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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Coming to an Internet portal near you: Art treasures seized by Hitler's minions in World War II.
Oct 16, 2002 | When the Nazis pillaged tens of thousands of artworks from museums and private collectors in occupied countries during World War II, they didn't just take the loot, they took notes.
The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, a major S.S. art-plundering organization, documented their haul on 5-by-8 index cards, meticulously describing each work. A typical ERR index card might include the name of the piece, its dimensions, the artist, scholarly notes on the significance of the work, and where and from whom it was stolen, says Sarah Kianovsky, assistant curator at Harvard University Art Museums.
"One of the terrible things about the Nazis is that they kept these extensive records about what they had taken," says Derrick Cartwright, director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. "It was so systematic that there is this archival legacy."
That chilling legacy is now finding its way online, at sites like the National Archives and Records Administration. The goal is to provide new access to the history of ownership, known as "provenance," of some of the millions of art objects and cultural artifacts stolen during Nazi looting.
No one knows how many of the items are still at large. Museum curators still pore through these Nazi records, auction catalogs and bills of sale, as well as the documentation of Gestapo treasure-troves compiled by Allied forces, in an ongoing attempt to reconstruct the paths works of art took before they landed in their collections.
American museums now think that the Web can help in their attempt to uncover the Nazi loot that may still be hanging on their walls. In September 2002, the American Association of Museums received a $240,000 grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Sciences for the creation of a Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal: a registry of objects in American museums of questionable ownership.
According to one theory, the U.S. Defense Department funded the early Internet because it hoped a distributed network would help protect American computer systems in case of some future nuclear attack. Now that network is being deployed to investigate the unsolved war crimes of World War II. Rather than protecting military secrets from a future threat, it's being used to help unravel a more than 50-year-old art theft mystery. The Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal isn't the first online attempt to address the question of artworks stolen by the Nazis. The German government already maintains a Lost Art Internet Database, where museums can register questionable objects for claimants to search. More than a dozen U.S. museums also have made information about objects in their collections, which have gaps in their histories of ownership, available online.
But the Provenance Portal aims at consolidation. "We're hoping to provide one central point where the descendant of a Holocaust victim could go," says Edward Able, the president of the American Association of Museums, who compares the task of finding a stolen artwork to "looking for a needle in a haystack."
"This is an effort to centralize the process," he says.
The Provenance Internet Portal aims to take advantage of the Internet's primary function: distributing information.
"It's so much like genealogical research," says Derin Basden, manager of the Provenance Index at the Getty Research Institute. "You have to dig and find records, and both sciences are really expanding because of the Internet."
For many museums, art provenance during the Nazi era has taken on new urgency in recent years. Since the reunification of Germany and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, thousands of new records have become available to scholars. Now that more than 55 years have passed since the end of the war, many documents in American archives have become newly declassified. The new primary source material and a number of well-publicized scandals in the late '90s, involving the Art Institute of Chicago, the Seattle Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in which Nazi-looted art was found in American collections, galvanized museum curators to try to ferret out possible contraband before a family seeking restitution comes along.
