This recent feature from Hedge magazine spotlights David Ummels, Director of Le Riche Fine Art Storage, and is reproduced here in full with our thanks to Hedge and photographer Paul Chambers.

David Ummels has gone from a 25-year career in investment management and debt restructuring, to become a cultural ambassador for his adopted home of Guernsey. RUSSELL HIGHAM reports

 

WHEN DAVID UMMELS goes on holiday, he feels no need to lock the doors to his Guernsey home. That’s not to say that passers-by should, or could, help themselves to Ummels’ extensive art collection – which includes works by Albrecht Dürer, René Magritte, Paul Delvaux and Titian. It’s mentioned purely to illustrate the fact that this island in the middle of the Channel between England and France, where the Belgian-born investment manager and his family have lived since 2015, is, as he calls it, “fantastically honest”.

Honesty is one of the reasons that 54-year-old Ummels chose Guernsey’s small but financially powerful capital, St Peter Port, as the site for Art for Guernsey, which he founded a year after moving there with his Ukrainian wife Nataliya and their two teenage children. Created, as he says, “in direct response to the level of integrity he found on the island”, it is both a public gallery as well as a charitable initiative that seeks to Channel the transformative power of art into providing educational and social advantages for the local community – especially its children.

That may sound noble as a mission statement but how does that translate to real life? Well, in Ummels’ case, it means using his own money to help acquire exquisite works of art, then taking them off the walls, out of their heavily guarded ‘gilded cages’ and into the classrooms of the island’s schools. This allows kids who wouldn’t normally have access to them to get up close and personal with paintings by Renoir and other world-famous artists they might otherwise only get to see, or possibly scroll past, on their phone screens.

Ummels believes that taking art directly to children and initiating a relationship between them, however that develops, yields benefits that can be felt throughout their lives, regardless of whether or not they consider themselves ‘creative’.

“Art connects people,” he says in his typically relaxed but considered way, a Wallonian accent still evident in the quiet utterance of his carefully chosen, softly enunciated words. “It can help you to understand what you profoundly like, and what you profoundly dislike. Even if you really hate something, it can help you to understand yourself, and others, better.

“And working with the local schools, as we do, getting them to look at and talk about art, is like re-instilling the art of conversation. You can disagree with your friends about a piece of art, but just talking with them about your differences is what helps make them your friends.”

 

 

“Today’s society is so polarised that we immediately become aggravated when someone has a different opinion to ours. What we at Art for Guernsey want to promote is critical thinking, tolerance and a level of open-mindedness. That is what art means to me: applying art as a strategy for achieving greater things.”

Ummels came to the world of fine art via a circuitous route. After completing an MBA in finance (with a specialty in applied mathematics to capital markets) from the University of Liège, he worked as a proprietary trader for various banks. First in Brussels for Paribas, then in Paris for SocGen, and finally in London for Dresdner Kleinwort Benson where he was co-head of equity derivatives trading.

In 2002, he partnered with Charles Bray (a Yale graduate and former director at Credit Suisse) to launch Astin Capital Management. Ummels describes how, after initially concentrating on volatility arbitrage, “we concluded that the strategies we’d mastered in the banking environment had become commoditised somehow, so we took the business in a different direction. We started to assist listed companies to raise capital, both equity and debt.

“Our niche was to offer the same services offered by the big banks but to concentrate on the small- and mid-cap’s. We did that for 12 years, employing staff from 17 different nationalities at offices in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, Kyiv and Shanghai. We added activities to our portfolio such as debt restructuring, in addition to asset management – with an average $200m AUM – and capital markets, arranging 45 transactions with a total value north of $1bn.”

“That,” as he says, “was the professional background to my first life.” But at the age of 39, he made a decision to take a step back from the world of finance to spend more time with his family. Not a complete withdrawal: Ummels still holds non-exec positions in a couple of other enterprises – including Guernsey-based ‘Le Riche Fine Art Storage’ – and sits on the board of a family office, assisting in the management of their multibillion pound art portfolio. And it is art that became the focus of his new life, although it is something Ummels believes had already been integral to success in his previous career.

“I started collecting in the late 1990s to decorate and furnish a 15th-century estate I had acquired in Gascony, southwestern France, once I’d started to make good money. So I had an early taste for art, but it was about more than just aesthetics to me. It became a strategy for success in business as well. The beauty of coming from a small country [like Belgium] is that you have to speak the languages of the bigger countries around you and connect with their cultures. As I visited and worked in different places throughout my career – at Astin we were servicing clients on three continents – I always felt the need to connect to people but in a genuine way.

“Art can help you to understand what you like, and what you dislike. Even if you really hate something, it can help you to understand yourself “

 

 

“ART & SOUL: Ummels came to the world of fine art via a circuitous route. After completing an MBA in finance, he worked as a proprietary trader for various banks. “

 

“If you understand the culture and working mentality of a customer, you will be better able to identify what is important to them and serve their needs. So every time I worked in a new country, I started to visit their museums and galleries to learn about the types of art that are meaningful to the people of those countries. And I feel that it helped me considerably to gain a deeper understanding of their culture – how and why they thought and worked as they did – and that, in turn, helped make me better at what I did.”

 

“Reading the composition of a painting is like reading the composition of a board table. The ability to focus on the details is a major benefit in negotiating a deal “

Ummels finds many parallels between the worlds of high finance and fine art, but not in the ways you’d usually think. “Reading the composition of a painting is, in a lot of ways, like reading the composition of a board table. The ability to focus on the details is a major benefit in negotiating a deal. But, you know, despite having bought hundreds of artworks since I started in 1998, I have never sold a single one, and have never bought one purely because I thought it would be a good investment. I’m still prudent, though. I’m an autodidact when it comes to art but I’d like to think I have a relatively discerning eye, and it’s in my nature to use money judiciously. So I’m certainly not going to spend it on a banana glued to a wall,” he laughs, referring to Maurizio Cattelan’s installation of, literally, a banana ducttaped to a wall, which fetched $6.2m at Sotheby’s in New York last year.

Ummels does collect contemporary art, though. On his frequent trips back to London where he used to live in Little Venice, he is a regular visitor to the James Freeman Gallery in Islington where, he says, “James has been outstanding for 15 years in supporting and developing stellar artists like Daniel Hosego and Olivia Kemp whose work I admire.”

His own gallery, Art for Guernsey, brings 30,000 visitors a year alone into St Peter Port – which helps generate substantial ancillary trade for local businesses – as well as the charitable work it does for the local community. Hardly surprising, then, that the local Chamber of Commerce have appointed him Cultural Ambassador for the island.

As for taking famous artworks out on the road to local schools, which Art for Guernsey did with Renoir’s ‘Rocks of Guernsey with Figures (Beach at Guernsey)’, worth around £1m, Ummels admits: “That’s not something we could do quite so easily in central London or Paris, especially when we’re covering the cost of insurance ourselves. But nobody steals in Guernsey so premiums here are about a third of what they would be in England or France.”

It’s another example of what he might call the ‘honesty dividend’. And it seems to have reaped benefits for Ummels in the art of conducting business, as it does for the young residents of his adopted home.

For more information, visit artforguernsey.com

With grateful thanks to The Hedge magazine for permission to reproduce this feature in full, and to photographer Paul Chambers for the accompanying images.