The Olive Trees by van Gogh (provenance excerpt:"1940, unknown German buyer")
When the estate of the famous art collector Getrude Stein was sold, several trustees of the MOMA (Paley, Rockefeller, Burden, Meyer and Whitney) created a powerful and well financed buying syndicate to acquire the artworks in the collection with a view to giving some of them to the MOMA.
MOMA (and later Metropolitan Museum of Art curator) William Lieberman and Walter Bareiss played a key role in mounting the financial operation quickly and efficiently.
What other artworks at the MoMa are linked to these powerful art collecting trustees?
Below are some of provenances from artworks included by the MOMA in its Provenance Research Project. Many would appear to require additional research to clarify their itineraries.
MOMA provenances (2019 version) that mention William S. Paley, John Hay Whitney, William A. M. Burden, Abbey Rockefeller, Nelson A. Rockefeller or the Museum of Modern Art Syndicate
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.
This video shows artworks gathered from NEPIP and other sources that mention the word "Lempertz" in the provenance published by museums.
Note: Some of the mentions concern the German auction house. Some do not. Some concern transactions prior to 1933, others after 1933. Inclusion on the list does not mean that the artwork was looted or sold in a forced sale, only that it contains a specific word.
German sales catalogues published by the Getty Provenance Index and Heidelberg University tend to stop or peter out after 1945, so it is very difficult to use digital tools to analyze Lempertz and other auction sales in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s when Nazi looted artworks were laundered via auction houses with little scrutiny.
Gathering mentions of Lempertz (and other auction houses) in museums provenances is one workaround for this lack of transparency.
(photo credit from MFA, Boston museum, The Cumaean Sibyl Donato Creti (Italian (Bolognese), 1671–1749) about 1730 ACCESSION NUMBER 1984.138 PROVENANCE
November 23-25, 1983, anonymous (German private collector) sale, Lempertz, Cologne, lot 1482. 1984, sold by Piero Corsini, New York and London, to the MFA. (Accession Date: April 11, 1984) https://collections.mfa.org/objects/34617/the-cumaean-sibyl
Harry Sperling, the grandson of art dealer Franz Kleinberger, became head of the firm F. Kleinberger Galleries. His cousin, Allan Loebl, an Art Looting Investigation Unit Red Flag Name, was in charge of the Paris office during WWII.
Below are the provenances of some of the artworks that transited via Kleinberger on their way to US museums.
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