Provenance Research Today: Principles, Practice, Problems

By Lund Humphries

The first accessible reference handbook to cover key aspects of provenance research for the international art market. This handbook guides the reader from a basic introduction to research methods to questions of ethics and the challenges of specific case histories and contexts. Provenance research is a crucial component of any art-market transaction. Without a provenance it is often difficult to establish a work's authenticity, its true value, or who has legal title. Whether buying, selling, or simply maintaining an artwork in either a private or a public collection, the days when a blind eye could be turned to the history (or the lack of a known history) of a work have long gone. Proper, thorough, and effective provenance research is the minimum required and demanded in today's art world—a world that is increasingly recognizing the need for greater and more effective self-regulation in the face of fakes, forgeries, and challenges to ownership or authenticity that are now commonplace. The Provenance Research Handbook is the essential reference tool for anyone involved in the art world, including provenance researchers, owners, or would-be owners, sellers of artworks, galleries, auction houses, collectors, dealers, museums, galleries, police, and art lawyers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lund Humphries
• Release date: Jun 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781848223196

Book preview

Journal

Introduction

Arthur Tompkins

Provenance matters. Who created an artwork? Where has it been? How has it changed hands – from whom and to whom? And how did it get both to where it was and to where it now is? For works of art in auction houses, commercial galleries, art fairs and biennales, as well as the halls and basements of museums, these are all crucial questions that need answering. But they are, each of them, answered by knowledge and evidence that, as the years and the centuries pass, recede or are lost or become obscured. The answers tend to appear, if at all, as through a scratched and distorting glass. Clues tend to be few and far between on the long and winding road travelled by an artwork.

Provenance is crucial. Seldom does a week go by without provenance featuring in the global media, for better (the celebrated and welcome return of a stolen artwork) or worse (an unresolved and bitter dispute over, or serious doubt cast on, the ownership or attribution of an artwork). All those involved with art – creators, dealers, researchers, art historians, critics, writers and, last but certainly not least, its viewers – deserve to know the work’s provenance, or lack of provenance, be it the storied histories of famous works of art or the equally storied but sometimes obscure or confused tales of less-recognised pieces.

Provenance Research Today: Principles, Practice, Problems illuminates the asking and the answering of those questions. It brings together researchers, scholars and practitioners of provenance research, who set out signposts, distill their experience and present their hard-won advice and wisdom.

Provenance research is the relatively recent label given to a multidisciplinary portfolio of knowledge, techniques, venues, resources and activities deployed initially by museum and collection curators, and latterly by a much wider variety of those involved with art. Provenance research discerns, uncovers, describes and evaluates the history of an artwork. From a sequential narrative description of the owners of an artwork, such as might appear on a provenance statement on a gallery’s wall or website, to a more nuanced investigation of the circumstances and validity of sequential transfers of a work, or the legitimacy of the movement of an antiquity, or indeed the attribution of a hitherto unrecognised Old Master, provenance research is now the concern of all those involved, directly or indirectly, with art.

When a single painting can be bought and sold for extraordinary sums, running into the tens and hundreds of millions of pounds/dollars, provenance research is vital. When it is suddenly asserted that the jewel of an important collection should be returned to the heirs of a dispossessed rightful owner now far removed in time, place and circumstance from the scene of a theft or misappropriation, provenance research may light the way to a resolution. When the attribution of an artwork to an artist can, in a moment, transform the work’s place in both the art-historical canon and the public eye, then getting the provenance right is of vital moment.

PART I: THE HISTORY, PURPOSES AND CHALLENGES OF PROVENANCE RESEARCH

Provenance was initially used simply to denote a sequential, narrative history. The opening essay surveys the expansion of provenance research beyond that, so that it now encompasses substantive questions of the validity, considered across a spectrum of criteria, of the movements of a work down the chain of possession and ownership. The preparation of inventories of royal and other ancient collections was a forerunner of modern provenance research. The resurgence, in the latter part of the last century, of interest in and concern for the repatriation of Nazi-looted art gave both impetus and substance to the expanding of provenance research into its current multidisciplinary and rigorous examination of both the form and the substance of every discernible stage in an artwork’s journey.

Leila Amineddoleh, in her essay on the use of provenance in resolving disputes, focuses attention on the considerable benefits that a thorough provenance can bring to all sides when an informed and evidence-based solution is sought, in situations often far removed in time, place and circumstance from the causative events underlying the dispute. She illustrates those benefits in a wide variety of cases, including theft and title issues in both civil and criminal contexts, forfeiture claims, sovereign claims to ownership of objects, authentication and valuation.

Sharon Flescher, Executive Director of the International Foundation for Art Research, the co-publisher of this book, identifies and confronts the challenges of contemporary provenance research, highlighting the need always to employ a ‘healthy scepticism’ when assessing a provenance, and the challenges posed by sometimes widespread, carefully constructed and elaborate forged or false provenances. She dissects and describes in detail a number of vivid examples of the latter, relating to fabricated works supposedly by Jackson Pollock, among other artists, and stresses the importance of a multidisciplinary approach and eschewing over-reliance on information in catalogues raisonnés.

PART II: BEST PRACTICE IN PROVENANCE RESEARCH

Marie Stolberg and Andrea Lehmann provide a practical and detailed guide to the step-by-step process of researching the provenance of an object, traversing the physical, documentary, archival, art-historical, historical, biographical and genealogical fields of enquiry. Lists of physical and online resources are provided (in the associated ‘Select Resources’ section in the book’s end matter, pp.194–207), as are key take-home lessons: systematic attention to detail, a lateral-thinking, ‘question everything’ approach, a combination of field and online research and the importance of meticulously documenting and recording the research and its outcomes, both positive and negative.

Jennifer L. Mass approaches provenance research from a forensic science angle. She traverses briefly the origins of forensic analysis of artworks, and the reasons such analyses are undertaken. She guides the reader through a variety of techniques employed when conducting materials analysis, elemental analysis, molecular analysis, microscopic analysis and elemental and molecular imaging. The focus then turns to resolving challenges or questions raised as to the identity of a piece, including physical and contextual changes, and the problems posed by multiple objects. She concludes by stressing the importance of a commitment to ‘objective and rigorous examination and technological innovation’ in the constant battle to protect cultural patrimony.

Jason Sousa and Ariane Moser provide a timely overview both of the role that present-day databases play in provenance research, and some of the likely impacts that such databases – together with the wide spectrum of data-related techniques and processes that are possible when accessing, using and deploying them – may have on the field.

Finally in this section, Louisa Wood Ruby surveys new tools developed for performing digital provenance research, and outlines the ways these can help in the digital humanities.

PART III: PROVENANCE RESEARCH, MUSEUMS AND THE ART MARKET

Two of the common settings for provenance research form the backdrop to, first, Lynn Rother and Iris Schmeisser’s essay on provenance research in museums, and then Susan J. Cooke’s essay discussing the place of provenance in catalogues raisonnés. Rother and Schmeisser take the discussion into the museum realm, grounding their analysis of the significant changes to provenance research firmly within the curatorial functions of a museum’s collection. They use Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s painting Sand Hills in Engadine, formerly in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, now in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, as a case study, both detailing how the fine-grained reconstruction of the painting’s ownership history was revealed by an international multidisciplinary analysis, and demonstrating that provenance research is as much about the historicity of research as it is the sequential narrative of ownership.

Susan J. Cooke dissects the place of provenance in the modern catalogue raisonné, stressing that provenance is ‘first among equals’ in terms of the component parts of an object’s catalogue entry, and of primary importance in meeting the immediate needs of the modern catalogue raisonné’s primary target markets: auction houses, dealers, and current or prospective owners, as well as researchers themselves. But the catalogue raisonné’s importance, and its potentially lengthy currency, go well beyond those immediate users and inform far wider and important fields of enquiry, be they the addition or exclusion of works to or from the artist’s oeuvre, the placing of an artist or a work within the fluid web of the art market, the illuminating of a work’s social history, or the writing or rewriting of art history.

Gareth Fletcher analyses the international art market through both a considered philosophical approach and the prism of the roles played by its main actors. He examines the supporting substructure of relationships underpinning this unregulated market, and illustrates how the amount, detail and scope of information possessed by those interested in, or involved with, an artwork tends to be unevenly distributed or revealed, and the consequences of that for provenance researchers. He then applies his analysis to illuminate the conduct of provenance research with respect to four different forms of participation in the art market – a first-time collector, an auction house, an art dealer and a public-sector museum.

PART IV: NAZI-ERA PROVENANCE RESEARCH

The pillaging, theft, displacement and concealing of vast quantities of art carried out before and during the Second World War constitute the greatest art theft in history. Leading practitioners of establishing the fate of art during the Nazi era, Marc Masurovsky, and co-authors James Ratcliffe and Amelie Ebbinghaus, emphasise the need both to establish as complete a provenance as is possible, especially by adopting a transactional analysis approach, and then to use that knowledge to facilitate the return of Nazi-looted artworks to their rightful homes.

Masurovsky describes the recent arc of Nazi-era provenance research since the 1990s, stressing the effect and challenges of the Washington Principles, the problems presented by, in particular, forced sales that occurred against the backdrop of the extensive Nazi persecution of Jews, and the tension unavoidably inherent in the different aims of claimants and holders. His list of resources (‘Select Resources’ section, pp.207–9) will be invaluable to anyone entering this field.

Ratcliffe and Ebbinghaus illustrate the role provenance research plays with respect to Nazi-looted art, highlighting the spectrum of possible outcomes, ranging from return to re-purchase by a variety of parties, joint sale, formal acknowledgement, and others, and the importance of provenance research to the forum- and country-specific contexts often encountered when parties seek to resolve disputes, either (but decreasingly) in national courts or through a variety of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms and methods.

PART V: PROVENANCE RESEARCH AND THE ILLICIT ANTIQUITIES TRADE

The illicit antiquities trade is large, all-pervasive and global. Simon Mackenzie and Donna Yates unpick its structure, noting how it overlaps with the legal trade in these ancient artefacts. They stress that it is aided and abetted by historically opaque business structures and practices, and the relative ease of access to many points along the network of supply routes. They detail a variety of methodological approaches to analysing and interpreting this grey market, including statistical, ethnographical and face-to-face fieldwork, and identify the gaps in knowledge and information that require more research.

In the two concluding essays, Lynda Albertson and Tess Davis both put provenance research squarely at the centre of the struggle against atrocities and terrorism, given the illicit antiquities market’s role in supporting, financing and benefiting from such activities. Albertson illustrates and reminds readers that a potentially illicit antiquity can hover close to, or enter and transect, both the centres and the penumbra of the international and lawful antiquities market. Establishing the true provenance, and status, of such an antiquity, given the very wide and often confusing nature of the sometimes very many and frequently opaque transactions, both financial and physical, is challenging but necessary.

Davis then turns the focus to the consequences of the illicit antiquities trade, including the financing of historical and current atrocities by a dismal roll call down the decades, including the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, the IRA, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Daesh/ISIL/ISIS. She places these into the context of the current United States’ antiquities market and illuminates the issue with her analysis of 2016’s Asia Week raids in New York, code-named Operation Hidden Idol. The operation was a joint investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney, Homeland Security Investigations arm of the Department of Homeland Security, Interpol and the Indian government. From this, she identifies a number of red flags that must be heeded, including the sourcing of an antiquity from a crisis area, its transport through a high-risk jurisdiction, the non-commercial and non-moveable character of an antiquity, and a weak or absent provenance.

LIGHTING THE PATH AHEAD

The physical, social, transactional and narrative life of an artwork is now of vital concern to everyone involved, directly or indirectly, with that artwork. The authors of the essays in this book argue that, in all its manifestations, multidisciplinary provenance research has moved firmly into the central spotlight. They seek to provide both a framework and a guide so that everyone concerned with art can, when navigating a work’s provenance, be guided by and benefit from firm and clear principles, approaches and practices, and hard-won experience.

PART I

THE HISTORY, PURPOSE AND CHALLENGES OF PROVENANCE RESEARCH

1

The History and Purposes of Provenance Research

Arthur Tompkins

A visitor to the National Gallery in London’s Trafalgar Square, standing in the Sunley Room and looking at Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding, is seeing a small and exquisite painting with, for an Old Master, an unusually near-complete provenance. Right from the moment it was painted, when van Eyck carefully but unmistakeably inscribed his name and the year, 1434, in ornate Latin script on the back wall above the famous mirror, the influential painting’s journey through time, place and circumstance has been notably well recorded. As described by Carola Hicks in Girl in a Green Gown: The History and Mystery of the Arnolfini Portrait:

Through different accidents of fate the portrait became a prized possession which passed though many hands and travelled from medieval Bruges via Habsburg Spain, through the ravages of the Napoleonic Wars to Victorian London. It survived through fires, battles, hazardous sea journeys. And uniquely, for a masterpiece this old, its provenance can be tracked through every single owner from the mysterious Mr Arnolfini via various monarchs to a hard-up Waterloo war hero, until it finally came to rest in 1842 as an early star of the National Gallery.¹

‘Provenance’, from the French provenir, meaning to come forth or arise, entered the English language as a word meaning the history of a work of art via two etymological routes, first and much more generally in 1785 as describing any antecedent, and then specifically in 1926 when it was first used (as it happens, in relation to a manuscript) to denote: ‘The history or pedigree of a work of art, manuscript, rare book, etc.; concr., a record of the ultimate derivation and passage of an item through its various owners.’² That definition conveys clearly the traditional approach to, and the central and dominant strand of, provenance research that, until relatively recently, was mainly the province of art historians, principally when working in a museum or collection curatorial context. This traditional approach tended to focus on the ownership of a work through the years and centuries, as indeed Hicks explicitly links the van Eyck’s provenance with its passing through the hands of ‘every single owner’. But ownership of anything, including an artwork, conceptually encompasses a wide spectrum of different kinds of rights – some legal, others possessory; some reputational, others determinative – which an owner can exercise or enjoy. What has resulted from the more recent development of provenance research, building on its traditional origins, has been a unified but diverse concept of provenance research that pulls together many strands to create a much more holistic approach. So, the arche-typical lawyer’s narrow question ‘Who is the legal owner of the work?’ is somewhat misplaced here, as provenance traditionally traced tended to conflate legal ownership with physical possession, and vice versa, as encapsulated in the trite cliché, ‘Possession is ninetenths of the law’. But those two queries – who has possession, and who is the legal owner – are quite distinct questions, and the answers to them are in fact often separated one from the other: the person who has physical possession of, say, a painting, may well not be the legal owner of that painting. And possession, whilst available as evidence to support a claim to ownership, does not of itself definitively determine ownership.

Historical inventories or catalogues provide a snapshot in time of the contents of a collection at a given moment, and can later prove to be a rich source to be mined in the search for the foundations and building blocks of a fuller, sequential and more nuanced provenance. Such inventories or catalogues were inclined by their very nature to be prosaically functional or purposive, and usually little concerned, if indeed at all, with the origins or sources of the artworks they described. Their authors simply listed what they saw. An early example played an important precursor role in the development of modern provenance research, and in particular both begat the idea that ‘Where [the art] came from, who owned it and where it hung were as important as who painted it and what it represented’,³ and created the forerunner of the modern art market, grounded on the notion that any person could possess and own great art.

Following the tumultuous and chaotic English Civil War and the regicide, on a chilly winter’s day in central London at the end of January 1649, of King Charles I, the English Parliament set about inventorying, valuing and then selling Charles’s notable collection of art, ‘that marvellous personal gallery built up with such undeviating zeal and exquisite taste’.⁴

The preparation of the inventory and the (largely unsuccessful) sale that followed had two consequences of central importance to the later development of provenance research. First, the narrative, and the sometimes fragmentary remnants, of the past and circumstantial history of an artwork – what might be termed its ‘social life’⁵ – became inextricably linked to the artwork’s reputation, its appreciation, and its value. The making of the inventory, and its primary purpose of facilitating the sale of the artworks listed to all and sundry, compelled its authors and those superintending the sale not only to record that the artwork was in fact part of the late King’s property (and thus eligible for sale), but also – to account for the proceeds of its sale to Parliament – to whom it had been sold, and for how much. Recording these aspects of an artwork’s social life would thereafter become indispensable features of the work’s provenance.

Secondly, the dislocations and travels of the bulk of Charles I’s paintings – into the Royal collection, dispersed into private hands during the sale, and then mostly retrieved by Charles II after the restoration of the monarchy – fostered along the way the conditions for the creation of the wide and durable commercial art market, an enduring incident of which would be provenance research. Between about 1670 through to the early 1690s, some 35,000 paintings were sold and bought through London, one of the busiest art markets in Europe. The knowledge that there was money to be made from mere pictures became widespread.⁶ That knowledge – that art is valuable, readily saleable, easily transportable and often vastly profitable – continues to be a notable feature of the art market, and provenance research is of critical importance to the validity of the numerous and frequently very high-value transactions permeating that market.

Thus did provenance research begin to assume both its multilayered meaning and its central role in the robust and enduring art market. From those early beginnings it would, in the middle to later years of the 20th century and against a backdrop of unprecedented tragedy and tumult, grow and expand.

THE WIDENING OF PROVENANCE RESEARCH

A narrow approach to provenance research – who has held an artwork, when and in what order – can result in a sometimes bland, even stark, sequential list of owners or holders that hides between its lines the storied and convoluted circumstances that frequently accompany an artwork’s creation and later movements and dislocations.

The long and tumultuous journey undertaken by Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer is an illustrative case in point. The centrepiece of New York’s Neue Galerie museum, the brief provenance statement on the Museum’s website only hints at the tragedies of the painting’s history:

Provenance

Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, acquired from the artist in 1907, until seized by the Nazis, autumn 1938

With Dr. Erich Führer, Vienna, by 1939

Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, acquired 1941, inv. no. 3830

Heirs of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, restituted by the Republic of Austria, 2006

Neue Galerie New York, acquired from the above, 2006.⁷

In the early part of the 20th century, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a wealthy Jewish industrialist, had commissioned a portrait of his wife from Klimt. After about a year’s work, the golden, shimmery portrait – together with The Kiss, the epitome and culmination of Klimt’s Golden Period – was delivered in 1907. Adele died from meningitis in 1925, and in her will she asked Ferdinand to leave their Klimt paintings to the Austrian National Gallery. Over a decade later, and following the unforeseen rise of the Nazi Party to power in Germany in 1933 and then the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938, Ferdinand fled Austria. The invading Nazis confiscated both his businesses and the Bloch-Bauers’ central Vienna home, where Adele’s Portrait and the other Klimt paintings owned by the couple still hung. Spurious ‘taxes’ were assessed as being owed, thus forcing liquidation of the assets, and the supervising attorney unlawfully transferred three Klimt paintings, including Adele’s Portrait, to the Austrian National Gallery. After the end of the Second World War they went on display in the Belvedere Gallery in Vienna.

Ferdinand died in Switzerland in 1945, and his heirs’ efforts over the succeeding decades to recover the paintings were painfully unsuccessful, both obstructed and resisted by the Austrian government. The three Klimt paintings remained in the Belvedere Gallery, and became entries on countless locals’ and visitors’ must-see lists,⁸ but with their tragic history buried in inaccessible archives. Modern provenance research should no longer permit such concealment.

Then, in the late 1990s, following the Austrian government’s participation in the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets and the promulgation of the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art by that conference (discussed overleaf; see also Chapters 11 and 12), the Austrian Parliament passed legislation ‘requiring all federal museums to ensure their holdings were free of art illegally seized during the war’.⁹ This gave fresh impetus and opportunity to Ferdinand’s heirs and eventually an arbitral tribunal ruled that the paintings should be returned.¹⁰ In 2006 Ferdinand’s heirs sold Adele’s Portrait to the Neue Galerie in New York, which is dedicated to German and Austrian art and plays a notably proactive and prominent role in provenance research, including issues relating to the restitution of Nazi-era looted art.

The surging expansion of the use and relevance of provenance research in the last decade of the 20th century and into the current century can be traced to, and explained and understood by, a series of coinciding events. In particular there is the combination of a burgeoning international art market, seemingly continuing today without pause; the coincidental advent and spread of the internet with the resultant enhanced (and usually cheap and swift) access to and dissemination of source, archival and contemporary information; and lastly the up-swelling of interest in, and expertise in researching, Nazi-looted art and its restitution. All three aspects are covered in later chapters of this book, but the triggering role played in the development of provenance research by the last-mentioned, the Nazi era and its myriad consequences, that added impetus to provenance research by the need to delve into the widespread theft of art by the Nazi State and its hierarchy, and the subsequent efforts to undo that greatest of art crimes, was a transformative event in the history of provenance research.

The upsurge in public interest in the fate of Nazi-looted art began in 1990 and coincided with German reunification – the amalgamation into the Federal Republic of Germany of the German Democratic Republic, which engendered the sudden freeing up of, and opening of access to, much documentary and other archival material hitherto hidden in East Germany. This was followed by the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the later revelations by Soviet art historians of the whereabouts of much of the ‘trophy art’ removed to Russia in the end stages and chaotic aftermath of the Second World War (see Chapter 11).¹¹ In 1994 Lynn Nicholas published her seminal work The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War,¹² and in 1995 a groundbreaking public symposium, bringing together ‘most of the world’s leading authorities involved with the repatriation of cultural property destroyed or displaced as a result of World War II’,¹³ was hosted by the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts in New York.

Since then there have been a series of important international gatherings, including the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, hosted by the US Department of State and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and held over four days, from 30 November to 3 December 1998. The non-binding Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art were issued by consensus following that event,¹⁴ and have been affirmed by the Council of Europe’s Vilnius International Forum on Holocaust-Era Looted Cultural Assets, in October 2000 in Lithuania, and the