Determining the provenance of purchases made by the modern art department in the 1950s and 1960s

In 2010, the Kunstpalast Museum in Düsseldorf began systematically examining its collection for possible Nazi-confiscated property as part of its provenance research activities. The two-year research project focused on the acquisitions for the modern art department in the 1950s and 1960s and on several works acquired earlier from the art market. Provenance researcher Dr. Katja Terlau of Cologne was commissioned to undertake the research.

In total, 154 works from the modern art holdings were examined. The aim was to document the origin of the works ideally from the date they were created up to the present day. All information obtained during the research into the masterpieces of a previously unknown and possibly questionable origin was captured in the Kunstpalast Museum (Düsseldorf) database created for the project which was funded by the Bureau for Provenance Research. This enabled a picture of the origin of the works to be created gradually and, at the same time, research gaps and future research paths to be identified. By the end of the project, all works requiring examination had been placed in different categories depending on how suspicious they were judged to be. Using this classification, it is now possible to make an assessment of the masterpieces from “completely lawful” or “clarified” to “suspicious origin”, particularly with regard to their whereabouts in the period 1933–1945. It should be noted that, of the 154 masterpieces that had provenance gaps or whose provenance was dubious, 60 objects were identified as “completely lawful” and 44 works as “generally lawful”. In 35 cases, the conclusive clarification of provenance was not possible on completion of the research; these gaps are indicated accordingly. Despite extensive investigations, nine works have been assessed as “generally unlawful” at this stage (2014) and must be kept under review.

(c) Kunstpalast Museum in Düsseldorf