Art Institute steps up efforts to learn the origins of everything in its collection

Knowing the ownership history of a painting, sculpture or other artwork — what is known in the museum world as provenance — has always been important in ascertaining who created it and having a fuller understanding of its context and meaning.

But in recent decades, intense new pressure on institutions to do a better job of sourcing their acquisitions and knowing how existing holdings came be in their collections has come from multiple sources.

They include families whose artworks were stolen or sold under duress to the Nazis in World War II. Countries in Asia or South America where objects were looted from archaeological sites and sold on the black market. Indigenous tribes that lost sacred objects generations ago.

“There is much broader awareness of these issues,” said James Rondeau, president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago. “There is much more intensive public scrutiny, and, obviously, there is more intensive legal scrutiny. But this work occupies not just the legal zones but the ethical and moral zones of ownership.”

To better confront such concerns and to simply know more about their collections, art museums are increasingly beefing up their provenance scholarship. In the case of the Art Institute of Chicago, that has meant enlarging what already was one of the largest provenance teams in the world.

In August, the museum announced the appointment of Jacques Schuhmacher as its first-ever executive director of provenance research. He formerly served as the senior provenance research curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which specializes in such areas as design and decorative arts.

“We’ve certainly upped our game,” Rondeau said, “but we have always been doing this work. We’ve come to understand that expectations around transparency are different today than they were X number of years ago. So, this has always been happening, but we’re just trying to make sure we have it as an essential part of our narrative.”

Schuhmacher takes over a four-year-old provenance staff that was recently enlarged to four members. He worked alone at the V&A, and the chance to tackle this research as part of a team was one of the big draws of the Chicago job.

“There are not many museums,” he said, “where you have a dedicated staff member for this work or any team. In many cases, this would be part of the work that a collections manager or a curator does in addition to their existing tasks.”

What also attracted Schuhmacher to the post was the backing of the museum’s top leadership. What is known as the provenance task force, a cross-departmental group that includes Sarah Guernsey, deputy director and senior vice president for curatorial affairs, meets every two weeks or so.

Schuhmacher’s hiring comes at a time when the museum has been embroiled in a legal dispute over the ownership of “Russian War Prisoner,” a 1916 watercolor by celebrated Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office has accused the museum of demonstrating “willful blindness” to evidence showing the work was snatched by the Nazis before World War II.

But in a court filing earlier this year, the Art Institute defended its purchase, saying prosecutors’ allegations were “factually unsupported and wrong.”

Some cynics might argue the Art Institute is merely beefing up its efforts around provenance as a way to bolster the defense of objects in its collection like “Russian War Prisoner” and more doggedly maintain ownership of them.

But Rondeau strongly pushed back on that narrative. He acknowledged the Art Institute has had to respond to new pressure and new legal directives, such as recently revamped regulations surrounding the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which was passed in 1990.

But he maintained the museum has been undertaking provenance research for decades.

“That’s our headline,” he said. “We’ve always been doing this work. We’ve listened and understood the drive for greater transparency around these issues, and we’ve intensified not only our resources but our messaging around this work.”

As an example of past efforts, the Art Institute pointed to Gustave Courbet’s landscape “The Rock of Hautepierre” (ca. 1869), which it purchased in 1967.

After earlier raising questions about the work’s provenance, the museum learned in 2012 of an heir of Max Silberberg, who owned the painting in the 1920s and was killed at Auschwitz. It reached out to her and officials were able to reach an agreement with the family to keep the work in the Art Institute collection.

More recently, the Art Institute announced in June it was proactively returning a fragment of a 12th-century architectural column to Thailand. The piece, decorated with sculptural reliefs, had been erroneously connected to Cambodia, but new research revealed it was actually part of the Phanom Rung temple in northeast Thailand.

Concerns around Nazi-era art holdings that improperly entered museum collections accelerated beginning in the 1990s, in part because of reporting by ARTnews magazine and other press outlets. The Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art was released in 1998 after a landmark conference attended by representatives of 44 countries.

While Schuhmacher acknowledged the museum has prioritized examinations of works from the 20th century and those originating in Asia, he emphasized his team is interested in the origins of all 300,000 objects in the museum’s collection.

“Irrespective of whether there are problems or perceived problems or not, it is vital that a museum has clarity about what it owns,” he said.

To that end, since Schuhmacher’s arrival, his team has already posted provenance summaries on the Art Institute’s website for 1,000 objects, including Henri Matisse’s 1939 painting, “Daisies,” which was donated to the museum in 1983. It was restituted to its original owner in 1945 after being confiscated by Nazi authorities and sold to a Chicago collector in 1952.

The Art Institute is not the only Chicago-area institution rethinking provenance. The University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, for example, has recently undertaken what it is calling a “provenance initiative,” receiving an initial planning grant of $100,000 from the Indianapolis-based Lilly Endowment.

In the summer of 2023, the museum learned of problems surrounding a centuries-old Asian painting in its collection. Despite purchasing it from a reputable New York dealer in the early 2000s, officials discovered the piece had been looted in the 1980s.

“We were very concerned about: Is the work authentic? And we didn’t pay enough attention to its history of ownership,” said Smart’s director, Vanja Malloy. “We felt that the stamp of approval from the place we were buying was sufficient when really we should have done due diligence.”

The painting, which is in the process of being returned to its country of origin, raised larger issues about best practices. “It made us start thinking about provenance not just in this narrow World War II area,” Malloy said, “but more holistically, especially thinking about objects with religious significance in our collection.”

In the end, Rondeau believes, people just want museums to act honorably and make sure they have rightful title to the objects in their collections.

“All we want to do is the right thing," he said. "We don’t want to be in breach of legal or moral standards ever. We’re desperate to do the right thing, and we’re trying to make that more evident than we did before.”