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  • The Provenance Detective
  • Emily Ding (bio)
Keywords

provenance, ownership, art, London, Victoria & Albert Museum, curator, World War II, Jewish, Nazis, Anne Frank


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Clock, circa 1890

Makers: Elias Kreitmayer & Matthias Walbaum

Silver and gilded silver, ebonised wood, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ivory, glass


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Unlike other museum curators who wrestle with provenance issues as part of their overall duties, Jacques Schuhmacher, a thirty-seven-year-old German historian employed by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, dedicates himself wholly to the matter of provenance. He is trained in the history of war crimes, not art.

His appointment represents one more step in an ongoing quest that intensified with the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust Era Assets, which Schuhmacher describes as having had a "tectonic" impact on museum practices. Previous attempts to restitute Nazi-looted art hadn't gone far enough, and a large number of stolen objects continued to circulate on the international market. But efforts became easier as American cultural interest in the Holocaust grew—with the release of Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl and the Eichmann trials of 1961—and as archives opened up across Eastern Europe after the Iron Curtain's fall. The passage of time also helped victims and their families to begin processing their trauma and reclaiming what was stolen from them. Today, when acquiring art, the expectation is for museums to obtain an unbroken chain of provenance whenever possible.

Of the approximately 1,200 items in the Gilbert Collection—an assemblage of European decorative arts donated by the late Arthur and Rosalinde Gilbert—Schuhmacher has identified eighty-five objects with gaps in their ownership. "It could be an object that was auctioned in Germany in the 1930s, or was in the possession of a Jewish collector before the Nazis seized power," he says. None of the items has been restituted, however, due in part to how the procedure works. Schuhmacher doesn't decide what happens to an object with troubling provenance. A recommendation—to restitute, compensate, or publicly acknowledge—is made to museums by a UK governmental panel, which only deliberates when a victim's descendants make a claim on an object in a public collection.

"That gives me a lot of freedom because I don't have to think about what it all means for the collection," Schuhmacher says. He can focus on his research and help the V&A communicate it to the public. Whereas provenance was once seen as an administrative detail, it's now something museums can tell visitors about, through publications and exhibitions, before the full picture is clear.

For him, the gaps are the story. [End Page 11]

Emily Ding
@emilydingwrites London, UK
Emily Ding

Emily Ding's work has been published in Mekong Review, Slate, Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Public Radio International, Al Jazeera, and South China Morning Post.

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