What is provenance research?

Where does an artwork come from? Was it legally acquired from its owners? These are the sort of questions that concern provenance research.

During the National Socialist era many Jewish artists, art dealers and private collectors were expropriated or forced to sell their property well below market value. Non-Jewish dealers, museums and galleries, as well as private persons often profited from this situation, and the Cologne museums were no exception.

In 1998, the Washington Declaration committed its 44 signatory nations to the task of identifying confiscated artworks and returning them to their rightful owners or to the owners’ descendants. In the wake of this agreement, Cologne’s municipal museums began to scrutinize their holdings – first and foremost the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, which already started in 2000 to investigate the provenance of paintings and sculptures acquired between 1933 and 1945. In 2007 the City of Cologne established a Provenance Research Office tasked with investigating the holdings of all the city’s museums.