Getty Puts List of Paintings With Nazi-Era Gaps on Web

As part of a worldwide effort to identify works of art that may have been looted by the Nazis during World War II, the J. Paul Getty Museum has posted on the Internet a list of the paintings in its collection that have gaps in ownership records--or provenance--in the years between 1933 and 1945, the duration of the Nazi Party’s stay in power.

The list, which has been compiled following Assn. of Art Museum Directors guidelines and in cooperation with the Commission for Art Recovery of the World Jewish Congress and the Art Loss Register, also details the provenance of paintings in the Getty collection known to have been confiscated during the Nazi era, then returned to their original owners and at some later point entered into the art market.

Of the museum’s 425 paintings, more than half, approximately 250, are listed as having provenance gaps during the war years. The number isn’t surprising because so much of the collection was acquired by oil baron J.P. Getty during that period. The list includes paintings by Courbet, Rubens, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne and Corot.

According to Getty spokeswoman Lori Starr, the list was put together in part to aid potential claimants in tracking down artworks. But, she cautioned, most gaps in provenance do not indicate theft. Particularly during wartime, ownership records may be lost, hidden or destroyed for any number of reasons, including the preferred anonymity of previous owners or simply poor record-keeping.

So far, the Getty list only includes paintings, but the museum plans additional postings of information on sculpture, decorative arts and other types of work as that research is completed.

With the posting, the Getty Museum joins New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art and other major metropolitan museums in offering specific information on provenance gaps that occurred during the Nazi regime.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art plans to post on the Web in early September a similar list of the paintings in its collection with provenance gaps; other local museums are also in the process of assessing their holdings according to the Assn. of Art Museum Directors guidelines.

The effort to better document the provenance of artworks that changed hands during the war began in 1998 when, responding to increased media attention to charges that stolen works had never been returned, lawsuits by original owners and their heirs, and several books focusing on the topic, the association issued its guidelines.

Much of the provenance information provided in the Getty list already was accessible through the Getty Research Center’s Provenance Index, a widely used resource launched in 1982 that contains continually updated information on the Getty’s holdings and works in other museums that voluntarily provide provenance information to the center. The new list, however, assembles all the works from the Getty collection with provenance gaps for easy access by the general public.

The list can be found by going to the Getty’s main Web page (https://www.getty.edu) and clicking on the category “Getty Museum Provenance Research (1933-45).” Along with photos and provenance data on individual paintings, the Web pages include information on how to interpret the data, as well as other online sources of such information worldwide.