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.

Provenance is a landscape

by Marc Masurovsky

Provenance is a landscape where every gap is like a gorge that one crosses on a bamboo bridge. Every stretch of time left unexplained is like a desert or a forest that one crosses seemingly without end.

It is the perfect post-modern expression of a history made of fragments of time, place and humanity, and we have to make sense of it.

If provenance is a legal document, it is woefully lacking.

If it is a security questionnaire, It becomes an open invitation to a tight interrogation.

Hayden White would feel right at home with a provenance because it exemplifies that tired motto: history is fiction.

Provenance is supposed to explain the history of an object. The basic components are time, place and people. Sometimes you have more people than places but no time markers.

Sometimes, a provenance will be like a ground hog poking its head up for a brief moment.

Hi, my name is John Smith and I owned a painting by Hans Holbein in 1969 and I won't tell where I bought it, so there. Sure enough, it disappears in its hole and you're left with a ground hog's view of history.

Innocence and truth

by Marc Masurovsky

We are socialized from an early age to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We are told, at least in the United States, that we are innocent until proven guilty, even if we were caught with the blood-soaked knife in our right hand and the unlit stick of dynamite in the left hand, several hundred thousand dollars of crispy cash in one hundred dollar denominations heaped in a pile in the corner. Innocent until proven guilty. Tell the truth, nothing but the truth, so help you God.

If we are told to tell the truth, we learn that the lie, which is the opposite of the truth, is a bad thing. If we lie, that is, if we do not tell the truth as it is, it makes us into bad people, into liars, and we deserve whatever gets thrown at us by our parents, our friends, and/or total strangers in a position of authority. We will go to hell, no questions asked. We should not do business with people who lie. They should be marginalized, ostracized, condemned for what they are—liars.

If people lie, does that mean that they are dishonest? Can you be an honest businessman and lie at the same time? Does it depend on who you lie to and what you lie about? Are you a liar if you tell only one lie? Or can you tell one lie a month and still not be viewed as a liar? Or one a year? Or one a week? Can you be dishonest once or twice a year and still be considered to be honest?

Can you be in business and tell the truth no matter what? Can you stay in business and tell the truth? What does it really mean to tell the truth? There are so many people who say: “well, I told a small lie today. Nothing much. No one got hurt.” Or someone confesses: “That was a white lie, actually.” A white lie? And what’s a black lie? Or a red lie? One can only infer that the “white lie” is on par with the small lie, it is of no consequence. No one gets hurt. We’re cool, right?

Is an inflated story a lie if it does not reflect accurately the facts as they unfolded? If you overrate the value of an object, are you lying about the object’s true value? Since value, for the most part, is subjective, is inflation or deflation a lie because it is inaccurate? Is the inaccuracy a deliberate part of a negotiating strategy to either buy or sell or exchange an asset? If so, does that make you, the inflator or deflator, a liar, a dishonest person? Should I continue to do business with you?

If you attribute a painting, a drawing, a print, a sculpture, a piece of furniture, to an artist who is not the actual artist and you do so knowingly? In other words, you “mis-represented” the authorship of the object. Is a deliberate, thought-out, calculated “mis-representation” as bad as a lie? After all, you chose not to tell the truth about the object. Does that make you a dishonest person or a clever negotiator or salesperson? Is the art of the deal anchored in calculated misrepresentations, small lies, white lies?

What about the professional relationships between dealers, collectors, galleries, museums and their clients, the artists they represent, the brokers with whom they must deal, the curators and experts who are “in between” somewhere in the transaction, the endless parade of support staff, donors, investors, specialists, historians, and other experts? Are they all telling the truth? Or are they all engaging in a massive cornucopia of white lies, small lies, unaccountable “honest mistakes” quickly patched with a self-flagellating [well-calculated] self-mortifying tweet that same afternoon or the next morning—early!—and accompanying selfie, hinting that forgiveness is in order until the next mishap occurs? If everyone involved in the art trade commits such mishaps, is that person shunned, excluded, treated as a pariah, unreliable, lacking all credibility? If so, no one might be left standing in the art market. It might actually implode from an acute attack of truth telling.

Business as usual

by Marc Masurovsky

The twenty-year old discussion about Nazi looted art and restitution tends to skirt a fundamental point: how was it able to happen? And most importantly, how were its fruits internationalized and monetized on a global scale?

In the interwar years, many paths led to New York, the emerging global center of attraction for artists, bankers, industrialists and intellectuals, including those who were anxious to start a new life away from the Nazi madding crowd.

If one looks at art as a business, then one can understand that the rise to power of Hitler on January 30, 1933, did not put an abrupt end to business relations between Germans and their counterparts outside the nascent Third Reich. In fact, it was business as usual. Many scholars have already covered this ground, but have been shy to point out that the Nazi plan against its perceived enemies, especially the Jewish community of the Reich and ultimately of continental Europe, was grounded in economic motivations as much as it was rooted in age-old anti-Semitic stereotypes and myths of alleged Jewish evil and malfeasance towards civil society and its institutions, even going as far as accusing Jews of holding the Zeitgeist of the nation hostage to their supposed base needs.

That said, the art world continued to function as before January 1933, except for the inevitable casualties of business under the Nazis, who enforced interdictions against artists and intellectuals and their supporters in the cultural and financial spheres. The attack against so-called degenerate art, objectionable forms of expression, forced the disgorgement of thousands of works and objects onto the private art market, followed by the purging of such banned pieces from German state museums and their sale inside and outside the Reich. The international community responded with its checkbook and began acquiring at bargain basement prices, works which had not been so easily available during the Weimar period.

The Nazis understood the financial power of art as a pendant to their attack on Kultur which eventually extended across Europe.

Let’s take a look at the economic infrastructure through which art flows—companies, banks, middlemen—because art is also an investment. Dealers and collectors alike are intrinsically connected to the financial and commercial interests of a nation, as well as its civil servants who rationalize and organize policy to enable economic growth, trade and financial investments both inside the Reich and abroad. Germany is a net exporting country as a consequence of the Versailles Treaty, forced to rely on foreign subsidiaries to generate markets so as to ensure its survival. The interwar era of global cartels brought financiers and industrialists of all major countries together at the table, as well as institutions such as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), whose members were instrumental in reshaping the financial map of the world, and helping to seal the fate of countries like Czechoslovakia. Should it come as no surprise that art travels with these businessmen, becomes a source of investment, serves as collateral, money is borrowed to acquire art as much as assets are leveraged to ensure transactions which have nothing to do with art.

In sum, the domestic plunder of German citizens and their art collections finds natural outlets in and through networks of affiliation long ago established and strengthened across the international corporate community. The appeal of specific styles by conservative elites—from antiquities to medieval and old masters all the way to the 18thand early 19thcenturies—act as a pump for art dealers with ready access to those works being funneled into the market by desperate people seeking quick cash to subsist and/or to fund emergency trips into exile and to safe havens.

The evidence is compelling that, from the first forced sales of summer 1933 in Berlin, buyers were in attendance from neighboring countries and far-flung ones—Great Britain and even the United States. The incidental business tourists who happened to find themselves in Nazi Germany with some disposable cash frequented auction houses where Jewish-owned property was being sold. These items in turn were repatriated back to their native countries to be included into their places of business and residence.

Hence, from the mid-1930s, looted cultural property is flowing outward following long-established networks of trade and kinship ties between foreign clients and their German dealers and middlemen.

The same scenario is repeated even more brutally following the March 1938 Anschluss of Austria with American investment banks like Goldman Sachs advising its clients to buy up devalued property ensnared in Aryanization procedures. Let’s not be naïve, as there are hundreds of Allied companies operating subsidiaries in the Greater German Reich with which they are not yet at war. Normal business relations continue unimpeded, these subsidiaries allow their boards to be aryanized by transferring out their Jewish cadres in order to appease the New Order.

These accommodations with authoritarian governments began long before Hitler came to power. Indeed, since 1922, Benito Mussolini ruled Italy with an iron fist, which appealed to many foreign businessmen who preferred to have some sense of order that would maintain social peace in their Italian subsidiaries. Moreover, European and American dealers traveled to and from Italy every year throughout the 1920s and 1930s to conduct business, exchange or acquire works of art, organize and borrow exhibits for display in their homelands. Hence, Fascism and later on Nazism did not create moral and ethical qualms for Europeans and American citizens as they pursued business opportunities with authoritarian, racist, racialist governments.

So, when we discuss how on earth did objects looted during the early years of the Third Reich ever manage to enter Western European and American collections, one should not look too far and too deep for an answer to that question. The same reasoning applied to the sale and exchange of other commodities. For instance, the Leipzig Trade fair attracted American buyers up until the late 1930s, even though trade associations in the United States expressed some concerns over the probity of maintaining commercial relations with companies in the Reich that discriminated against their Jewish employees and which had absorbed Jewish businesses through aryanizations, selling the aryanized property to foreign buyers.

Also, the international gold trade had been mired in some controversy after the Anschluss and the invasion of Czechoslovakia with the blessings of France and Great Britain, the gold reserves of both countries having been absorbed by the Reich, and their contents used on international markets to acquire badly needed foreign currencies. The US Treasury became aware of these movements of gold but were unable to prevent those bars from entering the US gold reserves on account of a fundamentalist approach to the international gold market. Nothing should be done to disrupt the inflow and outflow of gold because the dollar’s value was pegged to a fixed value of gold. Hence, any political disruption of the international gold matket rooted in discrimination against gold provided by the Reich as collateral to purchase foreign currencies was prohibited, unless the US wanted to destabilize the dollar’s value and therefore endanger the economic recovery of the US in the years following the Great Depression.

The international art trade mirrored closely the way in which international business relations were conducted between the future Allied and Axis countries. Provenance of goods and services was never held to account as a prerequisite for conducting business. Hence, the desire to question the origin of the goods and services was rarely raised and even when it was, could not be invoked as a reason not to conduct business with a German or Italian entity or individual. One would have to wait for a state of war to exist between the US, Great Britain and the Axis powers to restrict trade relations, including the international movement of art objects.

But, as we all know, where there’s a will, there’s a way.