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above: Gustave Courbet - Les Roches de Hautepierre, settlement with heirs of Max Silberberg
In the last ten years, what progress in provenance research at the Art Institute of Chicago for artworks it listed on the Nazi Era Provenance Internet Portal (NEPIP)?
This dataset preserves the provenances of AIC NEPIP artworks for two dates at a ten year interval: 2017 and 2026.
View AIC provenances for NEPIP items
Download CSV of AIC provenance for NEPIP items
This dataset preserves provenance information published by the Art Institute of Chicago for artworks associated with the James and Marilynn Alsdorf collection and related objects.
The dataset was assembled from publicly accessible museum webpages in June 2024 and May 2026.
Its purpose is to facilitate:
Note: Museum provenance information is dynamic. Object pages, provenance texts, donor attributions, and acquisition histories may change or disappear.
This dataset preserves snapshots of provenance information as published at specific dates.
The dataset includes, where available:
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This dataset reproduces provenance information as published by the museum at the time of capture. It is intended to support provenance researchers and others studying the evolution of institutional provenance narratives.
When citing the dataset, please include dataset version, retrieval date, and source URLs whenever possible.
VIEW DATASET LINK
DOWNLOAD CSV
_-_Venus_and_Cupid_(National_Gallery,_London).jpg)
The Times' David Sanderson just published "Painting from Hitler’s love nest hangs in the National Gallery" reminding us that Silberman Galleries provided false information to the UK National Gallery of Art about the 16th-century painting Cupid Complaining to Venus.
Its provenance has long been known to have a big Nazi era gap, and was even published in the National Gallery's Whereabouts of paintings 1933-1945 and in the Collection Trust's Spoliation Reports.
The Times article includes a photo of the Cranach "hanging in the living room of Hitler’s private Munich apartment, where he often entertained his mistress, Eva Braun".
All this poses two obvious questions.
and
(see also: "BOSTON MFA SETTLES VAN DER NEER CASE" http://web.archive.org/web/20151016233930/http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/news/artnetnews/boston-mfa-settles-van-der-neer-case.asp
and Double Comma Names )
Below are a few examples of :
The Art Institute of Chicago announced yesterday that it plans to restitute to Nepal one of the objects looted from it. The looted object, Buddha Sheltered by the Serpent King Muchalinda, (Reference Number 2014.1030) was gifted to the AIC by its trustee Marilynn Alsdorf in 2014.
One may recall the Nazi looted art case filed by the heirs of Carlota Landsberg for the Picasso Woman in White that Marilynn Alsdorf acquired from art dealer Stephen Hahn in 1975 with the provenance "Private Collection, Paris."
Or one may recall the investigations by Crain’s Chicago Business and ProPublica into "at least nine objects once owned by James and Marilynn Alsdorf that have been sent back to their countries of origin since the late 1980s".
Or one may simply be intrigued by hundreds of objects in a major US museum that still lack clear provenance despite a history of acquiring looted objects by their donors. Or, perhaps, the curious way the story is told by the museum when forced to return an obviously looted object.
The following dataset includes objects linked to James or Marilynn Alsdorf with the basic object information, credit line and provenances published by the Art Institute of Chicago on its website in June 2024.
This file contains provenance information related to artworks associated with the Alsdorf collection. Here are the key details:
RetrievalDate: All entries have the same date, "19June2024".Url: Direct links to the artworks on the Art Institute of Chicago’s website.Artist: Names of artists where available (only 44 entries have this).Title: Titles of the artworks.Medium: The materials used in the artworks.Credit Line: How the artwork was acquired or credited (e.g., "Gift of Marilynn B. Alsdorf").Acc Num: Accession numbers of the artworks.Provenance: Historical ownership information, partially available (161 entries have data).Exhibitions: Exhibition history (120 entries have data).References: Completely empty column.Date Created: The estimated or known date of creation.Dimensions: Physical dimensions of the artworks.Publication History: Records of where the artwork has been published (136 entries have data).Status: Mostly empty, but one entry states: "Loot-Deaccessioned for repatriation to Nepal Museum".See DATASET with provenances HERE
(data from November 2024)
Description: This enhanced Provenance dataset has been constructed from information available on the public internet site of the Art Institute of Chicago
The dataset focuses on artworks created before 1945 and acquired after 1932.
It merges the list of artworks on the Nazi Era Provenance Internet Portal with provenance texts published on the AIC's detailed item pages, as well as other artworks not on NEPIP.