It's not museums that continued collecting art during Covid-19 but banks

 

As pandemic-related shutdowns have entered their ninth month, banks have continued to collect, lend, and exhibit art. By comparison, 1 in 3 American museums never reopened after shutting down in March.

In many respects, Spain’s central bank was playing catch-up the minute it was founded in 1782—nearly 100 years after the Bank of England.

From another angle, though, Spain’s Banco de San Carlos, which subsequently became the Banco de España, was ahead of its time: It ranks as having one of the world’s first corporate art collections.

“The president of the Bank of Spain commissioned Francisco Goya to create six works of the bank’s directors,” says Banco de España curator Yolanda Romero. “One of the goals was to preserve the memory of the history of the bank through the portraits, and the other was to promote the art of its time.”

Gradually, the Banco de España was joined by a trickle of other financial institutions, which turned into a flood after World War II.

Today, banks are some of the most important art patrons in the world.

“Bankers stepped in like the new Medici,” says Arnold Witte, an associate professor in cultural policy at the University of Amsterdam, whose research focuses on corporate art collections. “From the 1950s onward, bankers needed to create a new and positive image for themselves, and I think bankers like [Chase Manhattan’s] David Rockefeller were really aware of the fact that they could use art to that end.”

Now, as pandemic-related shutdowns have entered their ninth month, and as public collections around the world dramatically scale back programming—if not the collections themselves—banks and other large corporations have continued to collect, lend, and exhibit art. By comparison, 1 in 3 American museums never reopened after shutting down in March, according to a survey released on Tuesday by the American Alliance of Museums.