Holocaust art research digital tools: Lempertz and artworks listed in the (defunct) Nazi Era Internet Portal

Art provenance research tools:

The Cologne auction house of Lempertz was included in the Art Looting Investigation Unit Red Flag list of names in 1946. In recent times, the name has appeared in connection to several claims for restitution of artworks. Until recently American museums published artworks that had gaps in their provenance 1933-1945 in a database called NEPIP (Nazi Era Provenance Internet Portal) (https://www.aam-us.org/programs/the-nazi-era-provenance-internet-portal-nepip-archive/)

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.

Link to database used in video: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/9769949/ (Enter the word or name you want to search for in the box)

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.

Link to Getty Provenance Index

https://www.getty.edu/databases-tools-and-technologies/provenance/

Link to CSV file downloaded from old Getty GPI for search on Lempertz

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTJweR5KAilTRyV0naGWjbLpXjfCNes52bUms-901DtZv99GWDBfi4HMxJfrOVFWEiRa21MAtmXDl6E/pub?gid=1417510852&single=true&output=csv

Link to Heidelberg University German Sales catalogues

https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/en/germansales//recherche/volltext.html

(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

RKD provenances that mention museums, collections or art dealers in California

Bust of Christ 1964.172 Fogg Museum, https://rkd.nl/explore/images/232193 *

The RKD database publishes provenances for many artworks by Dutch artists and has excellent search functionalities. 

What kind of information can be found about artworks that passed through California at one time or another in their history?

Below is a partial list:

DATASET MOMA Provenance Research Project (PRP) artworks

Dataset name: Enhanced MoMA PRP

Description: This enhanced Provenance dataset has been constructed from  information available on the public internet site of the Museum of Modern Art MoMA. It merges the list of artworks on the MoMa Provenance Research Project page with provenance texts published on the MoMA's detailed item pages. It is intended to facilitate research into Holocaust-era provenance for scholars, art historians and families. 



Original data sources that were merged to create new dataset:

• Moma.org Provenance Research Project (PRP)
• Provenance texts for each artwork on MoMa.org based on the url in the MoMA PRP Excel file 

Format: Google Sheet

URL: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vR2Xl_gm3I8l0uHhxklJW4aZNYwEV5reEa-7JbKdIk93Li0iqtm1OkWBUY_6KkCE3dOwiKFwtnds_jx/pubhtml

Download: CSV


Contents:
1. PRP Artworks with provenance 
(Artist,Title,Date,Medium,Dimensions,URL,Acc_Number,Department,Provenance,Publisher of Provenance,Author of Provenance)
2. About this file
3. Artists Count (pivot table with number of artworks by artists)
4. Department (pivot table with number of artworks by department)
5. Provenance text contains word "private" (pivot table with filter)
6. Provenance text contains name "Valentin" (pivot table with filter)
7. Provenance text contains the word "probably" (pivot table with filter)

Publisher: OAD

Date of Publication: October 31, 2019

Example of content: Provenance text contains word "private"

Selection of artworks listed on the MoMA Provenance Research Project that contain the word "private" in the provenance text published on the museum website 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vR2Xl_gm3I8l0uHhxklJW4aZNYwEV5reEa-7JbKdIk93Li0iqtm1OkWBUY_6KkCE3dOwiKFwtnds_jx/pubhtml

The Cailleux Project: Norton Simon Museum in Los Angeles, USA

The name "Cailleux" appears in the provenance of at least nine artworks in the Norton Simon Museum:

DATABASE: Download the Entartete Kunst inventory

"The V&A holds the only known copy of a complete inventory of 'Entartete Kunst' confiscated by the Nazi regime from public institutions in Germany, mostly during 1937 and 1938. The list of more than 16,000 artworks was produced by the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) in 1942 or thereabouts. It seems that the inventory was compiled as a final record, after the sales and disposals of the confiscated art had been completed in the summer of 1941. The inventory’s two typescript volumes provide crucial information about the provenance, exhibition history and fate of each artwork.

Download the Entartete Kunst inventory
(It's presented in two separate files:)

http://www.vam.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/240167/Entartete_Kunst_Vol1.pdf

http://www.vam.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/240168/Entartete_Kunst_Vol2.pdf

View a few pages from the Degenerate Art Inventory

***

see also:

Hermann Göring
http://wikidata.dbpedia.org/page/Q47906

Provenance online resources: Lost Art Internet Database Of Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste

The Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste has a large data base with a powerful search engine for cultural objects that were seized or stolen under the Nazis, most often from Jews.

http://www.lostart.de/Webs/EN/Datenbank/SucheSimpel.html

Provenance research: excellent data base at the Getty

To search Knoedler dealer records, the Getty provides a powerful tool.

Its online provenance research database contains more than 43,700 records transcribed from the 15 stock books of Goupil & Cie/Boussod, Valadon & Cie in Paris (1846–1919) as well as nearly 40,300 records transcribed from the 11 painting stock books of M. Knoedler & Co. in New York (1872–1970). 

http://piprod.getty.edu/starweb/stockbooks/servlet.starweb?path=stockbooks%2Fstockbooks.web


The Getty has made Sales Catalogs, Goupil and Knoedler files available for download as CSV on Github.

SALES CATALOGS: https://github.com/thegetty/provenance-index-csv/tree/master/sales_catalogs

GOUPIL : https://github.com/thegetty/provenance-index-csv/blob/master/goupil/goupil.csv

KNOEDLER:  https://github.com/thegetty/provenance-index-csv/tree/master/knoedler