Provenance

Lisa TurveyIFAR has been a leader in provenance research for approximately fifty years. Perhaps we could start with a working definition of provenance, which, especially in recent years, has become a crucial step in the due diligence expected of individuals, museums, and the art market. Is there a loose consensus as to its meaning?

Sharon FlescherThere’s a short answer and a long answer to that question. The short answer is that provenance is the history of ownership—the word comes from a French word indicating that—but the way it’s used now, it’s much more than that history: it’s the transfer of ownership and the context of the transfer, and it’s the history of the exhibitions, literature, and other factors that can help you trace an object from the artist’s studio to the current day. Particularly with World War II/Holocaust-era provenance issues, the context of the transfer is often in dispute. Forced transfers or transfers under duress are very debated points.

LTYour immensely useful Provenance Guide on the IFAR website describes “an ideal provenance.” I was struck by how difficult it is to confirm all the information listed: “a documentary record of owners’ names; dates of ownership; methods of transference, i.e. inheritance, or sale through a dealer or auction; and locations where a work was kept, from the time of its creation by the artist until the present day.”

Lisa Duffy-ZeballosSince we’re dealing with movable objects that are bought and sold, ideal provenances are extremely rare. We typically see unbroken ownership histories with artworks from royal or noble collections or when works have remained in a family, house, or religious institution. Works by modern and contemporary artists can have gaps in provenance because there are privacy concerns to contend with. There’s a certain level of opacity there that we don’t necessarily have when trying to trace the early history of an old master painting.

SFAnd Europe has much stricter privacy laws than we do, which also affects provenance research. It’s eye-opening for someone from the United States—even someone like me, who’s fairly well versed in these things—to factor in that you might need permission to mention that a particular work was in a family, which is integral to any provenance.

LTEven in the United States, though, the desire for anonymity on the part of owners is understandable. So too for consignors and buyers at auction.

SFWhether it’s galleries or auction houses, if they’re not willing to share information, or not able because of contractual agreements, that complicates provenance research. You are in a way at their mercy. Most will say, We’ll contact the owner or the consignor and see if he or she will be willing to supply that information. But they’re not obligated to do so. Museums, for all the criticism they receive, are much more open, especially these days, to provide that kind of information: they’re public institutions. But even there, there are privacy concerns. So it’s a tension.

LTIt’s an interesting tension, given how closely provenance is tied to authenticity and title. Increased transparency helps keep that record intact.

LDZIssues of privacy and opacity in terms of ownership history cut across a lot of different topics. They come up even when you’re discussing blockchains, which are designed to bring greater certainty and transparency to the art market. Nevertheless, at their core is a guarantee of privacy and anonymity for owners. The blockchain companies provide a degree of certainty in the market by issuing a token of verified ownership, but owners’ names aren’t disclosed, and artists and researchers don’t have access to that information.

SFEven when there’s a provenance, it’s not necessarily accurate. Whether through malicious intent or careless research or lack of historical record, errors just get compounded. You can’t rely on a provenance that you see; if the issues are important and you need that information, you really have to do your own provenance research to double-check. Often, mistakes get carried on from person to person, and they take on a life of their own because they’re cited so frequently.

Sometimes errors aren’t even explicable. We once undertook research for the government on a Matisse painting whose initial provenance said that it belonged to a particular collection in 1959, and when it was exhibited at a gallery, the gallery catalogue said it was in that collection. But the gallery itself owned the work at the time and had to know that the information wasn’t accurate. So why was it in there? Was it just laziness or carelessness on the part of the gallery researcher, who may have been a young intern? We couldn’t see any malicious purpose, and it was only when we were doing additional research that we uncovered the error. In fact we learned that there had been two owners in between the owner cited in the catalogue and the owner at the time of the exhibition.

All these parameters and permutations have to be taken into consideration. Not all provenance researchers are good. I hate to say that. I think we are, and Lisa is particularly good, but not everyone is equal in their ability to sniff out leads, to dig and dig and deal with all the other issues—the multiple archives, the different languages, the other things that come up, particularly but not only with World War II–related works.

LDZToday there’s an imperative for all stakeholders to do provenance research. It’s simply not acceptable to hold loads of unprovenanced antiquities or potentially Nazi-looted art in your collection and pretend you didn’t know it was there. We’re all expected to be doing some of this work. With IFAR’s history of promoting ethics in the art world, this is part of our mission, and it fits logically into the kinds of resources we provide. Our Provenance Guide shows people how to research provenance responsibly and ethically and thoroughly. What this looks like depends on the issues involved in each case. If you’re dealing with potential Holocaust loot, you might want to hire a researcher to do some of this. But you want to be able to show that you did due diligence to be a responsible buyer, seller, and holder of these works. That was our motivation for establishing the Provenance Guide, and we’re continually updating it with new information.

SFThe Provenance Guide is original to our website. We launched a completely revamped website in 2008 and posted three very different resources that we still maintain. One is the Provenance Guide and the other two relate to provenance research in the broader sense, to scholarly and legal and ethical issues concerning art objects—from attribution and authenticity, to ownership and theft, to looting and restitution.

Our ambitious Art Law & Cultural Property Database provides comprehensive information on, among other things, foreign patrimony laws. Currently we have laws from 131 countries, in both the original language and English translation, together with hundreds of case-law summaries. It was a free resource for the first few years, but it’s been expensive for us to maintain so it’s now subscription based. But people can also use it for a few hours for a very modest cost. At the same time, we launched our Catalogues Raisonnés database, which is still free to everyone. All three are living resources, continuously updated and expanded. They’re still growing and will continue to grow so long as people support us. We’re a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.

More and more archives have been digitized, particularly in the World War II restitution area. During covid and the closure of so many libraries, that became especially important. But not everything has been digitized and provenance research still requires a lot of hands-on research. You may still need to go to that archive and look at those handwritten scribbled notes.

LTIn some ways provenance research has gotten easier in recent years, thanks to the online availability of sales records, exhibition checklists, object files, and so on. In other ways it’s gotten harder, due to greater privacy concerns. How has the discipline changed, and what other resources are available?

LDZThe increased availability of digitized resources has been a game changer in the field, and it was a lifesaver for me during covid. I was able to continue working because so much of the material I needed was available online, or could be digitized on demand, which was another thing that had changed. One of the issues that plagued the field of provenance research, and limited it to specialist researchers, was the difficulty in knowing what materials you needed and what institution held them. You might not realize, for example, that the main scholar who worked on the artist you were researching had donated their archives to their alma mater. But now we have digital aggregating resources like ArchiveGrid, the Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America, and the EAN, where you can identify institutions—historical societies, municipal archives, or regional collections—that hold archival materials that might be related to your research. Online finding aids are also enormously helpful; they prevent you from wasting time traveling to archives, or trying to make inquiries only to find that their holdings don’t pertain to what you’re working on. Provenance research is extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming. Even if you’re hiring a researcher, you’re often paying for their time by the hour. You will want to be efficient and save time, and online resources allow you to do that.

Just getting access to documents is critical, too. Some of the smaller or private archives sometimes only open their holdings to “qualified researchers.” Well, who’s a qualified researcher? This is important because today various stakeholders, including collectors, heirs, and restitution lawyers, need to be able to do provenance research. Digitized sources allow anyone to access at least some of these materials, often for free.

There are other types of barriers as well. You have to be able to read foreign languages, or you might need to study paleography just to be able to decipher the handwriting of older texts. But this too is changing. Some institutions sponsor transcription projects to make the digitized texts machine readable and keyword searchable. So now you may not need to puzzle through that seemingly illegible document written in seventeenth-century German script; it’s been transcribed into a plain text readable format that you can access, and maybe even translate, online. Not always accurately! But these digital tools save you the time of looking through and deciphering less-useful material so that you can focus on more-valuable resources to answer your questions.

SFApropos of your question about how have things changed, in 2000 IFAR organized an all-day Conference on Provenance and Due Diligence. People attended from all over Europe and the United States. That was before the digitization of so much of this material. One of the speakers was Greg Bradsher, from the National Archives and Records Administration [NARA]. He noted that we’re used to the Dewey Decimal System, where things are organized by subject in libraries in a very logical way. But archives, and particularly the National Archives, were organized by the donor—e.g., the military division that donated the material. This made archives particularly difficult to navigate. I was one of a group who were invited to a roundtable by the National Archives when they wanted to start digitizing some of their materials, particularly their voluminous World War II materials. We were also led through their archives in College Park, Maryland. It was eye-opening to see that everything was on index cards; you had to literally sift through index card after index card. But now, much of that material has been digitized, so you can do your research from your office if need be.

LDZDuring covid I volunteered as a citizen archivist for NARA when they were digitizing some of their Holocaust-era claims records. This is a crowd-sourcing project that gets volunteers to read and transcribe documents (I transcribed Czech Holocaust claims) to make them machine readable. Several archives in the United States, including the Archives of American Art, have volunteer transcription projects. Of course, professional archivists vet the amateur translations and transcriptions for accuracy. The end result is that researchers can do keyword searches across an entire archive.

SFThese are enormous tasks, and many institutions can’t afford to digitize. Even the National Archives was having the “where do we start” question. So that’s one way the provenance-research world has changed dramatically. In Europe, Germany in particular has invested a lot of money and time and expertise in making records available—museum records, auction records, gallery records. Austria has too. Nonetheless, although some of this is posted bilingually and the second language is usually English, that’s not always the case. It’s very expensive for them to do the translations. We’ve been speaking about World War II–era provenance research, but in recent years there’s been a lot of interest in the colonial aspect of provenance research—the return to Africa of objects from Benin or other places, for example. This research is in some ways similar to and in other ways very different from the research many art historians in the United States are used to doing. The same is true with other cultural heritage and patrimony research. Specialists develop in these different areas; in the case of patrimony issues, archaeologists can be particularly helpful.

So provenance research has become a very broad area. There’s a cottage industry of provenance researchers, many of whom interned or trained at IFAR. Years ago there wouldn’t have been that interest; art historians in many grad schools were into theoretical and sociological art history. Provenance is essentially object-based art history, which was out of fashion for quite some time, and it’s interesting to see its resurgence.

LDZIt’s probably helped by society’s interest in stolen and looted art, because that ties into provenance also. That’s another area we’ve been involved in almost since our founding. Some countries—I’m thinking of Chile and Peru—have online databases of stolen works. China is said to be developing one. Tibet has an informal watchdog group that tracks stolen artworks across the market. Provenance research isn’t just for World War II or European art, so we include antiquities and heritage-related sources in the Provenance Guide. How one goes about provenance research constantly changes, since each case comes with its own set of facts and questions and a history to delve into. That’s what makes this research so interesting.

LTIt’s also very granular research—just establishing a few solid lines of provenance can take hours. When published, it seems transparent and straightforward, but to reach that point is—

SFAbsolutely. Checking one fact can sometimes be an entire day’s work or more. And let’s not forget the role of luck—who’s willing to open a gallery record for you, for example.

LTProvenance researchers often encounter what [author] Lynn Nicholas described, in her presentation at an IFAR evening in 2021, as “the human reluctance to share information.”

SFNo question. And it’s not just for legal reasons, not just to protect someone; it’s someone’s desire to hold on to their little rose, as in [Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s] The Little Prince [1943], and not share it. But more and more, I think, people are sharing.

LDZSome special challenges come with working on a contemporary artist and trying to do provenance research for more modern artworks. You’re not necessarily going to have access to private archives or dealers’ records as a regular researcher or collector, which makes having relationships even more important. And of course there are people who are buying art for investment purposes, who may own only a small fraction of the artwork. In this type of arrangement we may never know the names of all—or any—of the owners, which makes tracing provenance extremely difficult.

LTTo take your example of an artwork that is fractionally owned by someone, purchased as an investment and sold after, say, a year: what does that count for in a hundred years, when a provenance researcher is researching this object?

LDZWe might need to come up with a notation in our provenance histories for this type of pass-through ownership, as we do for dealers and agents who might have represented the artworks but did not own it. It doesn’t feel like a particularly meaningful category to us today, but it’s part of the history of the work, and in a hundred years researchers may want that information.

LTIf you’re researching provenance and there’s no catalogue raisonné or relevant archive—if you’re a living artist who wants to track work after it’s left the studio, for example, or if you’re an estate or foundation attempting to document a body of work that might have been out in the world for decades—where do you begin?

LDZArtists and artists’ estates sometimes set up websites, or even catalogues raisonnés in preparation, to encourage people to contact them if they own artworks. Sometimes they’ll put out a list of specific works that they’re trying to locate. There are different types of search mechanisms. Again, think outside the box: if you’re not using archives, maybe you’re doing reverse image searches, or setting up Google alerts and auction alerts.

SFI hope we don’t end without discussing the subject of faked provenance and the unreliability of provenance information. Provenance isn’t always what it seems to be; you can’t simply make an assumption. Whether due to malicious or fraudulent intent, or just lack of knowledge, the materials that you look for when determining provenance, which with paintings are often on the verso—exhibition labels, gallery labels, Nazi-era ERR numbers [Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, a Nazi Party catalogue of artworks they had plundered]—are sometimes faked. When you start doing the research, and you call the gallery whose label is supposedly on the back of the painting, and you find out that that particular gallery number belonged to a different work, or that the gallery never sold a work by that artist and never used that kind of label, it changes the entire picture.

Even when genuine, labels are often incomplete; over time, they’re torn, and people read them slightly differently. One of the reasons why institutions and individuals are doing so much provenance research is that they don’t want to end up on the front page of the New York Times in an ownership dispute over a work they thought they’d acquired legally. The more complicated cases often do end up in court, and you start seeing the experts on both sides disagreeing as to what the labels say and mean. It’s not just the history, it’s the interpretation of that history and those facts. Sometimes there’ll be gaps that won’t be answered and that are subject to interpretation. And then the law comes into play as to which side has the bigger burden of proof.

Documents also get forged. People need to be savvy about provenance research. It’s not just the scholarly digging and the bloodhound sniffing that are important, but the checking of everything, because so much is doctored.

LDZThere’s a dark side of digitization, too. We’ve been presented with documents, letterhead, labels, et cetera, copied from real archival documents that the fakers found online. Provenance researchers need to be questioning and critical; you can’t just accept what’s presented to you.

SFAbsolutely. Many years ago, I published an article in our IFAR Journal mentioning a couple of galleries that had found that their letterhead had been faked and was circulating, in an effort to make fake works by artists they dealt with appear authentic. I’m sure if I did another article now, I could find a dozen such examples. To repeat: documentation is not always accurate, and it behooves everyone to be extra careful. Most people are honest—rather naively, I actually believe that—but not everyone is, and you need to be sure, whether you’re a gallery, a museum, a purchaser/collector, or a scholar, that what you’re looking at is what it purports to be and is accurate.