Where is she from? Who made them? How old is she? I sometimes ask myself these questions when I look at the simply beautiful turquoise ceramic vase that my mother left me. On the other hand, when my heirs stand in front of a colorful flowering collage with a Delft vase, they do not understand how this painting came to me, how I discovered it this spring at an exhibition in Winterthur and how the Riconian artist Maia Roncoroni (56 years old) delivered personally. You don’t know until you do your research and stumble upon this text. Then you know the origin, in English: origin.
“Research on origins is on the rise,” writes the German art historian Christoph Zuschlag (58) in his recently published book. “But will it be so in 20, 50 or 100 years? I mean yes!” However, the boom and relevance were caused not by works of art from private households, but by collections of state museums, primarily from Switzerland: the Kunsthaus Zurich with an ambiguous painting by Monet from the estate of Dieter Bührle (1890–1956) and the Art Museum Bern with a gift Cornelius Gurlitt (1932-2014).
“Currently, origin research is mainly practiced in connection with so-called contexts of injustice,” writes Zuschlag. In Switzerland, the question is how some works belonging to Jews ended up in the collections of Bührle and Gurlitt; in France, Germany and the UK, museums must answer how legally they acquired cultural property from their former colonies. “The dispute is the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin,” writes Zuschlag. Excavated in 1912 by the German Society for the East, Egypt restored the bust for the first time in 1925, most recently in 2011.
Excavation is one of many possible ways in which cultural property can change hands and places. Other possibilities are trade, the art market, or inheritance, as well as war, robbery, and theft. Zushlag: “Napoleon and Hitler are two particularly serious examples of how military conflicts often go hand in hand with state-organized art theft.” From antiquity until the 19th century, it was considered the privilege of the conqueror to destroy, rob and plunder the property of the vanquished.
This is where provenance research comes into play to show the often confusing paths that works of art take and to show where legal and illegal ownership has changed. “The study of the origin usually begins with a thorough opening of the object itself,” Zuschlag writes. This is followed by studies of people using archives, specialized literature and Internet sources. A true detective story that often remains unfinished. Addendum: “It is important that gaps in chains of origin are clearly labeled as such.”
Christoph Zuschlag, “Introduction to the study of origin – how the origin of cultural property is deciphered”, CH Beck