2018 marks the 20th anniversary of American museums’ establishment of the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, a set of principles that have been greatly influential in the work of art historians, curators, provenance experts, heirs, and other researchers investigating the provenances of art potentially misappropriated by the Nazis.
The talk is held in connection with the German/American Provenance Research Exchange Program (PREP) for Museum Professionals, 2017–2019, which brings together German and American experts who specialize in World War II-era provenance projects for long-term, face-to-face scholarly exchange to facilitate provenance research pertaining to Holocaust-era art looting. The talk is the public culmination of a week-long international convening at the Getty Research Institute.
“The Getty Research Institute has major archival holdings, which are substantial for provenance research of stolen artworks during the Nazi period. And, with our German colleagues, we have completed the digitizing of sales catalogues of this period, transferring this vast material into the Getty Provenance Index,” said Thomas W. Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute. “Because of the GRI’s engagement in this field we are a partner of PREP, an important initiative to progress and intensify provenance research about the events in this dark period.”
Support
Major PREP support comes from the German Program for Transatlantic Encounters, financed by the European Recovery Program through Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, and its Commissioner for Culture and the Media, with additional support from the Smithsonian Women’s Committee, James P. Hayes, Suzanne and Norman Cohn, and Ferdinand-Möller-Stiftung, Berlin.