Museums Track Collections for Artwork Stolen by Nazi Party

All it takes is a tiny watermark or pencil scribble to send Sarah Kianovsky pouring over hundreds of files, calling art dealers or catching a plane to Europe.

Kianovsky, an assistant curator at the Fogg Art Museum, is heading up the effort by Harvard University Art Museums to conduct provenance research—tracking the whereabouts of a work of art over time—on pieces in their collections that may have been looted by Nazis during World War II.

The Nazi party conducted the largest art theft in history, Kianovsky says. Although many pieces were returned after the war, The New York Times estimated last week that about 100,000 works are still missing.

Harvard researchers are tracing the ownership of all museum artwork that may have been in Europe between 1933 and 1945. The artwork in question includes more than 500 paintings, 3,100 drawings and 120 modern art objects in the Fogg Art Museum and 750 objects in the Busch-Reisinger Museum.

Kianovsky says art from certain locations and collectors raises red flags.

“Certain dealers who were known to deal in looted art, problematic museum collections and paintings sold in Austria and Germany after 1948 are our main clues,” she says. “It has to do with knowing the progress of the war and the people involved.”

To date, nobody has claimed ownership of any work in Harvard’s museum collections, but Kianovsky stresses the importance of “proactive” research.

“Rather than wait for claims, we decided to take the broader view and look at the history of our objects,” she says.

Elementary, My Dear Watson

Every painting in the museums’ collections has a file recording all of its known owners, every collection in which the piece has been featured, scholarly commentary and a copy of every article and book in which the piece has appeared. Thorough provenance research requires examination of sales records and auctions, exhibition history and the artwork itself, according to Kianovsky.

“It’s really, really slow,” she says. “So many bits and pieces to put together.”

Kianovsky says she began to suspect the authenticity of one painting after noticing a label that resembled the markings of the Kohner collection, a Budapest dealer who sold illegally obtained artwork. Many of Kianovsky’s colleagues at other museums had noticed similar labels in their collections.

After examining the historical whereabouts of the painting, Kianovsky says she thought it might have been stolen from French collector Alphonse Kahn, who lost over 2,000 pieces during the Nazi occupation.

Kianovsky says she wrote to the Kahn family, who gave her access to the family’s archives in Paris. But she found no indication in their files that the piece had been stolen.

Finally, after contacting an American colleague, Kianovsky found a 1947 receipt recording the painting’s shipment to the United States—proof that the painting came back into the hands of the Kahn family after the war.

“It’s really a circuitous route,” she says. “Dealer records are all over the place.”

The provenance project has taken Kianovsky to Paris, London, New York City and Washington, D.C., and she is currently planning a trip to Los Angeles.

Hot on the Trail

Scott R. Wilson ’03 aided Kianovsky in investigating many paintings last spring, examining the backs of the paintings for markings.

“We looked for custom stamps, inscriptions that indicated if a piece was from a certain gallery or country, German writing, anything that might indicate that the painting passed through Nazi hands,” he says. “The inscriptions are very difficult to see, even under UV light. They were written in pencil decades ago.”

Wilson says he was amazed by the enormity of the project.

“It’s a huge task, but loads of fun,” he says. “It’s amazing to find a tiny scribble and find out something about the painting.”

But recent government efforts have made Kianovsky’s job a bit easier.

Over a million records on stolen work kept by the Nazis were opened to the public in 1998, and are housed in the National Archives in Maryland. The American Association of Museums recently published a handbook for institutions to examine the legitimacy of their collections.

In addition to her duties at Harvard, Kianovsky also consults the staff of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project and the Commission for Art Recovery.

“It speeds things up for people looking for objects, confiscation records and claims records.” Kianovsky says. “The landscape of provenance has really changed.”

Kianovsky says she draws on years of experience as a researcher. She stresses the importance of networking and keeping close contact with colleagues, sharing records and location information.

She says former art museum director James Cuno, who left Harvard for London last December, initially pushed for the project and encouraged transparency even when Harvard had no specific claims to investigate.

“Jim really made it possible,” she says. “He gave me the freedom to do the work and pursue it in the way I needed to pursue it.”

Gaining Momentum

The last decade has seen increased public awareness about the return of stolen artwork in museum collections.

Hector Felician’s 1995 book The Lost Museum made wide-reaching accusations against the museum world, calling many collections and institutions into question. Feature stories in the Times and CBS’s 60 Minutes also questioned the presence of such looted objects in American museums.

In 1998, the Boston Globe ran a series of articles suggesting that major American art museums—including Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA)—held artwork illegally seized by the Nazis, and the MFA has subsequently given back several pieces from their collection.

The same year, member institutions of the Association of Art Museum Directors, including Harvard’s art museums, said they would fully examine the provenance of their collections.

Many objects seized by the Nazis were not by well-known artists, and very few have turned up in museums. Finding records of private sales is almost impossible, making the process of finding lost artwork painstakingly difficult for former owners.

Kianovsky says she tentatively expects the bulk of the Harvard’s research to wind down in ten years—but every new object the museums acquire will undergo thorough investigation.

“We’re always going to have to be more aware than people were in the past,” she says. “Nothing we can do can remedy what happened, but we can look and examine the objects in our care.”

—Staff writer Kristi L. Jobson can be reached at jobson@fas.harvard.edu.