Showing posts with label colonial art restitution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label colonial art restitution. Show all posts

Dec 27, 2019

Nazi-era Provenance Gaps and Digital Analytics: A Stunning Lack of Progress

As 2019 draws to a close, one is astonished at how little digital analysis has been published concerning artworks that changed hands during the Nazi era and still have provenance gaps today.


Powerful digital tools exist. Yet they are not used by the Nazi-era art provenance research community. 

  • There is no "dashboard".
  • No "at-a-glance" executive summary that tells us how the different museums and institutions around the world are advancing in their provenance research projects related to the persecution of the Jews during the Nazi era. 
  • No "Transparency/Opacity Index" to identify institutions that do and do not publish provenance
  • No executive management tool (with goals, tasks, resources, action items and persons responsible) for ensuring that provenance information is publicly available, much less accurate.  
  • No single database that brings together provenances that have already been published publicly. 
  • No world map that compares the pre-1932 location of Jewish-owned artworks and their current location today.
  • No digital network analysis of the art dealers, collectors, institutions, publishers, and experts who collectively managed to shift artworks once owned by Jewish collectors in Europe to other hands.
  • No database of fake provenances, (and authors of fake provenances), even though "errors" in provenance texts correlate significantly with illicit transactions that a person or persons has tried concealed
  • No attempt at pattern detection in the provenance texts, though tools for regression analysis and even AI are becoming mainstream

Here we are in the digital age, but only the tiniest fraction of the power of the digital tools available has been applied to the problem of the Nazi-era art market. 


The task is massive, as everyone knows. Each individual artwork can take years to research. Archives are missing, hidden, destroyed, manipulated. Access is hard to obtain. Partial. But even amid all these obstacles, there is plenty that can be done in using digital tools to gain insights from the research that already exists. 



Let 2020 be the watershed year in the use of advanced digital tools to track, expose and analyse Nazi-era art provenance gaps.


Perhaps the recent interest in the cultural heritage of colonial era transfers from Africa, Asia and other lands will infuse new energy  and more advanced digital methodologies into provenance research.

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image credit:
Font Awesome by Dave Gandy - https://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons