Provenance Research Today

Principles, Practice, Problems

Arthur Tompkins

• Publisher: Lund Humphries
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781848223196
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte y negocios

Covering key aspects of provenance research for the international art market, this accessible publication, co-published with the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), explores a range of themes including challenges and best practice to considerations specific to Nazi looted art and the trade in illicit antiquities. 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. Provenance Research Today is essential reading for a broad audience, from those studying to become part of the art world or professionals starting a career in provenance research, to collectors or would-be collectors, dealers, galleries, auction houses, police and art lawyers.

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 European Union-sponsored 2009 Holocaust Era Assets Conference in Prague and Terezín.

The Washington Principles call for both identification of Nazi-confiscated art (Principle 1), and either its restitution, or the achieving of ‘a just and fair solution, recognizing this may vary according to the facts and circumstances surroundi...