Tracking Looted Art 2: Sothebys Sales of Restituted Artworks as Data

The provenances of artworks restituted to Jewish families  plundered by Nazis contain valuable information for the art historian and Holocaust scholar.

Questions:

• Which transactions occur between the seizure/sale under the Nazis and the restitution?
• Which names appear in these transactions?
• How often do they appear?

Part of the series:  Tracking Nazi-looted art dealers: Restitutions as data

This post looks a a simple method for identifying the names of these buyers and sellers for further analysis. In this example, we look at the provenances of artworks sold at Sothebys after they were restituted to their original owners or their heirs.

Let's run 1000 NEPIP provenances that contain Munich through the Looted Art Detector

In the previous post we gathered one thousand provenances of artworks listed (for the most part) by American museums on the Nazi Era Provenance Internet Portal that contain the word "Munich" or "München" in the provenance text.

In this post, using the Looted Art Detector developed at the Swiss Glamhack2020 and Glamhack2021, we rank artworks that contain a mention of Munich according to the criteria of "Uncertainty".