Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: no provenances for Picasso?

How can a major American museum fail to publish provenance information for European artworks created before 1933?

Photo	Short Title	Date	AccNum	Credit Line	Provenance
	Pedestal Table (Translation)	1922	47.10.80	T. Catesby Jones Collection	NO PROVENANCE
	The Banjo Player (Primary Title)	1921	47.10.81	T. Catesby Jones Collection	NO PROVENANCE
	The Horse (Primary Title)	1901	85.795	Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon	NO PROVENANCE
	Head of a Peasant Woman (Former Title)	1906	47.10.78	T. Catesby Jones Collection	NO PROVENANCE
	Still Life (Wineglass and Newspaper) (Primary Title)	ca. 1913–4	47.10.83	T. Catesby Jones Collection	NO PROVENANCE
	Fool on Horseback (Former Title)	1905	84.2	Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon	NO PROVENANCE
	Landscape (Translation)	1907	47.10.79	T. Catesby Jones Collection	NO PROVENANCE

Picasso in Museums around the world

PROGRESS REPORT

Twenty-five years have passed since the Washington Conference on Holocaust era assets.

Yet there is still no central database of museum artworks with their provenances. Some museums - big museums, university art museums - still publish no provenance at all.

Projects are announced, appear, disappear, each separate. There is no central tracking of Nazi era provenance gaps.  The scale is enormous. The number of artworks with unclear ownership history for the Nazi era remains extremely high.

Given the enormity of the task, this post looks at the situation in museums for a single artist: Picasso.

(update ongoing)

 

Collection	Before 1945	Image?	Provenance?	Nazi-era Gaps?
MoMA	659	yes	sometimes	yes
NGA	258	yes	yes	yes
Pompidou	59	yes	no	yes
Musée Picasso	4000+ all dates	yes	no	unknown
Albertina	40	yes	no	yes
Hermitage	36	yes	no	yes
Fondation Beyeler	22	yes	yes	yes
Museums in Denmark	133	yes	yes	yes
UK Collections Trust	16	no	yes	yes
Pinakothek (Munich)	14	no	no	yes
Kunstmuseum Basel	66	yes	NO	yes
Kunstmuseum Bern	9 -on display or Gurlitt	yes	yes - PDF	yes
Metropolitan Museum	56	yes	yes	yes
MFA	29	yes	yes	yes
DIA	21	NO	yes	yes
Harvard Art Museums	20	yes	yes	yes-11
Yale Art	35	yes	yes	yes
Cleveland	19	yes	yes	yes
Princeton Museum	6	yes	NO	yes
Emil Bührle Collection	5	yes	yes	yes
Musée d'Orsay	1	yes	yes	yes
Rose Art Museum	4	yes	no	yes

***

 

Links:

Museum of Modern Art - MoMa (USA)

Query for Picasso (all)  1246 artworks all dates

Query for Picasso before 1945 

(659 artworks is an estimation, because the query picks up some other artists as well)

NGA (USA): 

Query for Picasso created before 1945 

MFA Boston (USA)

Query for Picasso (all)

UK Collections Trust:

 Query for Picasso created before 1945 with gaps in provenance

Pinakothek (Munich)

Query for artworks by Picasso

Museums in Denmark

https://www.kulturarv.dk/kid/SoegKunstnerVaerker.do?kunstnerId=1312

Rose Art Museum (USA)

* no provenance information *

Query for Picasso (all)

Looted art: I asked ChatGPT for assistance writing code in R to classify 20,000 artworks

I asked ChatGPT for help writing a program in R to classify whether an artwork is ok, a forgery, or Nazi loot. What do you think of the result?

What happened to the Arkansas Art Center Database?

 The Arkansas Art Center changed its name to the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts.

There used to be an online art collections database with a search function.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110201214103/http://www.aacwebkiosk.com/

Where is the database today?

https://arkmfa.org/art/collection/

Back when the museum was known as the Arkansas Art Center, it listed 447 artworks on the Nazi Era Provenance Internet Portal (NEPIP).

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