http://www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/news/tully/tully8-30-96.asp
PROMPT: "How did the Degas go from Friedrich Gutmann to Daniel Searle. Please name every entity involved and their role."
Researching a Rigged Game: Open Source Data & the Trade of Cultural Objects, September 14 and 15, 2023. This YouTube video transcript presents a computational method for detecting potentially Nazi-looted art by analyzing the language used in artwork provenance records. The speaker, Laurel Zuckerman, explains how counting words indicating uncertainty, unreliability, and anonymity can reveal patterns suggestive of deception, drawing inspiration from her own experience with a family artwork. A software tool is demonstrated that allows users to upload provenance data and custom lists of keywords to quantify these indicators. While acknowledging limitations and the need for further research, the approach offers a scalable and objective way to prioritize artworks for closer scrutiny regarding their wartime history.
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".Since 1998, the Bavarian State Painting Collections have restituted 24 works from 15 collections. On this page, you can find more information about past restitutions.
The Bavarian State Painting Collections and the Bavarian National Museum have restituted a painting by Hans Wertinger (Count Palatine Philipp, Bishop of Freising, Inv. No. 12030) and two 16th-century Nuremberg sculptures(wood statuettes "Adam and Eve", Inv. No. 53/137 and 53/138) to the heirs of Jakob Goldschmidt (1882–1955), a Berlin banker and entrepreneur.
The painting was transferred to the Bavarian State Painting Collections in 1953 as part of former Nazi art holdings, and the sculptures were acquired by the Bavarian National Museum that same year through an exchange.
Jakob Goldschmidt was one of the most influential bankers of the Weimar Republic and was considered a central figure in the financial world. He held a leading position on the board of the Danat Bank (Darmstädter and Nationalbank) and served on more than 100 supervisory boards.
Goldschmidt began collecting art during World War I and built a significant collection. He was also a patron of Berlin museums and the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. His villa in Potsdam's Neubabelsberg district, built in 1921, was adorned with numerous artworks, as was the villa he acquired in Berlin’s Matthäikirchstraße in 1929.
Following the Great Depression of 1931, when Danat Bank collapsed, the Nazis blamed him for the banking crisis. In April 1933, he fled to Switzerland and later to New York in 1936.
The Nazis imposed severe financial restrictions on him, including a Reich Flight Tax of over 1.8 million Reichsmarks, revoked his German citizenship in 1940, and confiscated his remaining assets in Germany in 1941.
Goldschmidt managed to smuggle part of his art collection abroad with the help of industrialist Fritz Thyssen. However, much of his collection remained in Germany, with major portions being auctioned off in 1936 and 1938.
It is undeniable that Goldschmidt’s financial downfall was a direct result of Nazi persecution. The forced sales of his art collection would not have taken place without the Nazi regime, classifying them as persecution-related asset seizures.
As a result, the Bavarian Ministry of Science and Arts approved the restitution.
Markus Blume, Minister for Science and Arts:
"Provenance research results are clear: Jakob Goldschmidt was wrongfully persecuted by the Nazi regime and dispossessed of his wealth. Returning these works is not just a given—it is an ethical obligation. Restituting stolen cultural property restores justice and contributes to addressing Nazi crimes. I sincerely thank the Bavarian State Painting Collections and the Bavarian National Museum for their meticulous research that led to this restitution."
Prof. Dr. Bernhard Maaz, Director of the Bavarian State Painting Collections:
"Hans Wertinger was a masterful Renaissance portraitist. We are honored to return this exceptional artwork to Goldschmidt’s descendants, ensuring that this remarkable collection’s history is remembered."
Dr. Frank Matthias Kammel, Director of the Bavarian National Museum:
"Restituting the two statuettes from the workshop of Veit Stoß is an important moment for the museum."
Statement from the Goldschmidt heirs:
"The heirs of Jakob Goldschmidt are pleased with the restitution, which acknowledges that the loss of these artworks was the result of Nazi persecution and anti-Semitic propaganda."
In 1999 the Glanville family approached the Commission for assistance in locating a triptych looted from their home in Vienna when the family fled the Nazis in 1938.
Marietta Glanville described the looted painting as "an icon of my childhood." Her mother, Elizabeth Glanville, had searched for the looted von Kalckreuth painting since 1948. In 1971 she learned that the painting was in the Bavarian State Paintings Collection, Munich which had acquired it from a private collector in 1942. But, in the same year, her claim was denied by the Bavarian Compensation Office on the grounds that the deadlines for restitution had expired in 1948. In 1983 Elizabeth Glanville died without having been able to recover her painting."
The above graph, generated by a Wikidata query, can be made easier to understand with help from AI.
Steps:
1. Run Wikidata query:
https://w.wiki/Cdse2. Download CSV from Wikidata Query
3. Upload into ChatGPT4o with the following prompt:
"please graph - pay attention to edges"
Here is a graph representing the relationships between Swiss Art Dealer Association Presidents, their business or family connections, and associated paintings. The edges are labeled to indicate the type of connection, and node colors differentiate between SwissArtpres (blue), connections (green), and paintings (orange). Let me know if you'd like further adjustments
The same painting can be found in the "Entartete Kunst" database published by the Free University of Berlin.
American museums have relatively little issue with recounting the history of artworks that the Nazi government seized from its own (Nazi-run) museums.
Of Kirchner's Self Portrait of a Solder above, the Allen Memorial Art Museum writes:
This work, with its raw and garish colors, was included in the 1937 Entartete Kunst-Degenerate Art-exhibition put on by the Nazi authorities in Munich, after which it traveled to other cities in Germany in 1937-38. In Munich, the painting was exhibited in room 3, with other Kirchners, as "Soldier with Whore," under the texts "Deliberate sabotage of national defense" and "An insult to the German heroes of the Great War,"
This text is in a descriptive essay, under the title, "More information". The online entree for the artwork does not include a provenance tab.* Thus, while one learns that the Kirchner was "Degenerate Art", one does not learn how this art came to reside in an American museum, or that the artwork passed through a Nazi named Kurt Feldhäusser.*
***
Kurt Feldhäusser is a name that Nazi-looted art provenance researchers should be familiar with. In the above provenance for a Kirchner painting at the Oberlin Allen Memorial Art Museum, his name appears after the arttwork was seized from a German museum by the Nazi government in order to be sold to raise cash for the Third Reich.
This same Feldhäusser appears in numerous provenances of artworks looted from Jews that made their way to American museums.
Some restitution cases for artworks that passed through Kurt Feldhäusser include:
One notes in passing that all three of these artworks passed through both Feldhäusser and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and that all three had false provenances.
Feldhäusser is a name that is hard to confuse with any other. Feldhäusser was a Nazi Party member. Feldhäusser is linked to both art seized from museums in the Nazi "Degenerate Art" campaign of 1937-8 and looted from German Jews starting in 1933.
It would be interesting to compare and contrast, for the same artists, the historical treatment of the ownership history depending on whether the artwork was part of the "Degenerate Art" inventory of art seized from German museums or simply looted from Jews.
*The Allen Memorial Art Museum does not publish Nazi-era provenance for the artworks in its online collection with the exception of 30 artworks that were published in a slide show under "Provenance Research Nazi Era". One can find the Kirchner there. (see internet archive https://web.archive.org/web/20210813054133/https://amam.oberlin.edu/art/provenance-research/nazi-era