Research into war-time provenance at the British
Museum
All departments in the British Museum have been carrying out
research into the provenance of their collections to establish
whether anything could have been stolen by the Nazis prior to
acquisition by the British Museum.
This has taken place in response to a government initiative to
take positive action towards this issue, following an
approach by Lord Janner of the Holocaust Educational Trust in
1997. All national and local museums within the UK have been urged
by the government to examine the issues surrounding the spoliation
of art during the Holocaust and World War II. Similar initiatives
have taken place in public museums across Europe, Canada and the
United States. See G. Bartrum, 'Research into war-time provenance
at the British Museum', British Museum Magazine,
no. 37, Summer 2000, pp. 13-15 for further details.
Action has been coordinated by the working group set up in June
1998 by the National Museum Directors' Conference (NMDC) which is
chaired by the director of the Tate, Sir Nicholas Serota. Results
of the research taking place in museums and galleries across the UK
can be seen on the government
Cultural Property Advice website which is updated
regularly.
This website shows lists provided by each institution, including
the British Museum, of items for which further information is
sought and the whereabouts of which are unknown for all or part of
the period 1933 - 1945. In such cases where it is known that an
object was forcibly acquired by the Nazis, every effort has been
made to ensure that the material was correctly restituted at the
end of World War II and that subsequent acquisitions were made with
good title. Such objects are also listed.
Special emphasis has been made on provenance research in the
Department of Prints and Drawings. This type of research is not at
all straightforward because art dealers do not routinely keep long
term records of all material that passes through their hands, and
it is common for the history of an object's ownership to be
incomplete. The extensive collection of prints has not been
subjected to systematic research because individual prints exist in
numerous identical impressions and are consequently impossible to
identify in almost every case. A long
list of old master drawings shows all continental drawings with
an uncertain or incomplete provenance for the 1933-1945
period.
Further details can be seen on the government
Cultural Property Advice website which provides full
information on research into spoliation being carried out in the
British Museum and other museums and galleries throughout the
United Kingdom.