Provenances. Wayfaring Art

About this exhibition “Works of art go wayfaring. That has always been their destiny and will never change.” So began a description of provenance research by the Berlin- based art critic Adolph Donath (1876–1937) back in 1925. Its task – to ascertain the previous history of cultural objects, even extremely old ones – was taken for granted in his day. Anyone who bought art wanted to know what paths it had travelled in the past. If a work came from a “reputable collection”, its value was enhanced and so was the prestige of its subsequent owners. After the Second World War, the significance of provenance data waned. Countless collections built by Germans with Jewish roots had been broken up between 1933 and 1945, and their owners had been robbed, driven out or murdered. Those now in possession of objects confiscated or extracted under duress were wary of questions about their origin. Not until the late 1990s was the role of provenance revisited. After governments signed up to international agreements based on the Washington Principles, museums and art dealers began to explore whether works had been looted from Jewish victims of the Nazi regime. Since then, there has been a well-established moral obligation to investigate the journeys of artworks made before 1945. More recently, this has been joined by provenance research into objects from colonial contexts and other situations where injustice prevailed. Researchers in many fields are now working to uncover details of provenance that have been forgotten or cloaked in silence. The outcomes are often open-ended., for where can traces still be found of changes in ownership that happened many decades ago? Only one thing is certain when the quest begins: every work goes wayfaring, and knowing the story of its journey broadens our perception of the art. This exhibition picks up on an earlier event financed by the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung CORONA-funding line which was only open to the public for a few days before the coronavirus pandemic struck in 2020 and 2021. #provenancesBG