Peer into the Past
While some collectors secure the services of an independent conservator or an art advisor who knows how to conduct provenance research, collectors themselves can initiate the process by consulting with specialists and asking questions. A skeptical buyer might consult with art historians, museum authorities, researchers and curators who are experts in the field or period in question. Their opinions might not provide definitive answers, but they can shed light on a particular genre or period that can provide clues about a work’s history.

TOP VIEW Countries around the world are tightening laws seeking to keep ancient cultural icons on their home soil—and punishing those they catch with expatriated treasures. Heirs of stolen or looted art are also actively stepping forward to claim what is legally theirs, often surprising unsuspecting collectors. Art devotees must pay careful attention to provenance to ensure the pieces in their collections come to them through legitimate means—and not as the spoils of war.

Some criteria fairly scream “potential problem.” Art that changed hands between 1933 and 1945, or antiquities purported to be from Iraq, Afghanistan, Italy or Greece, merit suspicion until we can prove their provenance. Art that was lost during the Nazi period raises particularly nettlesome issues and strong emotional reactions. Much of the loot—estimates run as high as one-fifth of all of Europe’s art treasures—was taken from the homes of Jewish and other collectors who perished in the Holocaust or who fled Europe with little evidence of ownership of these works to pass on to their heirs, many of whom were also dispersed.

One prominent New York collector, who spoke to Worth on the condition of anonymity, recalls that as far back as the 1960s, she and her husband had their eye on a painting by French fauvist artist Maurice de Vlaminck, but encountered too many unanswered questions about where it had been since World War II. They found a picture of the work in a book with a notation that it had been displayed in a German museum, and the museum director was unable to assure them of a clean history. They passed on the purchase.

In May 2004, Elizabeth Taylor filed suit in a Los Angeles court to gain legal permission to keep a van Gogh painting, View of the Asylum of Saint-Remy, after three heirs of the work’s original owner laid claim to it. They said the van Gogh, which Taylor’s father bought at a London auction in 1963 for $257,600, had been stolen from their great-grandmother by the Nazis. At press time, the case is still pending.

Disputes over Nazi-era art have led to strict due diligence regimes at auction houses. Lucian Smith, head of restitutions at Sotheby’s, says the company instituted Draconian measures in 1997 to “minimize the risk we might accidentally sell a work that had been displaced in the last war.” Sotheby’s effort involves examining catalogs and lists of missing works and Internet databases, as well as the work itself and the frame, customs stamps, exhibition labels or “anything to add to the story about where it might have been between 1933 and 1945,” Smith explains.

Such diligent research can also reward the collector. In 2004, a pair of large, rare bronzes by 18th-century Italian baroque artist Francesco Bertos arrived at Sotheby’s in London, without a provenance. Cautious curators researched the works and found a reference to them in a 1928 magazine as belonging to Vienna’s Baron Alphonse von Rothschild, a victim of Nazi looting. The family believed the bronzes had not been returned. But curators at the Austrian state archives in Vienna uncovered references to the bronzes in lists of confiscated Rothschild property that had been returned to the family, and subsequently sold in 1948. With a clean provenance in hand, Sotheby’s auctioned the bronzes for $648,200.