Provenances

About this Event

“Works of art go wayfaring. That has always been their destiny and will never change.” That was how the art critic Adolph Donath described provenance research in 1925. Today it has become an integral part of museum practice. It investigates chains of ownership and contexts where injustice occurs in the history of cultural objects. In museums with holdings of modernist art, this primarily means paintings, sculptures or drawings that were stolen or extracted under duress from Jewish victims of National Socialism between 1933 and 1945.