Research and sanity during a pandemic

by Marc Masurovsky

 

Together with millions of men, women and children around the world, we have found ourselves trapped in a reality that we did not invite or want. 200,000 American citizens have lost their lives to a rampant virus which has not spared anyone that it comes into contact with. Failed public policies, reprehensible personal lifestyle choices and political callousness have only exacerbated what experts say was a highly preventable health crisis. 

 

The pandemic has taken a horrendous toll--emotional, physical and economic—on entire communities across the US and around the world. Although wearing a mask has turned out to be a no-brainer cheap way to stem the viral onslaught, for many, it’s an affront. An aspect of human behavior which I cannot fathom.

 

On a personal note….

 

My bedroom/study has become my operational epicenter, a small desk on which all of my tools are assembled—laptop, external drives, headset, printer, pens, post-its, lamp, the requisite pile of books, small teapot, tea cup and phone.  I do my best to keep the tea from spilling on the electronics.

 

My interactions with the outside world are even more filtered and skewed than before, relying almost exclusively on the technology of available bandwidth and uplinks to gain access to the internet, cable television, and Netflix. Staying sane is priority number one, tied with staving off COVID-19. The two have become unhappy bedfellows. Wanting to be hugged and held tight as a sign of human contact and love appear to be far off into the future.

 

On a professional note….

 

How can one make a project move forward that is anchored almost exclusively in on-site archival research? The National Archives are closed, as are the Archives of American Art (AAA) and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM.  The same with museums, universities and libraries.  Fold3.com (a digital container which contains a comprehensive sample of critical records pertaining to plunder during the Nazi years) and other research-focused websites have proven to be (relatively) lifesaving (not by much, though), making it possible to retrieve relevant documents. However, those digital resources have now been exhausted. 

 

The shuttering of archives on both sides of the Atlantic has put on hold, delayed and canceled entire research projects, many of which rely on cohorts of researchers and analysts plowing through archives in Paris, Munich, Koblenz, the Hague, Amsterdam, and London, to name a few. Furloughs and layoffs of research personnel across borders and oceans have been the inevitable consequence, sadly so, especially in the precarious freelance and independent research community but also in research facilities, small and large museums alike, and other cultural institutions. The long-term damage of these surgical operations against human capital is incalculable.

 

Can research projects survive in such a restrictive environment once on-site research and consultation of documents are no longer possible?  Is the Internet really cracked up to serve as a digital surrogate of real life? In the case of deep archival research, the short answer is no.  Data aggregators compiling information about works and objects of art sold at auction for the past three decades provide some limited solace which only fuels more anxiety and apprehension at the thought of conducting in-depth research.

 

Worst case scenario: the research stops, I/we hoist the white flag out of resignation and surrender in the face of a hopelessly vain quest to gain access to and obtain research materials.  

 

On a happier note…

 

The pandemic has put to the test long-established and newly emerging networks of affection and affiliation that bring together researchers, museum professionals, historians, cultural officials, archivists and librarians in many different countries and disciplines.  I can report with great relief that, so far as I have experienced and witnessed them, the ties that bind have so far have seemingly withstood the test of fractured physical encounters as evidenced by the amount of virtual assistance provided by archivists and specialists (so far) in the United States, France, the Netherlands and Germany. They have generously shared thousands of images of archival documents in unexpected expressions of collegiality and international cooperation.  Zoom conferences can only do so much but are a pale substitute for face-to-face organic encounters in enclosed spaces.

 

On a more personal note, the years-long hoarding of print and digital copies of archival documents has proven to be extremely useful. Under non-pandemic circumstances, this behavior might be viewed as suspect and an outward symptom of a serious psychological disorder.  Still, these virtual and physical mountains of documents have proven to be a lifesaver as they contain much relevant information, in most cases with the appropriate archival citation.

 

The continuing bad news is that the global health crisis shows no weakness, travel restrictions remain in place especially between the United States-major culprit in sustaining the pandemic—and a host of countries around the world. The better news is that archives are reopening in Western Europe under less than favorable circumstances for sustained research. The same goes for libraries and museums. Access—albeit limited--is resuming under restrictive conditions.

 

The next few years are going to be extremely challenging. In our narrow niche we explore the devastations wrought against culture, cultural rights and cultural goods, and the complexities of locating and recovering these displaced objects wherever they are.  Access to documents and know-how is essential to unravel the interlacing networks that favor and shape the displacement and dispersal of these objects over time and space. Without access to primary sources and other research efforts, it is difficult and oftentimes nigh impossible to understand the what, where, when, why and by whom of the problem. In order to mitigate our inability to gain access to documents, it is imperative that we shed whatever reluctance and reservation we may have about opening and sharing the knowledge that we have amassed over the years. We need to make it available to those who need it—personal company included--, so that all of our efforts, individual and combined, are not lost and wasted and they can be sustained, strengthened and disseminated so that we may all profit for our own good and for the common good.

 

Stay safe… This too shall pass. But at what price?

The Gyeongju Declaration of 2016

by Marc Masurovsky

Three years ago, representatives from China, Turkey, Greece, Cambodia, UNESCO, the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Korea, gathered at Gyeongju, South Korea, to discuss the status of looted cultural objects and their recovery by rightful owners.

A declaration was drafted by representatives of the above nations and NGOs and ratified by the conference participants, most of whom hailed from South Korea. The declaration is a worthy reminder that, in the absence of art market denizens and museums, cooler heads prevail and a more fruitful dialogue can produce more far-reaching statements of principle than the museum-inspired Washington Principles of December 1998. 

 
Therefore, I invitee you to read through the various components of the Gyeongju Declaration which still stands as one of the more progressive statements of its kind on market behavior, the rights of claimants and source nations, and means by which to achieve increased due diligence and ethical behavior in cultural institutions worldwide.

The Gyeongju Declaration, was drafted, revised, discussed and ratified, paragraph by paragraph, by all participants at the 6th International Conference of Experts on the Return of Cultural Property which took place in Gyeongju, the Republic of Korea, from October 17-19, 2016.


The Gyeongju Recommendation
We, the participants of the “6th International Conference of Experts on the Return of Cultural Property," held in Gyeongju, Republic of Korea, from 17 to 19 October 2016,

Expressing our sincere gratitude to our hosts, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Heritage Administration of the Republic of Korea, to our organizers, the Overseas Korean Cultural Heritage Foundation and the Cultural Property Return Campaign Center, and last but not least to our sponsors, Gyeongsangbuk-do Provincial Government, the City of Gyeongju, and the Korean National Commission for UNESCO, for their outstanding efforts and dedication,

Recognizing that the International Conference of Experts on the Return of Cultural Property, which was first proposed by the Republic of Korea in 2011 and whose first session was held in Seoul in the same year, with the second session in Seoul in 2012, third session in Ancient Olympia, Greece in 2013, fourth session in Dunhuang, China in 2014, fifth session in Nevsehir, Turkey in 2015, and sixth session here in Gyeongju, the Republic of Korea this year, has provided precious opportunities for the international community to share its experiences and knowledge on the return of cultural property and join the fight against the illicit trade in cultural property,

Welcoming the U.N. Resolution A/70/76, unanimously adopted in its December 9, 2015 General Assembly meeting and especially the operative paragraph 7 of this Resolution, where for the first time the recent institution of International Conference of Experts on the Return of Cultural Property as well as their concluding documents were recognized,

Recalling the Seoul Declaration (2011), the Seoul Recommendation (2012), the Ancient Olympia Recommendation (2013), the Dunhuang Recommendation (2014), and the Cappadocia Recommendation (2015) adopted by the previous International Conferences of Experts on the Return of Cultural Property.

Noting that international legal instruments, including the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954) and its two protocols (1954 and 1999), the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property (1970), and the UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illicitly Exported Cultural Objects (1995), as well as the devoted efforts and subsequently-adopted resolutions of the United Nations (UN) and legal instruments of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), have contributed to the prevention of the illicit trade in cultural property and its return to countries of origin,

Acknowledging that not only international non-governmental organizations, such as the International Council of Museums (ICOM), but also public and private institutions, including museums, libraries, and religious organizations, as well as the general public and local communities, have ever-increasing roles to play in the struggle against the illicit trade in cultural property,

Commending, in particular, that the amicable efforts by Korean civil society and religious organizations to recover illicitly exported cultural property by means of dialogue and mutual exchange cooperating with other foreign institutions in possession thereof have set a positive precedent that can be emulated by numerous states which have similarly suffered from the illicit export of their cultural property,

Observing greater need for administrative and judicial mutual assistance between countries and closer cooperation from auction houses, museums, and libraries in each country to prevent new means of illicit trade in cultural property in the art market, including online sales,

Condemning any uncivilized acts of vandalism directed against cultural property, including the recent destruction and illegal removal of cultural property in the conflict-ridden Middle East and the rest of the world,

Recommend that:
1. Each State should closely cooperate with other States for the return or restitution of illegally exported cultural property and the prevention of the illicit export of cultural property, and reinforce existing networks among public and private organizations, as well as individuals to share and exchange information concerning stolen or illicitly exported cultural property and its restitution;

2. Each State should continue to update the existing inventory of state owned and privately owned cultural property, as well as the databases of stolen or illicitly exported cultural property, and share actively such information with governments, relevant institutions, and non-governmental organizations of other States aiming to establish a common publicly available international platform;

3. Each State should continuously monitor the art market, including online markets, to control the illicit trade in cultural property, raise awareness of the legal and ethical duties of due diligence for participants of such markets, and impose administrative and judicial sanctions, when appropriate;

4. Each State should allocate resources to encourage provenance research, to facilitate licit trade in cultural property, and develop and implement educational programs to share and disseminate the outcomes of such research, thereby improving the capacity of those who work in the area.

5. Museums, libraries, and other public and private organizations that hold cultural property and collections are encouraged to: a) Take appropriate action to facilitate the rapid return of human remains and sacred cultural property when they receive a request for the return of such property, taking into account the wishes of the departed, the interests and beliefs of the members of the community, ethnic group or religious society from whom the property was taken; b) Make every effort before acquisition, in compliance with Article 4.4 of the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention, to ensure that any cultural property offered for purchase, donation, or any other transfer thereof, has clear title, c) Provide their directors, personnel, and volunteers with periodic training and educational sessions to raise awareness of illicit trade in cultural property and endeavor to ensure that the ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums is fully complied with;

And also,

6. Auction houses, museums and art dealers should accept for consignment, acquire or trade in cultural property only when they are satisfied that a valid title is held and should make public all available provenance-related information on cultural property;

7. Governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, the general public and local communities, private research institutes, museums, libraries, international academic institutions etc. should continue their efforts to further promote the purpose and spirit of this Conference which has been held annually in the Republic of Korea, Greece, China, and Turkey since 2011, respectively, for prohibiting and preventing illicit trade in cultural property and promoting return or restitution of illicitly exported or stolen cultural property.

Twenty years of Washington Principles: yet another conference

by Marc Masurovsky

On November 26-28, 2018, almost exactly twenty years after the start of the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, the German Lost Art Foundation will host an international “specialist” conference entitled: “20 Years of Wash­ing­ton Prin­ci­ples: Chal­lenges for the Fu­ture”. The aims of the conference are as follows:

“Be­gin­ning with a look back at the Wash­ing­ton Con­fer­ence of 1998, the con­fer­ence aims to dis­cuss the de­vel­op­ments that have tak­en place in the in­di­vid­u­al coun­tries since then, in or­der to ad­dress a num­ber of ques­tions for the fu­ture: What spec­trum is there for fair and just so­lu­tions? How can open gaps in prove­nance be dealt with? What does prove­nance re­search need in or­der to be able to work ef­fec­tive­ly? How can its meth­ods be used ad­e­quate­ly in ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing, in ex­hi­bi­tions and in mu­se­um com­mu­ni­ca­tion? And above all: What con­tri­bu­tion to a cul­ture of re­mem­brance can prove­nance re­search achieve?"

Twenty years ago, eleven Washington Principles were defined and issued as non-binding recommendations for national governments, cultural institutions and the proverbial art market to follow and abide by as a “soft” means of raising awareness about the racially- and politically-motivated displacements of Jewish-held property, cultural and other, between 1933 and 1945, which provoked illegal transfers of title and ownership from Jewish to non-Jewish possessors. Since then, there have been countless lawsuits and judicial proceedings filed by Holocaust claimants and their families in different legal settings on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean to try and recover what they argued was rightfully theirs. At the same time, museums and auction houses were placed under closer scrutiny, not by regulatory overseers, but by lawmakers, Jewish officials, lawyers, historians, researchers, journalists and NGO’s, in how they presented the contents of their collections, especially those items that were transacted between 1933 and 1945. In the case of the two largest auction houses, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, their sales and consignment practices fell under the magnifying glass to screen the provenance of items offered for sale and ensure that they did not indicate possible mishandling during the Nazi years, which could lead to a possible claim to block the sale of the item in order to facilitate a restitution to an aggrieved owner.

How can open gaps in prove­nance be dealt with?

Way too much ink has been spilled since the late 1990s on the subject of “provenance research.” Art historians and museum professionals had never encountered such pressure to explicitly describe and, many times, justify their recourse to “provenance research” in their daily practice as a means by which to ensure that the institution which they served was freed of any possible accusation of holding items which had been illegally displaced during the Nazi years and never returned to their rightful owners. One of the key issues motivating such research was “how to fill gaps” in the known ownership history of objects under their care or being offered for sale through auction houses or in other market venues. Filling a provenance gap has become a regular feature of provenance research, discussed at a plethora of conferences, symposia, and colloquia, organized both inside and outside academic circles in North America, Europe and even Asia. Researchers of all stripes and convictions have built part time or full time careers (as long as they work for defense lawyers and governments!) delving into the sinews of ownership trails to try and find crucial details that might fill up the spatio-temporal abyss known as “the gap.”

Here we are, in 2018, contemplating yet another international conference to reminisce over the Washington Principles. At that conclave, participants will be asked to contemplate “how to deal with open gaps in provenances.” What exactly has happened since 1998, if it is not putting into place complex strategies on how to address those “gaps.” It is hard to imagine how this question is pertinent unless the organizers of the conference have not been keeping tabs with the evolution of the provenance research field, however quixotic it has been.

What spec­trum is there for fair and just so­lu­tions?

Washington Principle #8 states: 

“If the pre-War owners of art that is found to have been confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted, or their heirs, can be identified, steps should be taken expeditiously to achieve a just and fair solution, recognizing this may vary according to the facts and circumstances surrounding a specific case.” As stated in previous articles published on the plundered-art blog, the idea of “a just and fair solution” was not the brainchild of a Holocaust claimant seeking the physical return—restitution—of his/her lost property from the possessing institution, be it public or private.

The real question should be: have current possessors been fair and just to Holocaust claimants? Please explain your response, whether positive or negative.

What does prove­nance re­search need in or­der to be able to work ef­fec­tive­ly?

The framers of the November Berlin conference on Washington Principles should make up their minds about the focus of their gathering. Is it about the future of the Washington Principles or is it about provenance research? Is it about assessing the merits and limitations of the Principles or is it about provenance research? Are they suggesting that provenance research lies at the root of restitution proceedings and “fair and just solutions”? If so, they should state this idea openly. In other words, they seem mighty confused about what they are trying to achieve in November 2018, as if twenty years have come and gone without them witnessing too much. One can grow impatient with such “innocent” questions raised almost in rhetorical fashion to stimulate a discussion which might not actually happen. If one wishes to delve deep into the vagaries and limitations imposed on provenance research by institutions subsidizing and acquiring such research, the discussion might soon become contentious. But contention is not a desired outcome, much as it unfolded at the Franco-German Bonn Conference of November 2017 on the wartime art market in France, where the fault lines on the financing of research in Germany by the Lost Art Foundation were exposed in a rather blunt manner. Do we want such a recurrence to take place in Berlin? I doubt it. If that is the case, the line of questioning should be altered and focused on the crucial issues facing provenance research—lack of funding, lack of focus, too much political meddling in the direction of the research.

How can [the] meth­ods [of provenance research] be used ad­e­quate­ly in ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing, in ex­hi­bi­tions and in mu­se­um com­mu­ni­ca­tion?

That’s a rather funny question because most museums—public and private—in Europe and North America oppose almost religiously any discussion of National Socialism, the Holocaust, the Second World War, Nazi expansionism, collaboration with the Nazis, as integral parts of the narrative to explain how these movements, trends, and events would have shaped the fate of objects in their collections. So instead of asking “innocently” how these methods can be used “in ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing, in ex­hi­bi­tions and in mu­se­um com­mu­ni­ca­tion”, perhaps the framers of the Berlin conference should provide a sober assessment to the participants as a starting point:

There is no education, there is very little provenance training, if any, there is no talk of the larger historical context in the presentation of ownership histories in exhibitions and in “museum communication”. Ask why that is, instead of pretending that there is training and education.

What con­tri­bu­tion to a cul­ture of re­mem­brance can prove­nance re­search achieve?

This question is astounding in and of itself. It might subsume that restitutions and “fair and just solutions” combined will become obsolete and a thing of the past. Instead of focusing on justice, why not use the history of objects to engage in “remembrance” of lost lives, lost art, the Holocaust and all of its ugliness. Isn’t it better that way? Remembrance is the ticket out for many people to clear their conscience and feel that they are being morally and ethically correct in how they treat objects with dubious histories. Perhaps, we should just set aside the ugliness of the past and focus instead on the loss of human life, as perceived or hinted at through the history of objects with Holocaust-laden stories and interruptions.

It’s hard to fathom how, after twenty years, adult men and women who are supposed to be experts and who are respected for their wisdom and insights, who occupy positions of leadership in institutions that steer and foster research and education on the most complex, most heinous crime—genocide and its corollary, plunder—perpetrated by men and women against other men, women, and children, only because of what they were—Jews--, can propose a framework of discussion which suggests that not much has happened in the twenty years that elapsed since the Washington Conference on Holocaust Assets.

I am tongue-tied.

In the mean time, the best advice that I can give is to hold a parallel conference that discusses the following themes:

-Throw out the Washington Principles, rewrite them and adapt them to the realities of the 21st century;

-Forget about “fair and just solutions”: they constitute a corporate welfare program for claimants, or how to buy out the claim without losing title to looted works in one’s collection.

-Fund provenance research at much higher levels than they are currently,

-Establish provenance research training programs on both sides of the Atlantic in order to train new generations of researchers, art historians into the finer aspects of contextual research that actually weaves the larger history into the history of displaced objects and inculcates critical thinking into their methodologies.

-Learn how to tell stories that are meaningful and truthful, not spun and woven tales designed to make museums feel better about themselves.

Why all the fuss about provenance research?

by Marc Masurovsky

Up until the mid-to late 1990s, provenance research remained within the province of trained art historians working in cultural institutions where art objects are cared for and displayed for the benefit of the public. The research aims to enhance the understanding of the object—its author, its physical attributes, the period in which it was produced, the reasons for its existence, and how it evolved over time and space.

This kind of research is an academic/intellectual exercise that helps ascertain the authenticity of an object and its place in the history of art, writ large.

It is not a requirement incumbent upon its practitioner. Provenance research is one of many duties that “come with the job.” If it does not get done, no one gets fired. More often than not, the information that is collected about the object does not enter the “public record” insofar as it is communicated to the general public. If it is communicated, that is left up to the discretion of the institution where the research is conducted.

Then, the 1990s came and went, and, all of a sudden, “provenance research” became something else entirely.

If I had been working in a museum in the wake of the scandal surrounding the misuse of Swiss bank accounts owned by persons of Jewish descent who may or may not have perished during the Holocaust, I would have been rather oblivious to any debate about loot in general. Once the debate about the mishandling of “Jewish bank accounts” (I hate that expression!) transferred into the (mis)handling of art objects nestled in the permanent collections of countless museums both in North America and Europe, provenance research entered the spotlight front and center.

If I had been working in a museum at the time that the “Portrait of Wally” by Egon Schiele had been seized at the Museum of Modern Art of New York in early January 1998, I probably would have wondered: what is that all about? And I would have naturally sided with the then owners of the painting, the Leopold Foundation of Vienna, and the exhibitors, the Museum of Modern Art, wondering what Robert Morgenthau, then district attorney of Manhattan, had had for coffee on the day that he decided to order the New York Police Department to seize the painting.

I would have done so because my training would have precluded me from even wondering if I should even worry about whether or not the institution that I served had actual title to the objects under my care and examination. Why should I have worried about title since I simply assumed that my institution was the rightful owner?

The right thing to do is to acknowledge that the beast that has become “provenance research” has been transformed from an innocuous art-historical practice into a tendentious, litigation-laced, means to an end: does the research into the origins of an object lead to the maintenance of that object in the collection that I help steward or does it lead to the de-accessioning of the object because of some historical wrong that broke the chain of ownership of the object, thus changing its status to “restitutable”?

Since the seizure of “Portrait of Wally” in early January 1998, provenance research lost its innocence. Battle lines have been drawn between defendants upholding their rights to keep art objects under fire for being “looted”, on one side, and plaintiffs demanding the return of those art objects arguing that they were the rightful owners whose families had been despoiled for racial, ethnic, religious and other reasons at some point between 1933 and 1945 during the twelve year reign of the Nazi Party and as a result of the expansionist war decreed by Adolf Hitler and his minions against Europe’s “undesirables”-Jews, Slavs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, emotionally and physically challenged individuals, and anyone else who was caught in the crosshairs of a continental-wide fit of man-made madness, verging on an apocalyptic nightmare worthy of any painting signed by Hieronymous Bosch.

There had been a glimmer of hope at the time of the so-called Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets of November 30-December 3, 1998. Art was not supposed to be on the calendar of the conference. The seizure of the Schiele paintings (actually, two paintings had been seized at MoMA in early January 1998) changed the configuration of the planning for the Washington Conference. American policymakers were not pleased about the seizure because they argued that it had besmirched the bilateral relations of the United States with Austria. In so stating, the US government had sided against the claimants and had upheld Austria’s argument at the time that the entire flap over “Wally” was a private matter to be resolved between the claimants—heirs of Ruth Bondi-Jarai—and the Leopold Foundation, then owner of the seized paintings. Still, and this is for another installment, Morgenthau’s muscled intervention at MoMA triggered an existential debate inside Austrian political and cultural circles which forced Austria to reexamine its entire relationship with its past as it affected the illegal seizures of Jewish cultural property. The end result: the only restitution law in the world which mandates “provenance research” in all Federal public cultural institutions of the Republic of Austria.

Begrudgingly, the US government and its many allies at the planning table for the Washington Conference inserted art as one of the many different types of looted assets whose fate needed to be deliberated on by the attending nations and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO). The Washington Conference produced the so-called non-binding “Washington Principles”—11 recommendations that have become de facto “policy” for lack of a better word in many nations that want to remove that cultural monkey off their backs.

For some, the Washington Conference was a success. For others, it was a dismal failure. For those who deemed it a success, the Conference provided a unique forum to get a sense of where the world stood as far as justice to Holocaust survivors was concerned. The principles notwithstanding, everyone went home thinking they had done God’s work for three days. Those who saw in the Conference a dismal failure balked at the so-called Principles as yet another diplomatic way out of taking full responsibility for not having done anything concrete to render justice to the victims of plunder while throwing a sop at museums, auction houses, and other privateers of the art market by reassuring them that, although provenance research was highly recommended to fill “unavoidable gaps” in the history of ownership of art objects under their care and stewardship, “fair and just solutions” ought to be sought in order to ensure a measure of justice for all. In the end, for the naysayers, the Washington Conference led to a massive failure of international public policy, thus creating a vacuum of power and decision-making over the fate of countless art objects whose newfound status in legal limbo—plundered or not? Restitutable or not?—had to be resolved not with legislation but through, oftentimes, vicious legal battles pitting museums’ hired guns against plaintiffs’ hired guns.

The search for justice over a massive crime of plunder tied to genocide has turned into an international legal slugfest. Instead of chasing airplane crash victims, it has become more profitable to seek out victims of plunder.

Provenance research: what to do?

by Marc Masurovsky

The fault lines around contrasting views and understandings of provenance research might appear to be subtle to the uninitiated but, in reality, the fissures are brought about as a result of the legal implications of provenance research.

In the view of this writer, a provenance is the history of ownership or possession of an object from the time of its creation to the present days. 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.

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 at the Columbia Conference 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?

In my view, the “traditional” approach is 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 now-extinct Prague-based 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—Angers and Paris. 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 institution, 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, its licensure 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’s instead 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.

What is to be done?

by Marc Masurovsky

Locating looted art in public and private collections, auction houses, galleries, is one thing; recovering these plundered objects is quite another.

The search for looted cultural assets is extremely tedious. Some people get lucky with “low-hanging fruits” like well-defined provenance information for objects being offered for sale or being displayed in a museum, which contains critical information that might lead to a match between the object and a plundered owner.

Those instances are rare.

The tedium of research concerns all other objects—weeks, months, sometimes years of research, often led by one or two people, most of the time on a part-time basis because there is no reliable source of money to underwrite such an investigative and analytical effort.

If progress has been made on documenting cultural losses at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators over the past twenty years, there has been no progress in establishing a solid, long-term funding mechanism to ensure that research into the ownership histories of countless objects and their location is sustained over a long period of time.

To remedy this chronic shortage of funds for research into the looted cultural heritage of the Jewish people, historians, investigators, researchers, even curators, have tended to focus their attention on single collections and/or a small clutch of plundered objects. These efforts aim to clarify the history of objects coming from a single owner, or located in a single museum or collection. But even those efforts are lengthy, arduous, and end up yielding few fruits, for all sorts of reasons, the main ones being lack of capital and legal and logistical obstacles to gain access to relevant data.

How does one resolve this paltry state of affairs?

One cannot locate any looted object if one does not devote the needed resources to conduct solid, forensic, investigative research into its whereabouts, ensuring that it is the correct one, locating its potential owners, and if there are none, declaring the looted object to be heirless property.

What does one do with objects deemed heirless? Remember that heirless property is simply unclaimed property for which no owners have been found ---yet. Since there are no well-funded research organizations or institutions in the business of searching for these objects’ rightful owners, they remain to a large extent heirless, deprived of their history, their context and their identity.

For instance, Jewish museums are stocked with heirless objects, coming from communities that have been systematically erased from the face of the earth. But not all displaced objects in Jewish museums are heirless. The mission of Jewish museums is to safeguard these objects, not necessarily restitute them. Hence, when faced with a restitution claim, a Jewish museum is more likely to behave like most art museums by opposing the act of restitution which would require deaccessioning the claimed object from its collection.

Governments of nations that were subjected to the horrors of Nazi and Fascist policies and global war, hold untold numbers of objects which were “found” at war’s end.  So far, little to no information has been released which can help apprehend the true extent of this seventy-year old problem.

The Russian puzzle is the most egregious. So-called “trophy art” picked up by specialized Soviet military units in all territories that the Red Army “liberated” in the months before the end of WWII is stored in museums across the ex-Soviet Union. Most of the objects that the Red Army “repatriated” as compensation for Soviet losses are presumably concentrated in what is now the Russian Federation, Byelorussia and the Ukraine. But there is also looted cultural material belonging to exterminated Jewish communities in the custody of governments in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, to name a few.

In an ideal world, the most logical way to address the question of researching and documenting the complete history of cultural plunder between 1933 and 1945 is to orchestrate a massive inflow of research monies and establish an international research and documentation infrastructure. Only in this way can one address systematically the full scope of looted cultural heritage (outside of Judaica which has attracted significant attention over the past decades) of the Jewish people, identify the location of plundered objects, figure out which ones have still not been restituted, match them with their rightful owners. If there are none, then the question of heirless property comes into the picture.

A vast international, even transcontinental, network or infrastructure of research institutions facilitated and nurtured by a mix of government agencies, independent organizations, and academic centers across the Americas and Europe should coordinate this effort. This is not a one-or three-person job. In order to get a handle on what was stolen, where, when, by whom, sold and resold to whom and where and when, one needs a small army of intelligent, motivated, educated, trained, PAID, worker bees.

There is a strong likelihood that “heirless” objects having once belonged to Jewish owners before the Holocaust era ended up in the permanent collections of museums, be they State-controlled or privately owned.

How does one persuade these cultural institutions to deaccession heirless objects which they argue were acquired in good faith and have no owner?

How does one convince governments which control cultural institutions holding such objects to return them? And to whom? Even in Israel, this policy is controversial.

The solutions to the above have always been complicated and laced with political overtones. Art makes people irrational. For an institution to part with an object is fraught with strong emotions and potent defenses against such an act, even it is for a good cause, even if restitution through deaccession is meant to heal wounds and provide a small gesture towards an act of justice. It goes against the grain of museum practices worldwide to restitute.

To end on a less negative note, it is worth exploring the different ways that exist to restore a modicum of justice to the victims of cultural plunder. But those approaches need to be anchored in victims’ rights, not in private property law and antiquated notions of cultural patrimony. In and of itself, such an approach could open new doors on how to manage in a more ethical way tomorrow’s museums and the global art trade.

And above all, a massive amount of money is needed in order to rewrite the history of looted objects, return them to their rightful owners, and establish much better practices in the global art market, the museums that display objects, the galleries and auction houses that buy, display, and sell, and the collectors and dealers who do the same.

Higher ethics, stringent due diligence, thorough provenance research and true transparency, transparently clear (as opposed to less opaque), like a sheet of cellophane or saran wrap, your choice. That is the goal.

Russian activity on the plundered art blog

by Marc Masurovsky

What could be so interesting about the “plundered art” blog that it has attracted a blizzard of pageviews unlike anything seen since the blog first started in 2010? The mission of this cultural blog has always been and will always be: to document and discuss acts of cultural plunder, the restitution of looted art, and the ethics of museum administrators worldwide.

This digital onslaught of “visits” to the plundered art blog has come from Russia. It coincides with the December 5, 2016,  publication of HARP’s study detailing the inability and/or unwillingness of the US Department of State to conduct provenance research when considering requests by foreign lenders for certificates of immunity from judicial seizure that provoked the Russian onslaught. Since then, the story has received more than 4000 pageviews. In our world, that number falls outside the range of “normal” readership on the plundered art blog. We’re happy if we get 2-300 pageviews in a month for a single article.

At the time of publication of the aforementioned article, the US Senate was considering a bill called S. 3155. This bill makes it possible for foreign lenders to obtain immunity from seizure for the objects that they consider lending to US museums. The American museum directors’ lobby, enshrined in the Association of American Museum Directors (AAMD) has been struggling for four years to pass such a law through the Senate. Twice defeated, the AAMD chose the “submarine” strategy. No publicity, no public discussion, just silent lobbying. It also obtained the good services of Mr. Sneak Attack himself, Senator Chuck Schumer, a “Democrat” from New York State, to shepherd the bill through the Senate.

Why would the Russian government be so concerned with an American administrative rule that ensures that works of art from abroad are not seized while on display in an American museum? The procedure in and of itself should be a sufficient guarantee that art works from Russian institutions will be adequately protected while on display in the United States. Apparently, that does not suffice. In a nation like Russia and perhaps other countries where the State oversees, to a lesser or greater extent, the cultural arena, explicit statements by national legislatures count more than an administrative rule. This might explain the motivation of the AAMD to go for the jugular and ask the US Senate to pass a law that enshrines the principle of immunity from judicial seizure as a clear expression of an American cultural policy that officially does not exist. The immunity from seizure procedure has been in place for decades, overseen and enforced by the US Department of State. So why pursue legislation that repeats pretty much what the State Department already does on a weekly basis?

There is no need to show up with reams of documents and thousands of emails to prove Russia’s interest in S. 3155. It is basic common sense to argue that it is in the interest of the Russian government that the AAMD should succeed in pushing S. 3155 through the US Senate.

And it did succeed, before the sun rose on December 10, 2016.

The AAMD’s success in the Senate should beam a strong enough signal to Vladimir Putin that American museum directors are doing their all to assuage him and to convince him to reverse his decision on the cultural loan freeze imposed by Russia since 2011.

S. 3155 will sterilize the American cultural environment at the exhibit level whereby all objects on display loaned by foreign institutions will not be subject to a claim for restitution by any aggrieved party. A perfect rendition of the absolutist idea that “Culture transcends History” as Dr. Mikhail Piotrovsky, head of the Hermitage Museum, would have you note, an idea in line with the philosophy of “globalism” touted by the world’s leading museum directors and their governments according to which the museums they lead are the sepulchers of culture and art. We should worship them and thank them for “safeguarding” samples of the world’s best art and most significant cultural artifacts. The globalist museum world believes in the free exchange of artistic and cultural objects without any impediments or restrictions placed by governments and their institutions. Globalists refuse to allow history and all of its abject manifestations--civil wars, military and political upheavals, economic dislocation, ethnocide, genocide, and other mass expressions of human cruelty—to interfere with their ability to acquire and display objects, irrespective of their origin, which means, irrespective of their provenance, of their history. Provenance research, for these institutions, is an option to be exercised when needed.

Governments, including the American government, have been complicit in allowing their museums to acquire and exhibit willy-nilly. Their ethically lax behavior emboldens theft and plunder. Once illicitly-obtained objects enter a museum’s collection, they are only rarely removed as restitutable items to their rightful owners. The United States government, by its very inactions, refuses to compel American cultural institutions which harbor looted cultural objects to restitute them to their rightful owners. Although looting is publicly condemned as a reprehensible criminal activity, its fruits are protected once they enter cultural institutions. This paradox is alive and well and has been so for decades. S. 3155 is but a mere expression thereof.

Public outrage against looting may be universal but when a museum accepts the fruits of such criminal acts, there is generally no effort to force it to disgorge those looted objects and return them to their rightful owners. S. 3155 confirms that absolutist, Statist approach to culture.

Now that the US Senate has passed S. 3155 and President Barack Obama has signed it into law, the American museum community has proven that the US does not really need a ministry of culture, because the AAMD, with the blessings of the US Congress, acts as the de jure cultural arbiter of the nation’s cultural institutions in line with the Federally-controlled Smithsonian Institutions; the US Senate and the US government are there to do its bidding. Put another way, the museum directors’ lobby usually gets what it wants, much like the National Rifle Association.

Provenance research 2016

by Marc Masurovsky

The “theory and practice of provenance research” seminar/workshop at the Museum of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX, has wrapped up its fourth season. This seminar is the outgrowth of multiple visits I made over the past decade at the invitation of the Museum at Texas Tech University in Lubbock to share information about cultural plunder, and how provenance research can serve as a tool to strengthen ethics in the management of collections and improve our knowledge of the objects contained therein. The idea has always been to foster a clearer understanding of how looted cultural and artistic material could find its way in the global art market as non-restituted property or back into the hands of their rightful owners.

Central to our discussions throughout the seminar was the following truism: 

Research into the ownership histories of artistic and cultural objects which changed hands between 1933 and 1945 under obscure and potentially illicit conditions, redefined commonly accepted notions of provenance research, thrusting this obscure discipline under the klieg lights of Holocaust justice.

Until the mid-1990s, very few people outside the sheltered world of art history, a certain art history that is, one focused on “art” produced before 1945, knew what provenance was all about including me. Yes, I admit, the word “provenance” meant nothing to me then. I might have engaged in such research without knowing it while investigating the movements of assets plundered by Nazis and their collaborators, from the scene of the crime inside occupied Europe through the “neutral” countries (Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal), before being transferred in many instances for shelter and/or reinvestment in the Americas, mostly North America. These assets included works and objects of art.  My focus then centered on the men and women who conveyed these plundered assets from point to point, in search of “safe havens.”

Fast forward to 1998.  A heady year, no doubt about it. 

An avalanche of news stories overtook an unprepared and largely ignorant international press corps which experienced great pains to explain what the hullabaloo was all about, especially six decades after crimes of plunder had been committed against Jewish owners of art collections, elevated to crimes against humanity at the International Military Tribunal of Nurnberg in 1946.

Events regarding looted art and its restitution (or lack thereof) cascaded one after another:

-the seizure of two paintings by Egon Schiele at the Museumof Modern Art of New York,

-the settlement of the Goodman vs. Searle case over a Degaspastel landscape,

-the enactment of the Holocaust Victims Redress Act,

-the establishment of a Presidential Advisory Commission onHolocaust-era Assets, 

-the Washington Conference on Holocaust-era Assets thathatched the now-infamous eleven “Washington Conference Principles onNazi-Confiscated Art”.

Almost overnight, the provenance of an object—its history and the chain of ownership that it describes—became intimately connected with an international quest for restitution to rightful owners of these looted art objects. Provenance research had become restitution research, to the quiet consternation of many museum professionals and art historians.

Eighteen years later, some of the dust has settled, although emotions still run high over how to conduct provenance research and whether objects identified as looted should be returned to their rightful owners.

Not a week goes by without a story in some corner of the world that documents illicit trafficking of antiquities, illegal sales of sacred indigenous artifacts in Western European showrooms, attempts at recovering art stolen during Hitler’s despotic and maniacal reign over Germany and three-fourths of Europe. We get regaled by stories of an unbridled art market impervious to the ethics of ownership for thousands of objects traded for hyper-inflated sums, not only in New York, but in London, Paris and showrooms at the antipodes of the earth, in free-ports, tax-free black holes where nothing is documented, nothing exists on paper, except when you traverse the force field that separates us mortals from the treasures that lurk behind protective barbed wire fences and high walls, in Geneva, Singapore, west Africa, and many other locations around the world.

Provenance research is an intellectual, multi-disciplinary methodological and analytical endeavor, characterized by a critical, empirical approach applied to the search for and examination of historical information about objects, their owners and possessors, and the paths that they borrowed from the time of creation to the present day. The approaches and methodologies implicit in provenance research vary according to those who conduct it and for whom.

Efforts to reconcile these varied approaches have been few and too far between, owing to the “vested interests” of those who request the research to be done. Indeed, many practitioners in the art world—museums, auction houses, galleries, etc.—remain skeptical if not indifferent to the idea that a provenance should make clear who the legitimate title holder is to the object whose history is described in the provenance. The lack of constructive dialogue between these traditional practitioners and non-art historians who engage in provenance research for reasons unrelated to the exercise of art history, remains an enduring obstacle to the establishment of a unified code of provenance research, which acknowledges commonalities in the varied approaches while outlining the differences and divergences produced by vested interests.

Knowledge is power and those who control the knowledge, or at least convey the illusion of control of that knowledge, exert an undeniable influence over the way the (his)tory of ownership of an object is drafted and presented to the public. Until recently, no one questioned who held title to an object or how title was transferred for an object suddenly displaced during societal disruptions, which might have included, but not limited to:

the siege of Paris in 1871, World Wars I and II, the Bolshevik Revolution, anti-Jewish pogroms in the Ukraine, natural disasters like earthquakes and floods, internecine rivalries between competing factions within a large feuding family, the enactment of discriminatory laws singling out entire groups and ethnicities leading to evictions, expropriation of property and marginalization, loss of property through duress, civil wars, mass arrests and the list goes on. 

These events, although not directly pertinent to art history, do inform and (re)shape the history of an object simply because the object evolves among people located in places which might have been subject to these disruptions which would have had a measurable or negligible impact on the legal ties binding the object to the affected owner of that object.

External factors weigh heavily in the drafting of a provenance: their apprehension and inclusion in the story of the object clarifies and enriches, sometimes complicates our understanding of the history of ownership of an object.  They matter immensely when the question surfaces: who holds title to the object in question? How did the object go from point a to point b? who was involved in the transfer?

When cultural institutions and businesses transacting in art objects sidestep deliberately the multitudinous gyrations and brusk movements that are inherent to the historical process, they obscure, skew and distort the provenance of art objects.  This misshaping of historical narrative lies at the core of the debate over provenance research.  By acting in this fashion, the institutions that promote culture and transact in art objects censure the narrative of the art object and deprive the public from reading and examining it, from learning.  Pedagogy and truth sacrificed on the altar of “vested interests”?

Should we go so far as to propose that this approach to the provenance narrative is revisionist, in the same way that any attempt to rewrite the history of the Holocaust by minimizing or relativizing its breadth, scope and impact, is viewed as revisionist, a conscious exercise in denial and rejection of history?

Although provenance research should not be held hostage by the cantankerous dyad of provenance and restitution, an ethically, rigorous quest for historical information into the ownership history of an art object may lead to a reassessment of its current ownership and may suggest that the rightful owner is not the current holder of title to the object.  For these and other reasons, cultural institutions must fully integrate provenance research into their day-to-day practices and especially the findings resulting therefrom and establish ethically sound procedures for addressing the revised ownership information of objects in their collections.

Once again, provenance research is a serious, inter-disciplinary methodology whose practice enriches our understanding of artistic and cultural objects worldwide. Its ethical and critical practice should be conducted without any prejudice or bias.

Provenance research on display--Part Three

by Marc Masurovsky

This is the third installment in a series of articles on provenance research as presented to the general and specialized public through digital communications in the form of websites and other displays accessible through search engines on the Internet.

Before we shift to cultural institutions outside the United States and examine how they present “provenance research” to their public, it would be good to consider for a while the notion of “challenge" that many museums express on their websites when describing provenance research.

Here are some ways that challenges are expressed to us, the general public, so that we can appreciate the seriousness of the task at hand—provenance research—and appreciate how complicated, tedious, arduous, laborious, thankless, and, yes, perhaps, even impossible the task might be. I ran out of adjectives.

One obvious reason for such challenges is to blame the lack of relevant documentation to physical loss and fading memories and the fact that previous generations were not as litigious as ours and not as obsessed with private property ownership and did not commit every iota of information about objects sold, purchased, loaned, bequeathed, on paper. Yes, that lack of concern for maintaining complete audit trails, registers and other forms of documentation, has worked to our detriment, perhaps, but it was then, and now is now. Hence, the challenge.

Oh, and there is that terrible situation where you cannot trust everything you read. What if you are being deliberately misled, three, four generations later, by some conniving seller who will withhold the truth about an object. Don’t trust anything that you read. This argument can be used malevolently by all parties involved in determining the ownership of an object and/or its authenticity.

And, yes, there is that timeless practice whereby owners, sellers and lenders of art objects under scrutiny want to remain anonymous. This is where provenance writing gets to be creative and enters the fictional house through the front door. History as fiction has found its nest.

Seriously...

Princeton University wants us to know that, for most of the above-cited reasons and many more, no provenance can be complete and there will always be some gap, as narrow as a thread or as wide as the Nile River.

The Art Institute of Chicago reminds us that, just because there is a gap, it does not mean that something bad and illicit occurred. Even if it did, the problem of ownership might have gotten fixed and therefore the object in its collection is FINE. So, no need to worry. There is always another document to demonstrate licit ownership. Or is there? In other words, we are now in the middle of the contentious debate whereby provenance research enters a subjective arena, where research is unfortunately tailored to suit the legal needs and requisites of the institution holding the object at hand or the person claiming it which will do whatever is necessary to demonstrate that it cannot leave the building or that it is in fact THE object being claimed as lost.  Both sides to ownership disputes have been found to be lacking in this area and reluctant to acknowledge that the facts at hand might dispute their arguments. It is an unfortunate state of affairs, even for me, to have to make this clear but the intellectual process that accompanies the research must be inviolate and not subject to our desires and expectations. Humility is a virtue not necessarily found everywhere, especially when we are proven wrong.

Stanford University correctly points out that the complexity of the challenge facing those who “do” provenance research can be ascribed to the physical nature and attributes of the object at hand, through mislabeling, multiple titles and dimensions that are dissonant with one another over time and space. Actually, this is one of the most common problems faced by anyone researching the object at hand. The researcher must always keep in mind when reading documents from long ago: are these documents describing the object that I am interested in or is it one that resembles it but is not exactly the same one? Every artist has produced different versions of at least one piece which she created, often driving researchers to the brink of madness in their efforts to ascertain whether or not their object is the correct variant of the other twenty versions of the Madonna with Child, Adam and Eve, the same still life, the same interior, or the same casting.

The Yale University Library (not the Art Gallery) recommends that the needed information to ascertain the authenticity of the object at hand can be found in documents having nothing to do with art history—wills, insurance policies, especially when no images are available.

While many institutions stress that curators perform the research into an object’s history, the Walters Museum in Baltimore, MD, and the Carnegie Museum of Art inform us that “museum staff, fellows, and interns” perform research tasks. This is wonderful news for those who are thinking of entering the museum world and do so through internships, mostly unpaid. But one has to wonder whether the training underlying the complexity of such research is provided to fellows and interns by either museum staff or outside consultants, in order to ensure optimal result. This comment is not meant to disparage the many graduates from art history and museum studies programs and anyone interested in historical research and art history and their skill sets. Everyone has to start somewhere. Since there are no systematic training programs in the United States to prepare those interested in provenance research, and especially to help them overcome the challenges inherent to such endeavors, the onus falls on those seasoned practitioners, like the sole curator of provenance in the nation, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, to ensure a framework for how research is conducted. Pressure, pressure.

To remedy the challenge of obtaining rather obscure documents to fill provenance gaps, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA, also recommends more sharing of information between researchers and their institutions. Such sharing does occur but to what extent is unclear except through anecdotal testimonials provided by museums staff or outside researchers and professionals who have been contacted to provide needed information on objects.

In sum....

Research requires intellectual effort, critical thinking skills, the ability to correlate and assess, objectively and critically without any hidden agendas whatsoever, the content, value and relevance of documents and pieces of information from disparate sources that one gathers in order to apprehend the framework and inner workings of a story, in this case that of an object. The more in-depth the research becomes, the more time is needed to delve into the story, partly hidden, fragmented like a broken vase which shatters into dozens of pieces. Maybe that is the best analogy that I can come up with: provenance research involves the reassembly of a broken history, and sometimes we just cannot. But we have to do our best. Cultural institutions oftentimes treat art objects the way that emergency room personnel operate a triage center: one pile of objects is ‘verschtunken’, condemned, useless, no one can save them, research is futile.  Another pile of objects might be salvageable and some research should be done enough to have something to say about them because the research itself might be less complex than for the "vershtunken" ones, and the pile that everyone loves is the one where objects’ histories and stories are simple enough to stitch together, You know, the vase that breaks in only three pieces is the one we like the most, even if there is just a tiny fragment that you cannot find but, what the hell, the story line is saved and so is your reputation and the world turns as smoothly as it ever did. As for the other objects, they were “challenging.” Some are rescued, most are not. Let’s just hope that cultural institutions, writ large, do not really approach research as if they operated (no pun intended) a triage center with an implicitly acceptable casualty rate.

Museums come in different sizes and shapes. Their content varies widely and wildly and so do their stated purpose and mission. The one task that should be common to all of them is research into objects for which they are responsible either as owners or as borrowers. One obvious reason why research cannot take place is the absence of financial and human resources mustered and allocated to support such research and assist these institutions in doing their due diligence and providing their public with the added benefit of as complete a history as possible for the objects in their care. Who knows? Visitors might actually be interested in the objects that they view.  The fault for this lies squarely, in my view, in the lap of those who direct and fund cultural institutions, for whom, research does not rise to the level of a necessity but rather remains in that non-essential category as a luxury, fit to be cut at a moment's notice. Museum boards and those beholden to them should bear the ultimate responsibility for this miserable state of affairs of research in cultural institutions. Local, State and Federal governmental agencies in the US and ministries of culture in all other countries, share in that responsibility and should be held accountable for such a scandalous withholding of research funding.