From the Director

UMMA’s Nazi-era Provenance Project

This article first appeared in the September–October 2007 issue of Insight, the Museum’s bimonthly magazine.

Over the last ten years, American museums have increasingly recognized their responsibility to identify and then publicly disclose objects in their collections that may have been unlawfully confiscated by the Nazis during World War II. In 2000, the American Association of Museums (AAM), the Association of Art Museum Directors, and the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States agreed upon recommended procedures for identifying Nazi-era objects in museum collections.

Convinced of its leadership role in ethical matters, UMMA has been in the forefront of Nazi-era research and recovery compliance nationwide. It is especially incumbent upon us as a university and as a public institution to hold ourselves to the highest professional and ethical standards. With the aging of the Holocaust survivors, it is particularly urgent that we confront this issue before all living memory is gone. The Museum of Art’s Nazi-era provenance project is one very direct way to help restitute, as transparently as possible, any ill-begotten works in our collections.

From September 2004 through August 2007, thanks to the support of former UM Provost Paul Courant and former UM Vice President and General Counsel Marvin Krislov, and my own conviction that this needed to be comprehensively and urgently addressed, UMMA undertook to research its collections, and to act as agent for a number of other campus collections to determine whether any objects potentially tainted during the Nazi era might have found their way to the University of Michigan.

Per AAM recommendations, UMMA provenance researcher Bay Warren began by identifying objects in UMMA’s collections that were created before 1946 and acquired after 1932, that were or might reasonably have been in continental Europe between those dates, and that might have changed hands between 1933 and 1945. Any works that matched these parameters-“covered works”-and whose provenance cannot be clearly determined to be “clean” are posted to the AAM Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal, an internet registry for people searching for lost objects and museums that may hold them. Posting to the Provenance Portal is by no means a marker that a work is tainted, but aids in full disclosure and further investigation.

At my urging, the University began its larger provenance project with the Museum of Art’s holdings, as these likely offered the greatest combination of potential risk and highest market value. Ultimately, UMMA’s Nazi-era provenance project also undertook a review of collections held by the Clements Library, Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, Museum of Anthropology, and Special Collections Library.

To mark the formal conclusion of the Museum’s Nazi-era provenance project, I will present the project’s most significant findings in a program on October 25 that will also feature a conversation with Lynn Nicholas, author of The Rape of Europa, as this year’s Doris Sloan Memorial Lecture in late October. In addition, UMMA will screen the award-winning new documentary of the same name based on Ms. Nicholas’s book.

James Christen Steward
Director

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