리먼 브러더스 도산으로 미술동네도 죽을 맛?
ARTINFO
LEHMAN’S ART-COLLECTING UNIT TO BE SOLD
The 158-year-old investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday, Sept. 15, 2008, sending shockwaves through Wall Street and international financial markets. Its assets are now set to be liquidated. Exempted from the bankruptcy filing, however, is Neuberger Berman, Lehman’s giant asset management unit and one of its few profit-making divisions in recent months.
The company is now taking bids for Neuberger, with five private equity firms reported as possible buyers: Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Hellman & Friedman, Clayton Dubilier & Rice, Bain Capital and CVC Capital Partners. Whoever wins it will walk away, along with the business, with one of the most distinguished corporate art collections.
Indeed, within the art world, Neuberger Berman principal Roy Neuberger (b. 1903), who cofounded the firm in 1939, is known as much for his taste in art as for his investment savvy -- the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y. is named after him, established with the help of Nelson Rockefeller in 1974 to let the financial titan show off his collection. Since 1990, his namesake company has had a fund to purchase "emerging to mid-career artists, with an emphasis on the former," according to the press release for a show of the firm’s collection that toured U.S venues in 2004 -- making Neuberger Berman one of the harbingers of the finance industry’s recent infatuation with emerging art.
That touring show, "Crosscurrents at Century's End: Selections from the Neuberger Berman Art Collection," included works by top contemporary artists such as Laylah Ali, Marlene Dumas, Andreas Gursky, Mike Kelley, Vik Muniz, Takashi Murakami, Neo Rauch, Thomas Struth and Sam Taylor-Wood, illustrating just what kind of player the company has been in the market. Selections from the approximately 600 works in the collection are extensively displayed in the Neuberger Berman offices around the globe. Whether the new owner keeps the art collection or would consider auctioning it off into the hot contemporary art market remains to be seen. Stay tuned.
MUSEUMS LOSE BIG IN LEHMAN COLLAPSE
Whatever the fate of Neuberger Berman, however, the collapse of Lehman Brothers is destined to pass like a cold wind through the museum world, which has leaned on the investment firm for untold millions of dollars in arts patronage (charitable giving at Lehman Brothers totaled $39 million in 2007, according to a story by Bloomberg reporter Philip Boroff). In recent years, Lehman has been the lead sponsor for a range of museum initiatives, from the Brice Marden retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and the Jackson Pollock show "No Limits, Just Edges" at the Guggenheim Museum to the "Young Friends of the Norton" program at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla., and a show about the pleasures of collecting contemporary art at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn.
John F. Akers, a senior board member at Lehman -- he chairs the firm’s "compensation and benefits committee," which now sounds like a misnomer -- has served as a trustee at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has received support from the investment bank. Other Big Apple institutions that have received Lehman Brothers funding are the American Folk Art Museum, the Asia Society, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Dahesh Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, the International Center of Photography, the Japan Society, the Jewish Museum, the Morgan Library & Museum, the Museum of Arts & Design, the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In New York, that’s what you call a "royal flush."
Elsewhere in the United States, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Miami Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y., the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art are all listed by Lehman Brothers as having been beneficiaries of the firm’s giving in 2007.
Nor is the damage limited to the U.S. In the UK, Lehman is partnered with the National Gallery, the Tate Modern and Tate Britain, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Victoria & Albert Museum. In Germany, Lehman has given to Frankfurt’s Stadel Museum. In France, it supports the Musee du Louvre. And in Japan, Lehman is listed as a "Diamond"-level supporter of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum (in fact, Lehman shares a headquarters with the Mori in the Mori Tower).
Beyond all this, the now-defunct company also had a notable philanthropic focus on supporting "excellence in the arts for children." Its 2007 philanthropy report boasts of giving grants to New York organizations like the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers ($25,000), ArtsConnection ($25,000) and DreamYard ($20,000) -- all of which focus on arts education for school children -- as well as $30,000 to the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. In the UK, Lehman gave £21,400 to support activities for disadvantaged young people at London’s Design Museum, and £10,000 to do outreach to hospital schools at the National Portrait Gallery.