Provenance Research
What is provenance and why do we care about it? Provenance is the ownership history of an art object. It provides us with important information about the particular work, as well as contributes to scholarship regarding the artist, genre, patronage, and taste. Historically, knowledge of an object’s provenance can also affect its value. More importantly, researching an object’s provenance is essential to ethical and legal collecting.
Four years ago, the museum began systematically reviewing and researching the permanent collection in accordance with the guidelines established by the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and the Association of Art Museums (AAM) to determine whether any object may have been unlawfully taken by the Nazi regime and never restituted.
View the list of European paintings in our collection that have an incomplete provenance and may have been located in continental Europe during the period 1933 to 1945. Our review of the sculpture collection is presently ongoing.