Last Oct. 3, two days after Bank of America Corp. completed its $21 billion takeover of LaSalle Bank, Rena DeSisto flew to Chicago to reassure some prominent Chicagoans about the new owner’s intentions — not regarding community investment or jobs, but about photography. LaSalle’s cache of more than 5,000 photographs, to be exact.
“They expressed concern the collection would be broken up and sold,” the New York-based DeSisto, BofA’s arts and culture executive and director of a vast corporate art collection, recalled in an interview. “They said the collection was important to the community.”
They needn’t have bothered trying to educate her: “I knew what the collection was,” she said. “I knew it was a treasure.”
She also knew it was mostly a hidden treasure. Generally, for any firsthand, in-depth viewing of the prints in LaSalle’s vaunted collection, one had to be an insider, client or someone allowed a private tour of the bank’s Loop offices.
DeSisto told those at the meeting — among them Samuel Sax, the collection’s founder — that BofA wanted not only to keep the collection but to let more people enjoy it.
The bank has since made loans of LaSalle photographs to small shows in Chicago and New York. But a big showcase for the collection is set for October, when “Made in Chicago” is to open a three-month run in the Chicago Cultural Center. The exhibit is to feature nearly 150 images from 1930 to 2007 by such lensmen with Chicago ties as Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, Ray Metzker, Art Sinsabaugh and Aaron Siskind.
“This is the largest loan we have made for a public exhibition in Chicago,” said Whitney Bradshaw, a longtime associate curator at LaSalle and now curator of photography for the whole BofA Collection.
By the end of next year, BofA plans to open a public gallery in Chicago to present photography and other art from the corporate collection. DeSisto said a site hasn’t been determined, but the bank’s galleries in other cities are in or adjacent to main offices or branches.
These efforts are part of a wider art-lending program by Charlotte-based BofA. It is offering museums and university galleries around the nation the opportunity to mount exhibitions drawn from its entire collection — spread among thousands of offices and storage facilities around the globe — with the bank paying for crating, shipping, insurance and other major expenses.
Museums may select a “turnkey” exhibition curated by the bank or put together shows by picking among offerings in the collection.
DeSisto said close to 30 shows are planned around the country through 2009.
It’s good business
Cesareo Moreno, visual arts director of Chicago’s National Museum of Mexican Art, last year began visiting BofA sites in the West and Southwest to choose pieces for an exhibition of 20th Century Mexican art to run in the Pilsen museum from January-April 2009.
He said the show could feature up to 125 paintings, drawings, sculpture and photos.
Museum President Carlos Tortolero estimated that a show of this size and caliber could cost his institution $300,000 to mount on its own.
Lending is good business for banks, even when the currency is art. DeSisto said the bank gains mainly by enhancing its community visibility and reputation, and by gaining access to prospective customers through museums and their boards.
She said the bank constantly reviews its art holdings to assess whether pieces should be sold or donated. It is believed BofA owns 60,000 works — most the spoils of corporate takeover victories. DeSisto wouldn’t confirm that number but said the bank has about 15,000 works of museum quality.
“We want to have art in the workplace, but does it have to be of museum quality?” she said. “We concluded it was better to lend museum-quality art.”
LaSalle employees have been spoiled. In the two Loop buildings where the collection is concentrated, they have a sampling of the history of photography. They walk down halls or confer in offices or dining rooms decorated with prints by the likes of Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus and Thomas Struth.
Sam Sax started the collection in 1967 for Exchange National Bank, then controlled by him and his family. A photography enthusiast since his teens, he pursued his passion, though some relatives thought art collecting unsuitable for a bank.
Rockefeller influence
“What overcame that was the model of David Rockefeller,” he said, citing the New York banker who, in 1959, began what is today the J.P. Morgan Chase art collection.
Like Rockefeller, Sax hired acquisition advisers, starting with Beaumont Newhall, the art historian and founding director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and his wife, Nancy, a noted photography critic. Starting in 1967 with a show on Edward Steichen (which the artist attended), Exchange mounted several public exhibitions a year in its headquarters, then at LaSalle and Adams Streets.
“The shows were big events in town for photography,” said David Travis, an assistant curator at Exchange before he joined the Art Institute in 1972. He now heads the museum’s photography department but is to retire June 30.
From Exchange to LaSalle
In the 1970s, he noted, photography began being accepted as an art form, and “shows at Exchange and the Art Institute and lectures at Columbia College really let people know there was a future in this field.”
Exchange fell into the hands of investors in 1976 and was bought by LaSalle in 1990. Under LaSalle, the collection expanded, particularly with Dutch photography (a bow to its Netherlands-based parent). LaSalle kept faith with the tradition of buying, when possible, vintage prints — those prized for being produced closest to the date a negative is made.
Although LaSalle didn’t host public exhibitions, Bradshaw said, curators staged shows and lectures for employees, led private tours, produced books and loaned works to museums.
They faced a scare in late 2004 after a major fire broke out in bank headquarters, 135 S. LaSalle St. But just 35 prints were ruined.
Under BofA, Bradshaw foresees more opportunities to share the collection with the public. With the LaSalle name fast disappearing from the scene, she is pleased it remains in the name for this photographic trove: the Bank of America LaSalle Collection.
“They are keeping the LaSalle provenance,” she said.
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cstorch@tribune.com
