Provenances for Modern Art at the AIC (selected artists)

Provenances published by the Art Institute of Chicago for artists persecuted as "degenerate" by the Nazis

(data from November 2024)

Analysing provenance gaps with CHATGPT4O

Can LLM Chatbots automate the analysis of provenance texts in order to detect potentially problematic provenances for the Nazi-era?

In this post we ask ChatGPT4O to "help us to look for gaps in the provenance (Provenance)?"

Revisiting restitution claims in the news: 2014 Egon Schiele watercolor Tote Stadt III (1911)

2014

 'The Leopold Museum, which holds the piece in its collection, has vehemently defended against the accusations. It maintains that a provenance investigation conducted jointly with the Austrian Culture Ministry in 2010 proved that the painting was sold after the end of World War II by Mathilde Lukacs, Grünbaum’s sister in law, to the Swiss art dealer Eberhard W. Kornfeld. Provenance researcher Dr. Sonja Niederacher subsequently concluded that there was no case for restitution. To further deter the Grünbaums, the Vienna institution has now gone on the offensive, stating that it “reserves the right to take legal action” against the heirs if they continue to claim that they are the rightful owners of Tote Stadt III. '

- "Leopold Museum Defends Against Restitution Claims" by Henri Neuendorf  date: November 5, 2014, ArtNet 

Nazi seized "degenerate" art in collection of Oberlin Allen Memorial Art Museum

The Allen Memorial Art Museum makes no secret of the fact that a Kirchner in its collection, Self Portrait as a Solder, once hung in a German museum.

 https://allenartcollection.oberlin.edu/objects/3758/selfportrait-as-a-soldier

The same painting can be found in the "Entartete Kunst" database published by the Free University of Berlin.

http://emuseum.campus.fu-berlin.de/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=117555&viewType=detailView

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:

• Artillerymen in the Shower (Kirchner) which had been owned by Alfred Flechtheim and which had been given a false provenance, restituted after litigation by the Guggenheim which had acquired it from the MoMA
• Over Vitebsk (Chagall) which (also) had been owned by Alfred Flechtheim and which also had been given a false provenance, restituted secretly by the MoMa to the Matthiesen heirs in exchange for a $4 million payment, after initially refusing restitution on the grounds that repayment of a debt and not Nazis had been involved ("MoMA, in its records on its website, said the gallery had turned over the Chagall painting to a major German bank in 1934 “in exchange for debt"- NYT)
• Sand Hills (Kirchner) which had been owned by Max Fischer and which had been given (sigh) a false provenance, restituted by the MoMa after the museum had initially refused mistakenly confusing the painting with another that had been seized from a German museum due to a sequence of errors

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

For more on Kurt Feldhäusser see:

Kurt Feldhäusser or Weyhe in provenance of artworks in American museums

Alfred Flechtheim: Das Soldatenbad by Kirchner

Part II: Tracking the Munich connections, ideas from ChatGPT

In "The Munich Connection" we listed artworks that American museums published on the Nazi Era Provenance Internet Portal whose provenance contained the word "Munich".

How to go from there to a map of the WWII and postwar art dealing networks? There is a lot of data and it is held in different places for different purposes. How not to get lost in it all? 

In this day of LLMs, it seemed reasonable to see if ChatGPT had any advice.

Prompt:

You are an art detective. You know the names of ten dealers based in Munich who were guilty of trading in Nazi looted art. What you’d like to find out is the names of the intermediaries they used postwar to launder looted artworks and sell them to American museums. You can obtain provenance from museums, from looted art databases and from restitution cases. You have access to a knowledge graph that can tell you who people are. Please suggest a plan.