---

Media Relations

Researching art's geneaology

IUAM Provenance Project traces origins and journeys of treasures

Since the late 1990s, art museums across the country have been making a concerted effort to research the provenance of their pre-1945 objects in order to determine whether any object was illegally transferred or looted during World War II, when art looting was rampant in Europe.

According to Jenny McComas, curator of Western Art after 1800, the Indiana University Art Museum (IUAM) began systematically researching the history of paintings in its collections three years ago and has been at the task ever since.

"Our registrar, Anita Bracalente, attended a conference on provenance research in Washington, D.C., at the National Archives, so she had ideas of how to begin this project in an organized fashion," McComas says. "We started by making lists of the works that were candidates for this research -- European paintings, sculptures, watercolors, and drawings that were created before 1945. The first step was to physically examine the object itself and record all labels and other markings we found. Next we combed through various museum files for clues to the work's provenance and from there moved on to library and archival resources."

In the course of researching the provenance of hundreds of paintings in the IUAM collections, McComas and her colleagues have found some interesting cases. One example is that of the Picasso painting, "The Studio" (1934), which was given to the museum by its first director, Henry Radford Hope.

"Professor Hope purchased the painting from the French art dealer Paul Rosenberg during the summer of 1944 in New York," says McComas. "Rosenberg had fled Nazi-occupied France in 1940 and reopened his gallery in New York. However, he left the bulk of his art collection stored in bank vaults in France -- all of which were ransacked by the Nazis. He spent years after the war trying to track down his stolen paintings and, in many cases, was quite successful. However, he managed to ship a small number of paintings to New York in 1940 before he left. Our Picasso was among those works that he got out of France."

In compliance with U.S. law that states the provenance of art objects in U.S. museums must be easily accessible to the public, IUAM launched its provenance Web site in November 2005.

"Our Web site is linked to the Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal (www.nepip.org), a site managed by the Association of American Museums," explains McComas. "The portal is a database in which all participating American art museums can be searched; it is a good place to start if you are researching an object, but don't know what museum owns it."

At the IUAM, there is no foreseeable end in sight for the Provenance Project. Two full-time staff -- McComas and Bracalente -- and several graduate students devote their time to the research, which is a slow, exacting process.

"It is not at all unusual for there to be numerous gaps in the history of a work of art, because invoices and other paperwork may have been lost or destroyed over time, or perhaps because there was never any paperwork to begin with," McComas says. "All of the graduate students who have worked on the project have found doing such intensely object-based research to be a valuable experience, even if they do not plan to continue on in museum work."

Visit the IUAM Provenance Project Web site at http://www.artmuseum.iu.edu/provenance/.

---

---