Nazi Looting: Kresge Art Museum's Provenance Research Project

"Provenance" refers to all previous owners of a work of art, tracing it from its present location and owner back to the hand of the artist. Provenance has many uses: it can help to determine the authenticity of a work, establish the historical importance of a work by suggesting other artists who might have seen and been influenced by it and determine the legitimacy of current ownership.

In the late 1990s, the member institutions of the American Association of Museums (AAM) committed themselves to examining the provenance of art in their collections to determine whether they may have been subject to any improper transactions, specifically in Europe in the period between 1933 and 1945. In 2004, Kresge Art Museum began this research and completed it a year later. Descriptions of the museum's works with gaps in Nazi-era provenance have been posted at the AAM's Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal.

"There have been a number of highly visible cases in the past few years involving very valuable—and high priced—pieces that had been in museum collections for decades," says Susan J. Bandes, director of Kresge Art Museum.

"While national and international law covers other areas of restitution, such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act that mandates the return of Native American artifacts to their people of origin, with Nazi repatriation, museums respond to moral and ethical obligations when the evidence of ownership is unequivocal.

"Several of our paintings are in fairly certain 'safe' territory while not surprisingly the majority has unresolved histories. Nothing in the collection has been connected with red-flag names of collectors or dealers and neither have we discovered anything startling about the collection."

Earlier this year Kresge Art Museum partnered with the Jewish Studies Program and MSU Libraries to present a screening of the film "Rape of Europa", which tells the epic story of the systematic theft, deliberate destruction, and miraculous survival of Europe's art treasures during the Third Reich. A panel discussion followed, featuring Bandes and Kenneth Waltzer, director of Jewish Studies.

From the AAM Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal:

"From the time it came into power in Germany in 1933 through the end of World War II in 1945, the Nazi regime orchestrated a program of theft, confiscation, coercive transfer, looting, pillage and destruction of objects of art and other cultural property in Europe on a massive and unprecedented scale. Some confiscated objects were sold to fund Nazi activities, while others were retained for the private collections of high-ranking party officials.

"U.S. museums were closely involved in the recovery and restitution of looted art after the war. During the post-war occupation of Germany, art historians and museum curators serving with the U.S. Army's Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Commission operated collecting points where discovered loot was inventoried, catalogued, and returned to countries of origin. Through these efforts, many thousands of works were repatriated to their countries of origin and often were returned to their rightful owners.

"Over the past decade, U.S. museums have become aware that their responsibilities in relation to Nazi looting did not end in the immediate postwar period. Increasingly, museums have come to recognize that objects unlawfully appropriated during the Nazi era without subsequent restitution-that is, with neither return of the object nor payment of compensation to the object's original owner or legal successor-may have made their way into U.S. museum collections in the decades since the war.

"Provenance information for non-contemporary works of art can vary widely in completeness and accuracy. When a work of art is acquired by a museum, the museum staff attempts to add to the provenance provided by the donor, dealer, or auction house. Sources for provenance information include exhibition catalogues, catalogues raisonné, and correspondence with other scholars. Information can also be gathered from labels and other markings on the object itself, which can point to its movement over time. However, even after extensive research, it is not unusual for long periods in the history of an object to remain unaccounted for."

For more information about Kresge Art Museum’s provenance research project, please e-mail kamuseum@msu.edu.

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