German Lost Art Foundation approves approx. €2 million for 20 provenance research projects

In the first ap­pli­ca­tion round of 2019 (dead­line: Jan­uary 1) the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion’s Ex­ec­u­tive Board ap­proved 20 ap­pli­ca­tions from mu­se­ums, aca­dem­ic in­sti­tu­tions, archives and one pri­vate in­di­vid­u­al. In do­ing so, it has fol­lowed the cor­re­spond­ing rec­om­men­da­tions of the Foun­da­tion’s Fund­ing Com­mit­tee on Nazi-Con­fis­cat­ed Art, and has pro­vid­ed fund­ing of around €2 mil­lion in 2019 so far to sup­port lo­cal­ly based search­es for cul­tur­al goods seized as a re­sult of Nazi per­se­cu­tion.

For the first time, a pri­vate­ly fund­ed sci­en­tif­ic and tech­ni­cal mu­se­um—Stiftung Deutsches Op­tis­ches Mu­se­um Je­na—is de­vot­ing it­self to re­search­ing its col­lec­tion for Nazi-con­fis­cat­ed prop­er­ty. Archives re­lat­ing to the art trade are of great in­ter­est for prove­nance re­search, but are of­ten not ac­ces­si­ble. But now, with the open­ing up of the Hauswedell & Nolte com­pa­ny archive, the trans­ac­tion da­ta of a lead­ing auc­tion house deal­ing in books, au­to­graph manuscripts and art will be avail­able for re­search pur­pos­es in the fu­ture through the Zen­tralarchiv für deutsche und in­ter­na­tionale Kun­st­mark­t­forschung e.V. (Cen­tral Archive for Ger­man and In­ter­na­tion­al Art Mar­ket Re­search—ZADIK).With the projects un­der­tak­en at the Kun­sthis­torisches In­sti­tut at the Freie Uni­ver­sität Berlin (FU Berlin) and the Porzel­lansamm­lung (Porce­lain Col­lec­tion) at the Staatliche Kun­st­samm­lun­gen Dres­den (SKD), pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions are once again work­ing with the de­scen­dants of vic­tims of Nazi per­se­cu­tion, like they had pre­vi­ous­ly as part of the “Mosse” project. This col­lab­o­ra­tion will take the form of joint­ly planned projects aimed at re­con­struct­ing the col­lec­tions of two promi­nent Jew­ish en­trepreneurs and art col­lec­tors (Abra­ham Adels­berg­er and Gus­tav von Klem­per­er).

“All the projects men­tioned serve as bea­cons and are tremen­dous­ly im­por­tant for prove­nance re­search. I am al­so pleased with the con­sis­tent­ly high num­ber of ap­pli­ca­tions, which clear­ly shows that in­ter­est in ex­plor­ing the ori­gins of cul­tur­al ob­jects is not wa­ver­ing,” said Gilbert Lupfer from the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion’s Ex­ec­u­tive Board.

An overview of all the projects ap­proved in this ap­pli­ca­tion round is avail­able in the an­nex.

Since the Fed­er­al and state gov­ern­ments be­gan sup­port­ing prove­nance re­search projects in 2008, the in­sti­tu­tions fund­ed to date have re­ceived around €29.81 mil­lion. A to­tal of 312 projects (218 long-term and 94 short-term) have been im­ple­ment­ed at these in­sti­tu­tions.Since Jan­uary, the Foun­da­tion has al­so of­fered fund­ing for projects fo­cused on find­ing heirs. The pur­pose of this fund­ing is to help iden­ti­fy heirs to ob­jects from col­lec­tions that have al­ready been the sub­ject of prove­nance re­search, and thus con­tribute to reach­ing a just and fair so­lu­tion in line with the Wash­ing­ton Prin­ci­ples of 1998 and the Joint Dec­la­ra­tion of 1999.