A recapitulation of Jeu de Paume articles (2011-2020)

by Marc Masurovsky

The “plundered art” blog has given extensive coverage to different aspects of the so-called ERR database, or “Jeu de Paume” database, since its release to the public in October 2010. The database is still available for anyone to consult and conduct searches on looted objects, their owners and their displacement during and after WWII. The main reason for this is selfish: I designed this database and managed it for close to 15 years. It is the ideal case study with which to understand the inner workings of what we refer to as “cultural plunder.” Not the kind that is random and unorganized, but the kind that is premeditated, scientifically executed, methodically prepared and carried out in the context of a genocidal undertaking.

The second half of October 2024 will be devoted to a series of articles that drill deep inside the inner workings of the Jeu de Paume from its reconversion in the fall of 1940 as a processing center for confiscated Jewish cultural property to its closure in early August 1944, two weeks before the Paris insurrection led by French resistance elements on August 19, 1944. Hopefully, it will give me an opportunity to ask (or re-ask) some uncomfortable questions which require at some point answers from scholars and researchers.

At the end of this exercise, I hope that you, the reader, will realize that the people responsible for the management of the Jeu de Paume and the processing of tens of thousands of looted objects through its galleries and storage areas were rather ordinary, many of them well-educated, and if you met them today, you would not suspect in the least that they participated in a massive four-year long criminal enterprise. They are just like you and me, they do their job and go home. They may even enjoy what they do. Like well-trained museum employees, art historians and experts, cataloguers, craters, appraisers, they apply themselves to their tasks with the professionalism that is expected of them, despite the fact that their superiors were ideological architects of the plunder whose fruits they handled on a daily basis.

Here are the highlights of the 2011-2020 "plundered art" coverage of the Jeu de Paume's activities and operations between 1940-1944:

-the building of the ERR database, its inner workings and the process of building the ERR database

-case studies of collections like those of Georges Bernheim, Diane Esmond (mistakenly tagged by the ERR as her father’s, Edouard Esmond) and a follow-up look at the collection’s fate, Raoul Meyer, Alexandra Pregel also known as Avxente or Auxente, Robert Schuhmann, Jacques Seligmann and Co., Hugo Simon, Frederic Unger, Georges Voronoff,

-certain classifications of objects dictated by the ERR’s experts like MA-B (or Möbel-Aktion Bilder), UNB (Unbekannt)

-particular artists and their creations whose stories were compelling or raised larger questions about Nazi cultural policy:

Jean-Baptiste Corot’s “Mrs. Stumpf”, a dessus-de-porte by Marie Laurencin, a bronze casting by Aristide Maillol, Gabriel Metsu, Caspar Netscher’s “Lady with a Parrot”, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro’s “View of the Pont-Neuf from the Seine” , a self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Vuillard, Philip Wouwermans, “Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berri » 

the Nazi fascination with Netsuke objects, Valencia ceramics, MA-B 702, Schloss 91, a painting by Bartholomeus van der Helst and the various attempts to recover it. and a 13th dynasty Egyptian antiquity.

-certain depots managed by the ERR in various parts of occupied Europe to store and dispose of looted cultural objects like the Nikolsburg depot in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and the fate of its contents in 1945.

-the treatment of ideological issues through art like the “Jewish question”, race, “Degenerate Art” and its hypothetical destruction.

Future installments on the Jeu de Paume will focus on the photographing of confiscated works and objects, the implementation of Nazi cultural policy on the treatment of confiscated works and objects, the esthetic preferences of Jewish collectors and dealers whose collections were processed through the Jeu de Paume, and a reconstruction of the actual chronology of the confiscations of Jewish collections in the Paris region.

Teaching plunder to children Part One

by Marc Masurovsky

Here are some images developed for a presentation given to young children in a Jewish middle school, ages 9 to 13. Feel free to use them!

To be continued...

The Gurlitt Task Force "fact sheet"

by Marc Masurovsky

The Gurlitt Task Force made a three-page fact sheet available to the general public dated 12 January 2016.

Since the discovery of Cornelius Gurlitt’s private collection in November 2012, too much ink has been spilled over the origins, content and disposition of this collection, which, due to its association with Hildebrand Gurlitt, father of Cornelius Gurlitt, has borne the mark of Cain for his association with the Nazi regime and for having profited therefrom. Hildebrand Gurlitt died in an auto accident in 1956. What he left to his heirs, one of whom was Cornelius Gurlitt, we do not know. We are unaware, at least we in the general public, of the total number of art objects that were in Hildebrand Gurlitt’s possession at time of death. We do not know how many objects his son, Cornelius Gurlitt, sold on the international art market, how many he loaned for exhibitions, how many he donated, how many he gave away, how many he swapped for other objects.

All we know is what we have been told by the German authorities: that there were 1256 works of art which comprised the Cornelius Gurlitt collection. 

The Task Force set about to ascertain how many of these objects had an explicit provenance which could connect it to an act of spoliation, to a theft or misappropriation directed or inspired by the Nazi regime against its owner.

After two years of work and the employment of over 20 contractual researchers on renewable short-term contracts, the Task Force has identified only 11 works as being explicitly the product of Nazi confiscations and thefts, some of which have been returned to their rightful owners, after laborious and unnecessarily complicated negotiations.

Eleven?

499 Gurlitt-owned works are listed on the lostart.de database, proof apparently that there is still a question about their ownership histories.

Let’s look at the other figures:

507 works were not considered to be tainted as Nazi loot, of which 231 works were de-accessioned from German public museums in the 1930s. Did the Task Force even bother to research their provenances once their link to German public institutions was clearly established? What if they were on loan to those institutions prior to being purged for being “degenerate”? Will we ever know?

Isn’t it a fact that the American government upheld during its occupation of a defeated Germany the Nazi de-accessioning law as a legitimate act by the Nazi Government to protect the “values” of German society? Sounds like the forerunner of our modern-day “family values” movement. The questions surrounding that politically motivated act by the American government in the immediate postwar years should be discussed in the open. One wonders if the decision to uphold this Nazi attack against culture was not motivated more by a fear of provoking a wholesale purge of American collections which had been stocked in part by donations from private collectors and dealers who had bought large quantities of “degenerate” works on the international market at fire sale prices and justified their purchases as “rescues”. One should not be shy to express these thoughts because one’s “rescue” is another’s act of complicity with acts of plunder associated with genocidal undertakings. Indeed, had the American government declared the de-acccesion law illegal, the question of repatriating to the reborn Germany all works sold to non-German collectors--private and institutional-would have had to be dealt with in one fashion or another. It never was.

We need to return to Square One here. 

We don’t really know how the Gurlitt Task Force has defined “Nazi loot.” Does it include works that were subject to “internal plunder” during the 1930s which were acquired by Hildebrand Gurlitt at auctions at which objects were sold as a direct result of racial and political persecutions against the owners of those works, forced to sell in order to garner some income to be used to flee Germany? Did the Gurlitt Task Force consider as plundered objects confiscated by Nazi collaborators operating in German-occupied territories?

We don’t know.

We don’t even know how many of the works in Cornelius Gurlitt’s collection were acquired by him on the international art market without due regard for provenance.

We don’t know anything about the methodology used by the Task Force, the archives that were consulted, how far and deep the research was conducted.  Were private archives consulted? How many art historians were consulted as experts on specific artists? How did one determine that an object was subject to Nazi theft besides the obvious description of a Gurlitt object on inventories drawn up by agents of the Nazi government as confiscated?

We might hope that some or all of these questions have been answered in the full report of the Task Force, which was released in German, several hours before the German government made a public announcement of its release, thus giving no time even for Task Force members to review the report.

None of this sounds good. If this is the best that the German government can do under the klieg lights of international opinion, its every moves analyzed and scrutinized for the past two years, we should not hope for German authorities and their agents in museums and cultural circles to practice what we consider to be “transparency”, an absence of “opacity.”

Murkiness has characterized the Gurlitt process since the investigation into Cornelius Gurlitt was initially announced in late 2012. It appears to be as thick as odorous sludge.

Enclosed is the first page of the Gurlitt Task Force “fact sheet.”

Fact sheet

Results on Munich Stock of Artworks

1258 artworks: Total number of works Composed of:

          1224 artworks: Number of seized artworks 


          34 artworks: Finds from Cornelius Gurlitt’s estate which were entrusted to the Taskforce for 
provenance research after Cornelius Gurlitt’s passing in August/September 2013 


Thereof: 


507 artworks: Number of works that were found not to be Nazi-looted

Results:


o 231: Works which were dislocated from German museums by the “Degenerate Art” operation, but which had been acquired by each respective museum already before the Nazi regime came into power in 1933 and which were not on loan from private individuals

o 276: Works which could be attributed to the Gurlitt family stock because they either were created after 1945, or were made by members of the Gurlitt family, or could be attributed on the basis of personal dedications

499 artworks: Posted on the Lost Art online database since suspicions had not yet been ruled out that they may be Nazi-looted art

Results:


o 11 artworks: work identity assured; provenance established (4 works: Nazi-looting confirmed; 2 works: strong suspicion of Nazi-looting after establishing their provenance; 5 works: initial suspicion of Nazi-looting ruled out)


o 117 artworks: work identity assured; provenance indications on possible Nazi-looting; very specific indications in case of 25 artworks


o 27 artworks: work identity assured; due to provenance indications Nazi-looting seems unlikely


o 152 artworks: work identity assured; low provenance indications

o 143 artworks: work identity assured; no provenance indications


o 49 artworks:work identity not assured; noprovenance indications

252 artworks: Artworks (mainly from the “Degenerate Art” operation) for which further research is necessary before they can be categorized

Happy birthday, Vincent van Gogh! Part Two

by Angelina Giovani

[Editor’s note: This is the second installment of the story of the “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” by Vincent van Gogh. The first part, entitled “Happy Birthday, Vincent van Gogh: Portrait of Dr. Gachet, a book review” was posted on March 30, 2015.] 

Paul Cassirer

In 1904 Paul Cassirer, born in 1871 to an upper middle class family, displayed van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet, at his Berlin Gallery, strategically situated next to other modern dealers such as Fritz Gurlitt, Keller & Reiner, and Schulte. Unlike other dealers, Cassirer had managed to establish a working connection with Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, mainly because he never argued with her high prices. Committed to introducing the French avant-garde in Germany, he had borrowed nineteen canvases from Johanna van Gogh-Bonger in 1901 and organized Germany’s first substantial van Gogh exhibition. Cassirer sold The Portrait of Dr. Gachet to Count Harry Kessler who also bought Maurice Denis’ Mother and Child which Ballin had consigned at the same time as Dr. Gachet. Kessler paid Cassirer 3,378 German marks for both works.

The arrival of the Portrait of Dr. Gachet coincided with a transition period during which Berlin was replacing Munich as a primary market for contemporary art in Germany. Unlike other places the Berlin bourgeoisie had a liberal taste for the modern, and proved to be a perfect audience for van Gogh’s work. At the time that Kessler bought Dr. Gachet, there were altogether seven paintings by van Gogh’s in German private collections: Karl Osthaus, Hugo von Tschudi and Julius Meier-Graefe. After the sale of Dr. Gachet to Kessler, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam and the Salon des Indépendants in Paris held van Gogh retrospectives. Sales picked up and, in 1905, Cassirer sold a total of twenty paintings by the Dutch master. Prices doubled in as many years, however, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger did not grant Cassirer the honor of being her ‘sole agent for Germany’. Up until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Cassirer enjoyed continuous success. He signed a contract to publish van Gogh’s letters, and bought 151 works. Other collectors were also expanding their collections, such as Helene Kröller, a wealthy art history major from Essen, and an American-born pharmaceutical magnate, Alfred C. Barnes, the first American to own a van Gogh. 

Count Harry Kessler

Count Harry Kessler was born in Paris in 1868. He was the son of Adolf Kessler, a Hamburg banker, and Alice Blosse-Lynch, an Irish explorer’s daughter. He was educated in England and Germany, traveled a lot and wrote for Pan, an Art Nouveau journal, Pan. In 1903 he was appointed director of the Grossherzogliches Museum für Kunst un Kunstgewerbe in Weimar. He brought the Portrait of Dr. Gachet to his house in Cranachstrasse, Weimar, which was designed by Henry van de Velde. The house itself was impeccably conceived to entertain and display the Count’s collection, the perfect vehicle through which to introduce The Portrait of Dr. Gachet to critics, artists, writers, and other members of the intelligentsia. For many, it was their first encounter with a van Gogh. As director of the Grossherzogliches, Count Kessler strove to turn Weimar into a center of modern culture. He organized monthly public exhibitions of Impressionists and neo-Impressionists which eventually drew rebukes from Weimar’s conservative circles. 

Four years after acquiring the picture, Kessler consigned Dr. Gachet with Eugène Druet, in Paris. A specialist in Postimpressionists, Druet had started out as a photographer of Auguste Rodin’s sculptures and made significant purchases of van Gogh works. The Paris art market was in constant evolution. After Cézanne's death, Ambroise Vollard organized Matisse’s first one-man show, Picasso completed Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, while Georges Braque produced his first collage. Collectors from Europe and North America dominated the Paris art market, driving Impressionist prices higher than ever before. Duet exhibited Dr. Gachet in 1908 together with thirty-five other pictures, and although the exhibition ran for twelve days, he did not sell a single painting. Despite this, the Portrait of Dr. Gachet stayed with Druet until February 1910, when he purchased it himself, for 14.000 francs. Then he lent it to Roger Fry, the British art critic and a leading painter in the Bloomsbury circle. Just like with the French, the British were not ready for van Gogh. A critic with the Daily Express called van Gogh’s works "unintelligible". Seeing how "England had no use for Dr. Gachet" the portrait returned to France.

The following year, on February 20, 1911, Druet shipped the painting to Georg Swarzenski, the director of the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt since 1906, an institution renowned for its Old Master collection. Prior to acquiring the picture, Swarzenski had seen it in Kessler’s house in Weimar and also at Galerie Druet in Paris. This was the first postimpressionist canvas to enter the Städel. Swarzenski planned to transform the museum into a shrine for modern art.

Georg Swarzenski

Swarzenski was barely thirty years old when he became director of the museum. He was born in Dresden to a Jewish merchant, and was initially trained as a lawyer before switching to the study of art history. His goals were not only that the Städel should expand its collection, but also that it compete with other great museums of Europe. The only way to do this was to expand the collection with Impressionist works. As a result he removed all plaster copies of Roman and Greek art from the museum floor, and within 2 years he acquired over 350 pieces of sculpture both from Europe and Asia.

By 1911, the tendency to buy Impressionist works from France stirred a protest called “A protest of German Artists” fueled by 140 participants consisting of conservative artists, critics and museum directors.  Swarzenski asked Victor Mössinger, a businessman who later became his father-in-law, to purchase Dr.Gachet and donate it to the Städel.

On August 3, 1914 Germany declared war on France. Communication between art world figures in France and Germany became more complicated. The advent of war severed ties between Johanna van Gogh-Bonger and Paul Cassirer who was inducted into military duty as was Swarzenski. At war’s end in 1918, Swarzenski ordered that construction resume on the modern galleries, which were completed in 1923. By 1928, Swarzenski wore many hats in the Frankfurt art world, as head of the Städel and the Städtische Galerie but also of the Museum of History, and the Museum of Art and Crafts. Until the mid 1930, van Gogh and his works gave rise to new art historical writings as well as treatments in psychological and psychoanalytical literature.

In Spring 1933, months after Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany and, with him, the Nazi Party, Swarzenski removed Dr. Gachet from the walls of the Städel and locked it in a room under the museum’s roof together with a lot of Expressionist paintings. On March 12, the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda was established under Dr. Joseph Goebbels. His mission was to align German culture with the ideology of the Nazi party. In September 1933, he established the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture) which among other things imposed strict controls on the production of art in the Reich as well as on art exhibitions and the art market. Nazi ideology condemned modern art and labeled as ‘degenerate’ all forms of German and French Expressionism.

On March 13, 1933, Frankfurt’s Socialist mayor was replaced by Göring, and within weeks Swarzenski was suspended from his position as director at the Museum of History, the Museum of Arts and Crafts, the Städtische and his position as professor at the University of Frankfurt. Yet, Swarzenski managed to remain as director of the Städel, which was a private foundation and technically the Nazis had no jurisdiction. Still, he was summoned before a commission, and only managed to hold on to his position thanks to the Lord Mayor, Friedrich Krebs, who had been an early member of the Nazi party and oversaw the closing of over 500 Jewish-owned businesses in Frankfurt during the first year of the Third Reich. Krebs also belonged to Alfred Rosenberg’s Combat League for German Culture, a rival of Goebbels’ Ministry to promote Nazi-approved art and attack modernism. Krebs did not consider Swarzenski as a threat.

Friedrich Krebs

In 1935, Swarzenski met Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA), at the Parisian gallery of Paul Rosenberg.  At this meeting, Barr asked to borrow Dr. Gachet for a van Gogh retrospective that he was organizing at MoMA. Upon his return to Frankfurt, Swarzenski wrote to the "Ministry in Berlin" requesting permission to lend the painting. The Ministry denied the request. Alfred Wolters, the Nazi-designated successor of Swarzenski as director of the Städtische, dispatched a photograph of Dr. Gachet to Goebbels, at his request. Communication between Wolters and the Ministry focused on paintings in the museum’s collection that could be sold for a profit. Wolters, a close friend of Swarzenski, explained that selling Dr. Gachet would be a terrible loss for the city of Frankfurt. Moreover, it had not been acquired with city funds, but had been a gift of a private citizen, Victor Mössinger. Friedrich Krebs, a vocal opponent of modern art, also wrote to Berlin, asking that the Frankfurt collections should be spared. Dr. Gachet remained safe for the time being, while eleven paintings acquired by Swarzenski for the Städel were confiscated and taken to Munich and displayed at the Degenerate Art show which opened on July 19th, 1937.

On December 1st, 1937, Adolf Ziegler, one of the chief organizers of the Degenerate Art exhibit and a rabid anti-Semite, met Wolters and demanded five more paintings to be delivered to the Propaganda Ministry, including Dr. Gachet.  Stalling for time, Wolters asked the Ministry for an official written request. Wolters was able to buy only a few days. The Portrait of Dr. Gachet was taken out of storage.  It left the museum on December 8, 1937, a move reported in an article published by the Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung (FAZ). Johanna, Victor Mössinger ’s wife, read the article and inquired about the painting’s whereabouts. No one knew that the painting had ended up at a Berlin museum depot for "degenerate art" on Köpernickusstrasse, along with tens of thousands of other art works slated to be destroyed. The Portrait of Dr. Gachet by Vincent van Gogh was number 15,677.

Provenance research: what to do?

by Marc Masurovsky

The fault lines around contrasting views and understandings of provenance research resurfaced during the international conference on looted art that took place on February 20 and 21, 2015, at Columbia University entitled “Ghosts of the Past: Nazi looted art and its legacies”.

The fissures are brought about as a result of the legal implications of provenance research.

In my view, a provenance is a document that outlines the history of ownership or possession of an object from the time of its creation to the present. The older the object, the more likely it will be difficult to account for every movement and place where the object was situated once it left the studio of its maker. But as you all well know, even so-called modern works can have elusive provenances such as “private collection, Zurich”.

The contrast in approach, in my view, stems from the fact that one school, mostly articulated by museum professionals, which we will refer to as “traditional” is not necessarily interested in injecting economic, political and social history into the documentation of the fate of an object, especially as it pertains to the 1933-1945 period. For some strange reason, that entire period remains a taboo subject, difficult to express even in the literature that museums and galleries develop around the objects that they display. This same school also argues that one will never know exactly what happened to an object, maintaining that there is no concrete evidence that something “bad” happened to the owner of the object and, even it did, it might not have affected the legal title to that object. After all, the object might have been sold “legally” and we just don’t know about it. Hence we can never ascertain that the object was in fact misappropriated for racial or political reasons, and therefore should not be restituted to its purportedly rightful owner. This view remains the favorite weapon of individuals who work for those who are best described as the “current possessors” of the object being claimed, namely cultural institutions—public and private.

The other school to which this writer belongs argues that context plays a very important role in determining the fate of an object. One might call it the “organic” school, for lack of a better word. It argues that the object, the place where it is and the person in whose possession it is, represent the three cardinal points around which the history of the object is articulated against the matrix of history which evolves over time and space. Put simply, an object that changes hands in Munich, Germany, and which belonged to a person of the Jewish faith may be moving around for reasons compelled by the change of regime in Germany on January 30, 1933, thus signaling a potentially violent and illegal transfer of ownership after Hitler’s rise to power.

A research training program takes on vastly different features if it follows the “organic” school or the “traditional” school that warrants that the actual fate of an object will never be exactly known, raising the possibility that there could be a document out there that could prove that nothing untoward occurred and the object changed hands legally even in the context of racial and political persecution and genocide.

You would be surprised, but this “traditional” school of thought has led to negative outcomes for claimants more often than not, most notably in the Grosz v. MoMA case and in the case opposing the heirs of Martha Nathan to the Toledo Art Museum and the Detroit Institute of Art. 

When we think about establishing provenance research training programs in colleges and universities, we realize that some schools might adopt one or the other approach. A balanced program would offer both approaches to future practitioners, advising them of the pitfalls and benefits inherent to either approach.

Some participants and speakers at the Columbia Conference (see above) were very adamant about promoting their own views of how provenance research should be conducted, whether “traditional” or “organic” which is a good thing because it gave those in attendance an opportunity to weigh both in their own minds.

Any museum-guided provenance research training program will likely promote the “traditional” view that provenance research is first and foremost about documenting the itinerary of an object from creation to the present day, with history being relegated to a back seat.

Any provenance research training program guided by the notion that it is essential for the provenance to document who the actual owner of the object is promotes the “organic” view and will assign greater weight to history and the environment in which the object evolved, beyond the narrow confines of conventional art history.

These contrasting views have become an integral part of the landscape of provenance research, influenced and skewed by decades of litigation and legal wrangling between current possessors—in most cases, museums and galleries—and claimants.

The geography of “traditional” vs. “organic”

Where do we find “traditional” views as opposed to “organic” views of provenance research?

The “traditional” approach is mostly upheld in the hallowed halls of cultural institutions of a certain size located in large metropolitan centers. It can also be found among those who teach in museum studies programs and art history programs. One can even argue that the “traditional” view suffuses the curriculum of these academic programs that train future curators, art historians and other cultural professionals.

The “organic” view, strangely enough, finds its strongest advocates among archaeologists and cultural heritage specialists who take seriously the matrix from which objects are extracted. They are joined by those who research the fate and history of objects lost by claimants and their families. Some government officials, mostly in Europe, have eased their way into an “organic” view of provenance research, especially in the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.

The future of provenance research

There is no game plan right now. The most important next step is to institute formalized academic offerings in colleges and universities that introduce students to both methodologies—“traditional” and “organic”—as well as in specialized workshops organized by non-profit organizations.

The European Shoah Legacy Institute (ESLI) offered a Provenance Research Training Program (PRTP) from 2012 to 2015 through a series of five workshops staged in five different cities—Magdeburg, Germany; Zagreb, Croatia; Vilnius, Lithuania; Athens, Greece; and Rome, Italy. Both approaches were offered to participants although most workshops tended to lean towards an “organic” view of provenance.

By contrast, the Washington-based American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) have offered half-day and day-long seminars characterized as workshops in which they introduced curators, librarians, archivists and art historians to the mechanics of working with objects and documenting their history. These programs fit into the “traditional” mold and will likely continue. Likewise, the Smithsonian Museums appear to be thinking about developing some kind of “traditional” provenance research training program of their own.

Proposals abound about how to produce a more structured approach to training. Some efforts are taking shape in France. Provenance research is now being introduced to universities in select cities.  The Free University of Berlin continues to offer a curriculum on “degenerate art” which tends to steer away from controversy and thus finds comfort in a more “traditional” approach to provenance research. This is perhaps due to the fact that funding comes from the government. On the other hand, in Munich, the Zentral Institut für Kunstgeschichte (Central Institute for Art History) promotes through its research projects a more “organic” vision of provenance research that gives extra weight to the mechanics of the Third Reich, the relationships of power and interest between various groups in the art world, into the understanding of an object’s pathway through the 1933-1945 period. These relationships and “interests” , it is argued, shape the fate of the object.

There is talk about asking the European Union to establish a Europe-wide entity with EU funds that would coordinate research into the history of objects under review for possible taint of looting or misappropriation. The idea makes eminent sense since national governments have skirted the issue rather successfully for the past 70 years. It might just require such a supranational effort to compel provenance research and training of practitioners. For such an effort to even get off the ground, entities and individuals with an “interest” in these matters of restitution, looted art, provenance research, will have to work together, coalesce their strengths and assets in order to lobby successfully for the creation of a funded unit at the EU level.

And still others argue that the only way to provide training is through some sort of international association of provenance researchers. According to this position, this association (which does not yet exist) will be responsible for coordinating at the national and international level all activities pertaining to provenance research and training. For this to happen, national chapters have to be established and more importantly, a clear definition of provenance research has to be adopted. If we follow this duality of “traditional” vs. “organic”, will the association try and reconcile these two approaches or will it favor one over the other? Who will make that determination? Without a clear understanding of what provenance research is, how can such an association see the light of day?

Maybe several associations are required if the two approaches cannot be reconciled. That might not be the worst thing to do. The only organization of provenance researchers that exist today is in Germany, the Arbeitsstelle für provenienzforschung (AfP) and includes mostly German researchers who are for the most part working for municipal, regional or federal museums and cultural institutions. Expand this idea and we are talking about fundamental different outcomes and approaches shaped by the employer. In most of Europe, the employer is the government. In the United States, the main employer is a private non-profit or profit-making cultural institutions, with the exception of municipal, State and Federal museums. Hence, an international association would become a cacophony of conflicting interests, because some researchers would be government civil servants, others would be working for the private art market, while others would be working for claimants and advocacy groups.

Define your terms

Before anything concrete can happen to transform provenance research into an internationally-recognized profession with its requirements, methods and approaches, licensure or certification procedures, we all must be clear about exactly what provenance research really is, and how it is practiced. Failing that, there is nothing to talk about. Instead of an association and its bureaucratic pitfalls, let us for now establish a strong global network of individuals and entities interested in the history of ownership of artistic, cultural and ritual objects, a network that would be inclusive and not exclusive, one with a maximalist understanding of the idea of research. That approach might help shape the contours of a generic definition of provenance research on which everyone could agree without feeling as if they betrayed their principles and ideals.