Nazi-Era Provenance Research is gaining ground

Dr Jacques Schuhmacher’s brilliant new book is an invaluable addition to the expanding literature.

The literature on the Nazis’ wholesale looting of Jewish collections and the persecution and extermination of their owners has grown inexorably over the past twenty to thirty years.

A brief list of notable English-language titles would include Lynn Nicholas’s The Rape of Europa (1994); Hector Feliciano’s The Lost Museum (1995); Elizabeth Simpson’s edited volume: The Spoils of War (1997); Peter Harclerode & Brendan Pittaway’s The Lost Masters (1999); Jonathan Petropoulos’s The Faustian Bargain (2000); Simon Goodman’s The Orpheus Clock (2015), and more recently the various volumes on the Gurlitt case — Susan Ronald’s Hitler’s Art Thief (2015), Catherine Hickley’s The Munich Art Hoard (2016), and the Gurlitt Status Report (2017).

We also have a clutch of constructive volumes on the technical and theoretical discipline of provenance research, notably Nancy Yeide, Constantin Akinsha & Amy Walsh’s AAM Guide to Provenance Research (2001); Gail Feigenbaum & Inge Reist’s Provenance: An Alternative History of Art (2012); and Arthur Tompkins’ edited volume: Provenance Research Today (2020).

To this by no means exhaustive list we can now add Jacques Schuhmacher’s excellent new book: Nazi-Era Provenance of Museum Collections: A Research Guide (2024). Dr Schuhmacher’s often moving and beautifully written text offers a reminder that the process of researching and redressing the monstrous historical wrong of the Holocaust will never be complete.

The New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that one should always have a permanent commitment to tasks that cannot be completed in a single lifetime. This is certainly true of Holocaust-era provenance research.

The enlightened decision by the Victoria & Albert Museum to appoint Jacques Schuhmacher as the museum’s first Senior Provenance Research Curator (and sponsorship of the post by The Polonsky Foundation) allowed Dr Schuhmacher to travel widely and to mine numerous archives in Europe and beyond. The results are bountiful. One is left wondering why more museums (post-Washington Principles) have not established curatorial research posts of this kind. One hopes this book will encourage other major art institutions to follow suit.

Thanks to Dr Schuhmacher’s broad linguistic reach, the book features a wealth of fresh research, including many new case studies. It also has a comprehensive bibliography which has broadened my horizons still further.

Given the prevailing and ever-increasing focus on our museums, their historical development, their collecting strategies, and in many cases the deficiencies of their cataloguing processes (the British Museum’s recent embarrassments spring to mind), it is timely and topical that this book places its emphasis on Nazi-era cultural objects in museums.

One thinks back, to name just one example, to the acquisitions by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in the 1930s under the direction of its first director, Alfred H. Barr.

In June 1939, Barr commissioned the New York-based German emigré art dealer Curt Valentin of the Buchholz Gallery to represent the museum at the dispersals of Jewish property conducted by the Fischer auction house in Lucerne, Switzerland.

Valentin’s ventriloquising role was designed to disguise MoMA as the art works’ ultimate destination. In Barr’s crosshairs were some of the 125 masterpieces by leading lights of the Modernist era seized by the Nazis from German museums and private collections — many deemed by the Reich authorities as “Entartete Kunst” (Degenerate Art).

Many European art dealers and collectors deliberately avoided the auction on moral grounds, while the more ethically negotiable among them entered into “ring” arrangements to depress the prices. A month after the auction, Barr, aware of the controversial nature of the circumstances of the sale, wrote to a colleague: “I am just as glad not to have the museum’s name or my own associated with the auction. I think it very important that our releases…should state that the works have been purchased from the Buchholz Gallery, New York.”

Barr was not alone in wrestling with his conscience on the issue since a number of other American museums were toeing a similarly precarious moral tightrope. “Perhaps I am being not only Calvinistic but Jesuitical since I want to keep the pictures here [at MoMA]” Barr wrote to a fellow museum director. “But in any case, you’re safe on the first count (legal); your conscience must guide you on the second (moral).”  — [Quoted in Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Alfred H. Barr: Missionary for the Modern, Contemporary Books, New York, 1989, pp177-179]

On a personal note, having started my career as a young fine art auctioneer and valuer, I still shudder when pondering the innumerable examples of portable material culture — decorative art, books, clocks, watches, jewellery, ceramics, sculpture, objets d’art, and so on — dispersed under provincial auction hammers in the decades after the Second World War.

Rarely if ever were questions asked as to the prior ownership history of these objects, many of which came to market via the circuitous art and antiques trade. Of course, back in the 1970s, provenance was an entirely unfamiliar concept in the regional art market. Later, as a post-graduate art historian (for a time at the V&A), and later still as an art market journalist, the issue of provenance — and its relevance to Nazi-era assets more specifically — began to assume a tighter focus.

In 2000, while a director of art data company, Invaluable, we shared a building with the Commission for Looted Art in Europe run by the inestimable Anne Webber. Since then, provenance research has been front and centre of everything I think about when writing and lecturing on the art market’s professional practices. Hence the decision seven years ago to launch Flynn & Giovani Art Provenance Research with my business partner Angelina Giovani-Agha, herself an acknowledged expert in provenance research.

Dr Schuhmacher’s inspirational new book is by turns practically instructive, engrossing and, unsurprisingly, occasionally heartbreaking for the numerous tragic stories of loss it recounts.

As a concise account of Nazi-era spoliation, it should be required reading not only for museum curators and art market professionals, but also on the reading lists of university art history courses (most of which shamefully denigrate anything to do with the market).

It should also retune one’s awareness when visiting museums, prompting us to ask critical questions about collections, the presence of which we too often take for granted. Where did this object come from? How did it get here? Who did it belong to? And where are they now?