When the Swiss banking giant UBS bought its rival Credit Suisse in 2023, it got roughly a half of a trillion dollars in assets as well as customers and offices around the world. It also took on a fleet of model ships, and more than 13,500 artworks, including pieces by Swiss artists Ferdinand Hodler and Félix Vallotton, as well as piles of decorative posters.
UBS took over Credit Suisse after it failed under the weight of scandals and losses—including corrupt loans in Mozambique, a rogue private banker and a loss of more than $5 billion when a client went bust. In the integration process, UBS has merged some entities, moved clients over to its systems, unloaded assets and cut jobs.
Still outstanding is the thorny integration of all of that Credit Suisse art. The key questions for UBS’s department are whether to store, display, sell or donate it.
Art handlers help free a truck full of Credit Suisse art stuck on a Swiss mountain pass. – UBS Art Collection team member
The art haul brought the total size of its collection to more than 40,000, estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars even before the integration. Credit Suisse’s art was largely from local Swiss artists—not a seamless fit with the UBS collection, which takes a more global approach, with works from names like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein and Lucian Freud.
There is “never a dull moment,” said the global head of the UBS art collection, Mary Rozell. An art lawyer and historian who grew up in a small town near the Adirondack Mountains in New York, Rozell runs the roughly dozen-person team tasked with the art integration.
One day last fall, high in the Swiss Alps, a semi truck full of fine art sputtered to a halt on a narrow mountain pass. A UBS employee stepped out into a snowstorm, and surrounded by steep cliffs, she tried to help free the truck from the snow and ice.
Hours later, the truck returned to the twists and turns of the Fluela Pass and finally reached Davos. It pulled up to a small UBS office where art handlers emptied the cargo into the bank as the November sun went down. The dozens of paintings, photographs and prints, estimated to be worth thousands of dollars, had been taken from a closed Credit Suisse office in St. Moritz.
That delivery was a normal day in Switzerland for the UBS art team lately, said Rozell, whose days often involve crisscrossing the U.S., Europe and Asia to decide which art the bank acquires, displays, sells or donates. Much of what goes on in the UBS art collection these days “wouldn’t 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-chip works from old masters to modern art. They display pieces on the walls of the bank’s hallways, offices and conference rooms, and they also loan art to museum exhibitions. Sometimes they donate the works to museums.
Art helps banks cultivate wealthy clientele. The most exclusive works often hang inside their private bank wings. Banks make art loans to high-net worth clients—or those that have at least $1 million in investible assets. They also woo clients with connections to the art world and VIP access to exhibitions around the globe. For these clients, their own art can be collateral for loans the bank makes to them.
Art is also a big deal in the C-suite, where picking out paintings for an office is considered a senior executive rite of passage.
The first major problem Rozell faced in the integration was identifying all of the art she now is in charge of. Credit Suisse’s database ran on different software, was largely in German and had gaps when it came to key information. The art team expects it will still take months to clean that database, which covers each piece of art’s location, dimensions, valuation, sale history and more.
The Credit Suisse offices that UBS planned to close—many in Switzerland due to overlapping home bases—were full of art. Rozell’s team has to determine which art stays and goes from each office and where to keep it in the meantime.
“There’s still art that will be found somewhere, in a closet in Shanghai or something,” Rozell said. “Or things that hadn’t been accounted for.”
Banks keep some art at expensive, highly secure and temperature-controlled facilities, places the industry can privately exhibit works or even broker deals. But UBS has at points in the integration run out of its available space at the professional storage companies it works with in New York, London and Zurich. That left some of the less-valuable art from the collection tucked away into extra rooms within its offices, the temperature cranked down to protect the works.
Some of what ended up in front of Rozell and her team wasn’t art at all, at least by UBS collection standards.
Take the hundreds of decorative posters that UBS found within Credit Suisse. Framed depictions of everything from landscapes to the abstract, the posters weren’t UBS collection material. The bank decided to sell the posters to employees, who jumped at the chance to buy them. The sale was so popular it ended a day early.
“There’s a picture of some guy, he’s got like eight pictures under his arm,” Rozell said. “You could tell he was decorating his whole bachelor pad in one swoop.”
And then there were the model ships, whole fleets of them, captured by Credit Suisse after its takeover of First Boston in the late 1980s. UBS found the ships showcased on special shelves throughout Credit Suisse offices from London to New York, each estimated to be worth hundreds to thousands of dollars. Elsewhere in the collection there were other nautical motifs, crowd-pleasers on Wall Street, such as historical photos of ships.
The miniature wooden vessels weren’t exactly UBS’s style, but there were so many that the bank couldn’t get rid of them right away. The ships had to instead be auctioned off slowly in tranches, so as to not flood the market. Three of them sold in London this past week.
Rozell didn’t say exactly how much of the Credit Suisse art the bank might get rid of, but she estimated it might ultimately be hundreds of pieces.
The art it does keep from that collection will be kept mostly within Switzerland, throughout offices and a hotel in Zurich that UBS acquired in the deal. Some of it will be displayed in exhibit lounges at art fairs.
Art collectors sometimes need to get permission from an artist to destroy a work, either because of local laws, the contractual terms of a commission or as a courtesy. UBS has had to take these things into consideration with the Credit Suisse offices in Switzerland, for example, where the bank had commissioned art for specific spaces.
Emails have poured into UBS over the past two years from current and former employees who want to purchase art from the collection.
The bank makes the decision to sell on a case-by-case basis, but the answer is often no. It can’t sell art that is core to the collection, for example. It also declines to sell art over a certain value directly to employees, since it is not a private art dealer. (Proceeds from employee sales are donated to various charities, according to the bank.)
“The higher up the person is, sometimes the more pressure there is,” Rozell said. “You have to be very diplomatic about it.”
There is a laundry list of rules the bank has to deal with to donate a single artwork, which is classified as a charitable contribution and can be tax-deductible. (The UBS art team said it doesn’t typically seek tax deductions when it makes donations).
There are high levels of due diligence required for the recipient organization and its trustees, for example, and anti-money-laundering protocols to take into account. One past donation by UBS, of more than 150 19th- and 20th-century American landscape photographs, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., took five years.
UBS has also had to deal with the complicated past of art at Swiss banks, whose World War II-era activities have faced scrutiny over the unreleased funds of Holocaust victims.
Recently unearthed documents from bank archives showed Credit Suisse, in particular, had Nazi ties that ran deeper than was previously known, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
UBS and third-party specialists searched the Credit Suisse collection for any art with Nazi links, as part of its broader due-diligence process. “According to our research and external authorities, no artworks are subject to any particular provenance issues,” the bank said in a statement.
When one set of plain steel statues, each around 2 feet tall, reached UBS, with them came a sense of déjà vu.
The statues had been sold by UBS years ago. They were eventually bought by Credit Suisse. In fact, more than a dozen artworks that UBS had previously sold have ended up back in its collection through the same round trip.
Other parts of the two bank collections have clashed on public view. The style of the UBS collection is what Rozell calls “the art of our times,” compared with Credit Suisse’s relatively narrow Swiss approach.
In a UBS exhibition at its New York headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, only one piece of art from the Credit Suisse collection can be found: a chromogenic print by the Swiss artist Beat Streuli. The old Credit Suisse building near Madison Square Park tells a similar story. Artwork from the UBS collection fills the walls of client-facing spaces, while the legacy Credit Suisse collection is mostly in employee-facing common areas like conference rooms and hallways.
