On Criminal Misdeeds
Works of art are easily taken, concealed and sold. It's not safe to assume that your's is completely pure. The Art Loss Register will conduct a search (for a charge) to determine if your treasure might have something sordid in its past. ArtLoss have offices in New York, Berlin, and London, and their services are inexpensive.
Their website provides a wealth of information about the various forms of art larceny. The primary means of identification of stolen art is simply looking at auction catalogues, which accounts for fifty-one percent of such identifications. Paintings are the items most often recovered. According to Art Loss Register, only one percent of the loot recovered is sculpture. The vast majority (fifty-four percent) of art thefts come from private homes, while museums account for twelve percent, and galleries another twelve percent.
World War II-era questions
If your work of art is European, and was created or traded hands during the early 1930s to the late 1940s, you would be wise to check one of the databases devoted to art from that era. Try the Nazi-era Provenance website, which encompasses mainly paintings from most museums in the United States. The Museum of Modern Art's Provenance website concentrates on modern and some post-modern fine art.
In England there are multiple sources of information on Nazi-era art. The War Office records at the British Library is a good resource. The National Art Library holds material of the British Committee on the Preservation and Restitution of Works of Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and at National Archives in Surrey, you'll find records of the Control Commission for Germany, British Element.
There's a large (and burgeoning) body of literature on the special problems of Nazi-era art; here are three of the best introductory books:
Akinsha, Konstantin. Beautiful Loot: The Soviet Plunder of Europe's Art Treasures (New York: 1995).
Feliciano, Hector. The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art (New York: 1977).
Nicholas, Lynn H. The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York: 1994).
Next: More hunting and gathering on the web.
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From your Guide: Nadine Granoff, professional art researcher, locates artistic needles in prestigious Haystacks otherwise known as the Library of Congress, Archives of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art Library in Washington, D.C. She's been happily doing so for the past ten years. She may be reached at her email address.
