenghi Crispi, until this year the president of the Italian Banking Association’s Cultural Commission, but, he added, most tend to pay more attention to the art market and artists with consolidated reputations.
“Few follow the artists of the future, investing in the young,” the way UniCredit does, he said. “In a country where we don’t help young people to grow, and don’t offer bright future prospects,” it becomes especially important to invest in new generations, he noted.
Many banks, Italian and not, patronize the arts. Deutsche Bank, which has a significant collection, has been supporting contemporary art for more than 30 years — hanging works in its offices throughout the world as well as sponsoring exhibits — and currently a selection of photographs from the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Collection is on show in Milan at the Museo del Novecento, or Museum of the 20th Century, which opened this year.
According to the Italian Banking Association, Italian banks invest some €500 million a year in various cultural activities, from preserving existing collections to supporting cultural initiatives. That sum does not include acquisitions.
Many are local banks, which often take an interest in the burgeoning art scenes of their cities (and in Italy, because many banks’ headquarters and key branches are housed in historic palazzos, often art works in themselves, one day a year they open their doors to visitors).
“Investing in contemporary art is an investment in the territory,” said Fulvio Gianaria, chairman of the CRT Foundation for Modern and Contemporary Art, which the Turin bank Cassa di Risparmio di Torino set up in 2000 to support arts in Piedmont and its capital. Over the past 10 years, the foundation has spent more than 30 million euro in its activities, which include buying pieces for local contemporary art museums, including two of Italy’s best: the Castello di Rivoli and the Galleria Civica di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea. Even though the economic crisis has curtailed investments to some extent, for the banking foundation, culture remains a priority, Mr. Gianaria said.
The foundation recently bought “Cosmos” — a 2008 piece by the American minimalist John McCracken, who died last month — for Turin’s Castello di Rivoli, which is showing a retrospective of McCracken’s work until June 9.
The piece, said the show’s curator, Andrea Bellini, who is also the museum’s director, was “ideal for the museum’s collection,” which seeks to explore contemporary creativity.
“We try to spend well with the few funds we have,” he added. And given that the Italian government spends about 10 percent of what France and Germany invest in culture, foundations like CRT or Unicredit, which also sponsors Rivoli, “are of fundamental importance,” he said. Now, in a moment of economic crisis, where the arts are among the first to feel the crunch of cutbacks, “without the banks we’d go underwater,” Mr. Bellini said.

Milan: Branch 00200 of UniCredit — Italy’s largest bank by assets — is unlike any other. Sure, transactions are made: money is deposited, checks are cashed, bills are paid. But for some visitors to this bank in Milan’s central Piazza Cordusio, interest is calculated using cultural, not financial, parameters. For the past year, the branch has been host to several exhibitions featuring young contemporary artists, a testament, bank officials say, to the group’s commitment to creativity and growth, in the broadest sense of the term.

“We began to focus on contemporary art a few years ago, as one way of looking toward the future,” said Carla Mainoldi, who heads UniCredit’s corporate giving and events department. “And working with young people gives us a strong sense of engagement, opening us to society and the tendencies of the moment.”

Art is also a unifying factor in a bank that has expanded rapidly in just over a decade through mergers and acquisitions of both East and West European banks. Art was seen as one way to create a strong cultural identity for an institution that now operates in 22 countries.

This philosophy propelled the creation this year of a new initiative to further consolidate the bank’s multinational mandate. On June 3, a winner will be announced of the UniCredit Venice Award, so called because the prize is to be given to an artist representing his or her country at the 54th Venice Biennale, which starts next week.

Competing for the €150,000, or $211,000, prize are artists from those central and east European countries where UniCredit is present. The winning work will become part of UniCredit’s collection to be loaned to a contemporary art museum in the prize winner’s country.

The biennale is a singular international showcase, said Walter Guadagnini, the president of the Scientific Commission of UniCredit for Art, a board — that advises the bank for the collection. UniCredit may have its roots in Milan, “but it now has an international breadth, and the occasion of the biennale seemed right,” Mr. Guadagnini said of the prize. In Milan, a more permanent showcase has been devised.

A designated exhibition space — aka UniCredit Studio — was carved out of part of the ground floor of the bank’s headquarters, an elegant palazzo designed by the Milanese architect Luigi Broggi at the turn of the 20th century.
Until this month, bank clients and passersby could ponder pieces by 10 young artists, all graduates of the Brera Fine Arts Academy in Milan. The next exhibit will open in June.

“Many artists see a bank as a non-place, vaguely threatening, but for me a bank is a place where many exchanges take place, financial and cultural,” said Alberto Garutti, an artist and a professor at Brera who curated the most recent show, “Branch 200.” “A bank has lifeblood, it activates the mechanisms of a city and is an intrinsic mechanism of a city. This exhibit is a manifestation of the full dialectic that exists between art and economy.”
Since last year, the bank has also had a so-called “UniCredit Project Room” at the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, an art foundation tasked with preserving and cataloging the works of the Milan-based sculptor, which is also involved in contemporary sculpture.

UniCredit “isn’t just a sponsor, the relationship is very much about exchange,” said Carlotta Montebello, who is in charge of the general coordination of the foundation. The “room” — actually part of a large open space — is now host to works by the Russian-born Siberian raised artist Olga Schigal.

The foundation chooses the artists for the UniCredit space, tending to favor Europeans in line with the bank’s predominant interest, when it comes to contemporary art, Ms. Montebello said.If choices favor a European bent, UniCredit’s acquisitions policy does not serve a mercenary art-as-an-investment logic. Instead the contemporary art collection — which was officially sanctioned in 2004 — is being fashioned by the desire to interact with the here and now.

“We don’t want to follow trends, we’re starting with the idea that art dialogues with reality,” Mr. Guadagnini said. “Our principal commitment is to work with young generations. There are no constraints in terms of technique or media,” though photography and paintings have dominated recent choices because many of the works hang in bank branches and offices.

The bank does not disclose its acquisitions budget, but last year, Mr. Guandagnini said, UniCredit added 450 new pieces to its collection, directly financing several projects. Many go on long-term loans to contemporary art museums in various countries.

The 450 works swell a contemporary collection that hovers around 10,000 pieces, a significantly growing share of UniCredit’s core collection of some 60,000 works, which spans centuries and mediums to include works by late Renaissance heavy hitters like Tintoretto and Savoldo and more recent art by Gerhard Richter and Doug Aitken. The heterogeneous assortment reflects the acquisitions policies and vicissitudes of the various international banks — prominently HypoVereinsbank in Germany and Bank Austria, which had particularly strong contemporary collections — that over the years merged into the UniCredit group.

A selection of pieces now travels as part of “PastPresentFuture,” an exhibition of paintings from the collection that has been touring for the past two years.

UniCredit also works closely with several museums in Italy, as well as other countries like Austria, Germany, Romania and Turkey, financing among other projects museum programs to commission works by young artists.
“All banks are close to culture and art,” said Guido Palamenghi Crispi, until this year the president of the Italian Banking Association’s Cultural Commission, but, he added, most tend to pay more attention to the art market and artists with consolidated reputations.

“Few follow the artists of the future, investing in the young,” the way UniCredit does, he said. “In a country where we don’t help young people to grow, and don’t offer bright future prospects,” it becomes especially important to invest in new generations, he noted.

Many banks, Italian and not, patronize the arts. Deutsche Bank, which has a significant collection, has been supporting contemporary art for more than 30 years — hanging works in its offices throughout the world as well as sponsoring exhibits — and currently a selection of photographs from the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Collection is on show in Milan at the Museo del Novecento, or Museum of the 20th Century, which opened this year.

According to the Italian Banking Association, Italian banks invest some €500 million a year in various cultural activities, from preserving existing collections to supporting cultural initiatives. That sum does not include acquisitions.

Many are local banks, which often take an interest in the burgeoning art scenes of their cities (and in Italy, because many banks’ headquarters and key branches are housed in historic palazzos, often art works in themselves, one day a year they open their doors to visitors).

“Investing in contemporary art is an investment in the territory,” said Fulvio Gianaria, chairman of the CRT Foundation for Modern and Contemporary Art, which the Turin bank Cassa di Risparmio di Torino set up in 2000 to support arts in Piedmont and its capital. Over the past 10 years, the foundation has spent more than 30 million euro in its activities, which include buying pieces for local contemporary art museums, including two of Italy’s best: the Castello di Rivoli and the Galleria Civica di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea. Even though the economic crisis has curtailed investments to some extent, for the banking foundation, culture remains a priority, Mr. Gianaria said.
The foundation recently bought “Cosmos” — a 2008 piece by the American minimalist John McCracken, who died last month — for Turin’s Castello di Rivoli, which is showing a retrospective of McCracken’s work until June 9.

The piece, said the show’s curator, Andrea Bellini, who is also the museum’s director, was “ideal for the museum’s collection,” which seeks to explore contemporary creativity.

“We try to spend well with the few funds we have,” he added. And given that the Italian government spends about 10 percent of what France and Germany invest in culture, foundations like CRT or Unicredit, which also sponsors Rivoli, “are of fundamental importance,” he said. Now, in a moment of economic crisis, where the arts are among the first to feel the crunch of cutbacks, “without the banks we’d go underwater,” Mr. Bellini said.