This session will address aspects of provenance research on cultural property from different angles. The first presentation will detail research methods and findings on displaced monographs within Canadian cultural institutions, while the second presentation will provide an overview of an undertaking at the Getty Research Institute to increase access to digitized art auction catalogs. Themes of the session will include examining the availability of primary and secondary sources for provenance research, creative collaborations with librarians, archivists, and researchers both within and across institutions, as well as the challenges of reconciling dispersed physical materials and varying metadata on digital surrogates. In exploring the process of enhancing access to primary art history sources and through an exemplar of tracing the history of looted books, the session aims to inform and support research into the provenance of cultural objects.
Moderator: Sally McKay
Nazi Looted Cultural Property in Canadian Educational InstitutionsThis presentation will provide current research on the occurrence of World War II displaced (Nazi looted) artwork and books in Canadian museums, art galleries, academic libraries and archives through collaboration with key scholars and institutions such as the World Jewish Restitution Organization and the Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives. This research, initiated during COVID, included locating seminal archival files, documents such as the "Holocaust-Era Judaica and Jewish Cultural Property: A World-Wide Review" and analyzing Canada's best practice guidelines for "Holocaust-era Provenance Research in Art Museums and Galleries." Through examining historical information, library/artefact databases and contacting Judaica librarians and archivists in Canadian cultural institutions, this research will provide recommendations for conducting provenance research of specialized or displaced collections in general.
Speaker: Karen Halliday
Cross-Departmental Collaboration: Enhancing Research Capabilities on Art Auction CatalogsThis joint presentation will illustrate a recent collaboration between two long term projects, the Getty Provenance Index and the Getty Research Portal, which involved aligning these previously separate platforms at our institution in order to better support provenance research. The GPI provides transcriptions of the contents of documents related to the history of art, including rare annotated copies of auction catalogs, and enhances these by providing authority control for artist, buyer, and seller names. The Portal is a free online search platform that provides access to digitized texts on art, architecture, material culture, and related fields—including several thousand auction catalogs. This presentation will detail how the collaboration sought to correlate digitized auction catalogs available through the Portal with entries in the GPI. In the current environment where access to libraries and archives has been significantly reduced due to the pandemic, availability of such digital surrogates has taken on renewed importance.
Speakers: Annie Rana and Eric Hormell
