Provenance Research And The Many Chasms:

Acknowledgments

• My Thesis Advisor at Columbia University:
  Prof. Janet Kraynak
• Funding:
  Caleb Smith Memorial Fellowship given by Columbia University
• Interface Design and Functionality:
  Ben Miller
• Editing:
  Anna Szymanski

Restitution as a Global Subject

In 2018, a report commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron, known as the Savoy-Sarr Report, raised some controversy in regard to the restitution of postcolonial artefacts from sub-Saharan Africa kept in French museums. At a recent symposium held at the Italian Academy at Columbia University, both of the authors of the Savoy-Sarr Report, Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, gave a speech about the global issues of restitution and the governments' previous disregard of the subject. This thesis looks at the recent "Gurlitt Affair" as a contemporary German case study of the status of current restitution laws and the progress of provenance research since the end of World War II. The "Gurlitt Affair" is one of the largest discoveries of hidden art by a private individual in the 21st century. Its story demonstrates the need to advance the field of provenance research and highlights the continued constricted vision on the subject of restitution in Germany and abroad. While this thesis focuses on art looted in the period around World War II and does not directly address the restitution of Post-Colonial artefacts, the recent symposium highlights the importance of uncharted research within the field of provenance and the ethical questions that can no longer be ignored on the complex issue of restitution. One specific element that was addressed by Felwine Sarr during the symposium was the concept of reanimating and recontextualizing objects of art in today's world and resituating these objects both in new and old contexts.

When looking at the provenance of works of art, following the journey that led certain works to where they are today can be challenging. Also, deciding where artworks should go, regardless of whether the work was looted during the post-colonial period or World War II, is never a seamless process. Instead, the identification of the object's origin and the circumstances of the object's most current "owner" must be traced to establish the groundwork for moving forward. However, what happens in cases where works of art have gaps in their provenance, or if no claimant currently requests the return of a knowingly looted work? How do we make sure that future generations get a say in where these works go, or more importantly, are aware of these works' existence? There are no easy answers to these questions. Nonetheless, value can be found in analysing matters of provenance and restitution and circulating new information, as is the purpose of this thesis.

As previously mentioned, this thesis focuses on one of the largest and most important recent cases concerning restitution: the Gurlitt Collection in Germany. The importance of the case stems not only from the large amount of works that were found in the private homes of Cornelius Gurlitt, son of art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, but also, in large part, from the momentum this case unleashed in Germany in regard to discussions about current restitution guidelines and the financial possibilities for continued research. This momentum soon followed in other countries, including the United States, which worked with Germany on different research projects and public conferences to discuss the Gurlitt Collection and to respond to the conversation initiated by the media and the public at large who wanted to know why so little had been done on the subject of restitution since the end of World War II. The aim of this thesis is to help answer these questions: To what extent does the Gurlitt Collection demonstrate, as a contemporary case, the struggles provenance researchers face when looking at works potentially looted during the time period between 1933 and 1945? How has the case shed light on the current restitution framework in Germany? Can digital humanities help facilitate a better understanding and contextualization of the subject?

A collection consisting of approximately 1,500 works was first confiscated by the Zoll, customs, in Munich, in 2012 and soon identified in the media as the "Gurlitt Art Trove." Stored in the apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, it was a collection acquired during the lifetime of his father Hildebrand Gurlitt. When the story broke out in the news a year later, German authorities were pushed to the front on the discussion of Nazi-looted art. How was it that this collection remained unnoticed by Germany for so many years considering the Gurlitt family name was long known to be associated with the Nazis.

Did Germany Know?

In 1939, just shortly before the beginning of World War II, Adolf Hitler established the Sonderauftrag Linz, or Special Commission Linz, which was to be used to create a Führermuseum comprised of Hitler's private art collection. By 1943, Hildebrand Gurlitt had become one of the chief art dealers who was commissioned to purchase works for the museum in Linz, Austria, supplying over 300 paintings to the NS-party. He also applied to be part of the Commission for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art, along with the three other art dealers Ferdinand Möller, Karl Buchholz and Bernhard Böhmer. From 1937-1939, this commission was in charge of selling Nazi-seized art abroad for foreign currency or in exchange for works of art that were approved of by the NS-party.¹

It was due to these circumstances that Hildebrand Gurlitt's name was recorded on the ALIU Red Flag Names List and Index created from the Art Looting Intelligence Unit (ALIU) Reports of 1945-1946. Created by the US government, these reports list all individuals and agencies involved in or suspected of being involved in art looting for the Nazi regime. The discussion of why Gurlitt decided to serve the NS-Party—considering that he was classified as being a "quarter Jewish" due to his Jewish grandmother—remains controversial, as it is, at times, presented as a reason—or an excuse—why he could not have possibly been collaborating with the regime. What is clear is the fact that he profited from his business in the art world in Germany before, during and after World War II using his close contacts, including collectors—among whom were many persecuted Jewish families.

While customs raided the Munich apartment of Hildebrand's son Cornelius Gurlitt in 2012, the German department of Public Prosecution in Bavaria had already opened an investigation into the Gurlitt case in 2010 for suspected tax evasion. This, however, was at the time not disclosed to the public. However, the collection had been in the Munich apartment when Helene Gurlitt, the mother of Cornelius and wife of Hildebrand, was living there, which begs the question of whether no one knew that a historically relevant collection had existed at this address for decades. In the time since the raid, several works of art have been restituted to their rightful heirs by subsequent research projects and task forces put in charge by the German government through the German Lost Art Foundation. Research on provenance in the collection is still underway by German agencies and by the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland—the stipulated heir to the Gurlitt Collection, as given in the will of Cornelius Gurlitt. The Kunstmuseum Bern and the German authorities are finishing their collaborative work on the Gurlitt Collection, and new research findings are to be published in 2021 on the provenance of various items in the Gurlitt Collection, so the exact status and future holding place of many of the artworks in the collection remain unclear.

Resistance Towards Restitution

In addition to examining the specific facts around the Gurlitt case and the history of Nazi-looted art, this thesis will also consider the complexities involved in restitution and the resistance to it. Restitution is still not always accepted and faces substantial resistance, due partially to the fear of emptying the walls of cultural institutions as well as limiting the global accessibility of art by returning works to former private owners. This, however, is not an argument for justifying negligent due diligence in terms of conducting provenance research. A recent book in Germany was published in 2008 alongside an exhibition entitled Robbery and Restitution shown at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, which contains interviews with German experts within the field of restitution on Jewish cultural objects from 1933 to today.² Among these experts are art dealers, lawyers, professors, antiquarians, auction houses and heirs. It is a complex subject to untangle and requires taking into consideration different points of views, including those of claimants and those of current owners who might have bought or inherited, so to speak, cultural objects in good faith decades ago. It is within these challenging circumstances that solutions must be found.

Most of these ten interviewees noted that not enough research is being conducted on the matter of restitution, and action is being driven by the requests of lawyers and not personal initiatives from museums, highlighting the lack of intention by the German law makers to create a legal framework within Germany for restitution cases. A controversial issue is also frequently brought up by some of the interviewees, and that is the possibility of selling a work of art after it has been restituted, with some arguing that many of the families whom a work has been given back to were not even in the type of financial disarray that would justify the selling. It is remarkable that even today, restitution is regarded by many—including some experts in the field—as doing "favors" to those who claim ownership. Supposedly, because claimants have been shown "generosity," they must demonstrate gratitude through their actions, which limits what they can do with their own property. This is simply wrong.

As has been proven with the Gurlitt Collection, restitution cases and provenance research do not only deal with famous objects, such as the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt, which garnered the media's attention due to the value of the artwork. In the Gurlitt collection, over 1,500 works were found in both the Munich and Salzburg residences of Cornelius Gurlitt, and the majority of the works were inexpensive prints on paper. Tracing the provenance of these types of works is incredibly tedious due to a lack of information on the different editions of prints. Yet, this is somewhat beside the point. The financial value of a painting, or a print, is of secondary importance, despite what the media likes to focus on, when understanding the purpose behind what it means to restitute. The significance lies in the emotional value ascribed to objects by their rightful owners. These owners should then be free to sell the work, give the work on loan to a public institution or fill their homes with it. The decision is theirs. As Jost von Trott zu Solz, a lawyer who specializes in international restitution rights, has said, "the more public awareness of the then historical situation prevails, the more, in my opinion, people will accept that it is about something other than the removal of an image from a museum"³

Digital Humanities

The field of Digital Humanities is one that is still being established, and it currently lacks a concrete definition, but, generally speaking, it is "[…] a collection of practices and approaches combining computational methods with humanistic inquiry."⁶ In the specific context of this thesis, Digital Humanities refers to the online platform being used to showcase and to share work on provenance research and restitution claims from 1933-1945 for greater public access. As an emerging field, Digital Humanities, as the name indicates, digitizes the traditional scholarship of the humanities, whether through hypertext editing or database construction, among other options. The possibilities for displaying historical information using various visual and graphic digital tools are endless. By definition, history is the study of past events; however, digital humanities takes this meaning and develops it further by creating and foregrounding questions and experimentations of the past in the context and technological sphere of today and recognizes the dynamism of history as ever-changing. The production of meaning is created both in the historical information itself as well as in the conceptual and interactive production of the Digital Humanities projects. It is a field—as also noted by the Getty Research Institute, a leading institution on the use of Digital Humanities in art scholarship—that uses multidisciplinary resources and involves collaborative action between individuals from archeologists to computer programmers.

Digital Humanities can also ensure that works of art otherwise stored or archived for few to see are instead exposed to the public and provided with context on the artworks' origins. Among the leading scholarship on this subject is the book by Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Petter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp entitled Digital Humanities. A handful of fictional case studies, based on existing projects, are included in the book. Among them is a case study on resituating "[…] religious objects through a multi-modal approach that captures ritual practices across the time and space of diaspora. Spearheaded by a museum, the goal of this project is to produce an animated archive of cultural materials attuned to questions of provenance, and use, and scholarly interpretation."⁷ In reference to Nazi-looted art, different ethical and historical questions can be, and should be, put into digital form for greater dissemination of information.

One of the great modern art collections and examples of online archival provenance research is the Bührle Foundation in Zurich, Switzerland.⁸ Originally established in 1960 by the widow of Emil Bührle and his two children, the private collection of over 600 artworks is made available online with extensive provenances provided for each work. After World War II, thirteen works in Emil Bührle's collection were identified as having been looted, mainly those purchased by Bührle from the Fischer Gallery in Lucerne, Switzerland. After the restitution of these works in 1948, Bührle re-purchased nine of them, with the other four going to the Jewish art collector Paul Rosenberg. These provenance cases serve as historic documents and have helped in subsequent research by other institutions, including the Kunsthaus in Zurich, as newfound information is updated regularly on the website. As one of the most promising strategies for moving the field of provenance research forward, the cataloging of works and the transparent publication of archival materials is of great importance and urgency for cultural institutions. Digital platforms within educational and institutional frameworks allow for multiple viewpoints to be presented at the same time, creating a complex and multifaceted review of relevant historic documentation.

The structure of this website identifies and separates the different aspects of provenance research in relation to the main case study, the Gurlitt Collection. Within each of the separate subheadings, historical analysis is included incorporating information gathered from the German Federal Archives in Koblenz and graphical representations, which forms a narrative that helps users better understand the Gurlitt Collection and the mostly German restitution guidelines. New information is also shared on this website from personal interviews conducted with experts involved in the Gurlitt case, translations of German texts that are relevant to the case, a selective collection of media sources that expand upon the case and a collection of databases and sources for provenance research. This project incorporates the idea of Digital Humanities to look towards the future for how to improve research on provenance and restitution.

Disclaimers

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