NEW YORK—It’s not rare to see artworks adorning the walls of a bank. Financial institutions have been displaying prosaic landscape watercolors and fruit-bowl still-lifes in their lobbies for about as long as there have been lobbies—and decorators to decorate them.

It’s also not rare for banks to have a hand in the art world, since most of the big ones put their logos on sponsorship packages at the Met and MoMA and the country’s blockbuster touring exhibitions.

However, The Park Avenue Bank has followed the likes of UBS and taken the connection one step further—opening up an actual art gallery within its posh Midtown digs. It has even hired its own curator, Martin Mullin, who wants the space to “promote the bank’s desire to play an increasingly active role in New York’s cultural life.”

And for its current exhibition, it’s showing a New York favorite to match: “Andy Warhol: Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century,” through March 2.

Enabling this display is the Gallery at The Park Avenue Bank’s new partnership program, called “Meet a Museum,” which links it with arts institutions throughout the tri-state region and allows it to show collections such as this one, from The Jewish Museum. (Its first mini-exhibition, which ran from November to early January, was a preview of the Connecticut Athenaeum Museum’s exhibition “Faith and Fortune: Five Centuries of European Masterworks.”)

Museums, not surprisingly, have jumped on board with the program, praising it as a fresh opportunity to display prominent pieces in a new location.

And indeed, the venue is quite unconventional, which is something we like, frankly. While museums often require fighting monumental crowds to see a big-name exhibition, the bank's gallery incorporates the show into everyday life: Pick up dry cleaning, check. Get cash from ATM, check. Take in some important Warhols, check. The gallery is open to the public, not just Park Avenue Bank customers, and the atmosphere is intentionally un-intimidating.

As Mullin recently told The Associated Press, “Anyone can come in and look and enjoy these great works.”

The drawbacks? The gallery itself is quite small, with less-than-ideal lighting, and it’s situated almost uncomfortably close to a cluster of bankers’ desks. Sure Warhol unabashedly embraced the market, but listening to the clicking and buzzing of daily commerce while viewing the work can be a bit distracting.

There is less to say about the works themselves. When art dealer Ronald Feldman initially asked Warhol to create this 1980 series, the artist insisted on calling it “The Jewish Geniuses,” and in some manner, while contemplating vibrant portraits of such figures as Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein and Golda Meir—legends rendered by a legend—one does feel immersed in a feedback loop of revolutionary thinking.

And coupled with a smart concept for a gallery, the title does seem apt.


Jacquelyn Lewis is the assistant editor of ArtInfo.com. She has written about art and culture for publications across the United States and is currently a master’s degree candidate at New York University.