Museums and auction houses rarely mention that a name in a provenance of an artwork corresponds to a person who was robbed and murdered by the Nazis or a Jewish refugee fleeing to escape the Holocaust.
This Wikidata Sparql query displays a few of the art collector whose names are absolutely to be considered red flags in provenances because they either died in the Holocaust or were forced to flee to survive.
Wikidata query run 18 May 2024: Short link: https://w.wiki/A7pr
Jakob Goldschmidt (1882-1955) was one of the most important bankers of the Weimar Republic. Persecuted by the National Socialist regime, Goldschmidt fled Germany in the spring of 1933 and emigrated to the USA via Switzerland in 1936. His German citizenship was revoked in 1940 and his assets were confiscated the following year.
Goldschmidt's art collection was auctioned off on September 25, 1941 at the Hans W. Lange auction house in Berlin.
The Renoir painting Blick von Haut Cagnes aufs Meer (cat. no. 45) (View of the Sea from Haut Cagnes) was purchased by Hildegard Diehn, the wife of Wehrmacht officer Wilhelm Diehn. In 1960 the Renoir was at the Nathan Gallery in Zurich, where it was acquired by Prof. Gustav Stein from Cologne, a member of the Federation of German Industries. He passed the painting on to Fritz Berg, President of the South Westphalian Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Hagen in 1948 and the first BDI President from 1949. After the death of his widow, Hildegard Berg, the Berg art collection was transferred to the Osthaus Museum Hagen.
- source: press release from Osthaus Museum Hagen https://www.osthausmuseum.de/web/de/keom/presse/renoir2023.html
Dataset with Koutoulakis-linked items in the:
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The Minneapolis Institute of Art publishes provenances for some artworks but not for others.
Below is a list of selected artworks at Artsmia.
Provenances, where present, are from April 20, 2024)
Download Data in CSV for research
Art looting networks operate on many levels, many of them hidden, over long periods of time. The native graph function of Wikidata enhanced by federated queries can help track them.
April 9, 2022, Laurel Zuckerman
Graphs and Networks in the Humanities 2022 Technologies, Models, Analyses, and Visualizations
6th International Conference, 3. – 4. February 2022, Online
The 6th international conference on Graphs and Networks in the Humanities took place from Thursday 3. February to Friday 4. February 2022 online, co-organized by scholars from the Huygens Institute (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), the Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz, Vienna University, University of Leipzig, and the University Ca’ Foscari Venice
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