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New MOMA: The wider world can enjoy some of the UBS collection at New York’s revamped gallery |
Many banks are avid collectors of modern art, but are their most treasured works appreciated? Hanging them in conference or board rooms, or the corridors on executive floors and the number of people who get to see them is limited. There’s always the option of putting them in your lobby. Or you can go one step further, like UBS, and display them in one of the most celebrated modern art museums, the newly reopened MoMa in New York.
“Contemporary voices: Works from the UBS Art Collection” is the first full-scale temporary exhibition in MoMa since its redesign by Japanese architect, Yoshio Taniguchi. UBS has given MoMa 44 modern and contemporary works and is lending another 24 to the exhibit from its collection of over 800, mostly put together by Donald Marron when he was chairman and CEO of PaineWebber, acquired by UBS in 2000.
It has to be a winner for the bank. UBS gets all the exposure it could dream of as exhibitor and sponsor and clients love a good private view. Whether art lovers want to pay the $20 MoMa entrance fee at, partly to see a highly profitable bank’s private collection is another matter. On the other hand, it’s not every day you get to see a visiting collection spanning 40 years of modern and contemporary art, including artists such as Lucian Freud, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Cy Twombly and Cindy Sherman.
And if that doesn’t get your pulse racing, standing near the top of an atrium soaring 110 feet above street level in the new building will.
