“I was searching the internet and I was putting in words until it finally came up. That is how I found it. I don’t live in New York. I don’t go to the Metropolitan Museum. I am not an art historian. I am just a normal person.”
That is what Laurel Zuckerman said to indianexpress.com over a video interaction about how she was able to find an artwork that her great-granduncle and aunt sold as they escaped anti-semitic persecution in Germany and Italy.
Among the many heinous crimes committed by the Nazis during the third reich was the systematic plunder of art from across Europe. By some estimates, nearly one-fifth of the art in Europe at the time was looted by the Nazis.
During the second world war, nearly 600,000 paintings were looted from Jewish people. Even though the war ended in 1945, it was only in 1998 that 44 countries came together in Washington to set some principles to return these artworks to the descendants of the rightful owner. More than two decades after the resolution, hundreds of thousands of paintings remain lost, according to reports.
One of the reasons for this is that locating and identifying these artworks that were either looted by Nazis or sold under duress by Jews escaping the third reich is quite difficult. Often, curators and art historians sidestep mentions of the war in the “provenance” of artwork.
Provenance refers to the ownership history of an artwork starting from when it was created to how it arrived at the museum where it is being displayed. For artwork that “changed hands” between 1933 and 1945, these provenances are quite often inaccurate. Some people are resorting to digital tools to root out such false provenances.
Zuckerman is the great-grandniece of German-Jewish art collectors Alice and Paul Leffmann. As Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, the Leffmanns fled the country in 1937 to go to Italy. In 1938, they sold The Actor, a Picasso painting in their possession, to an art dealer. According to Zuckerman, this was to fund an escape from Italy, which saw a rise in anti-semitic persecution under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini.
A picture of The Actor in the living room of the Leffmans in Cologne, Germany, published in DekorativeKunst in 1921. (Image credit: Digitale Sammlungen)
The Actor is currently in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, famous for the Met Gala. Zuckerman said that she discovered the artwork in The Met’s collection in 2004, a few years after the museum launched its redesigned website, offering access to its collection online.
Initially, she did not know the name of the painting and only had a vague idea of what it looked like. But this was shortly after the time when the Met Museum began publishing provenances of artworks that changed hands between 1933 and 1945. After “searching for various keywords and trying to look for it,” Zuckerman finally stumbled upon the painting in the Met’s collection.
Since then, Zuckerman has unsuccessfully sued for the artwork to be restituted to the legal heirs of the Leffman estate in US courts. Even though her attempt at restitution was unsuccessful, this ordeal got Zuckerman interested in uncovering false provenance of artworks.
“It took a dozen years to debunk these false provenances. They had one layer after another after another. And many of the authors of these provenances were well-known, distinguished people,” Zuckerman explained over the video interaction.
Zuckerman then began to wonder how widespread this phenomenon was. After looking into it, she found, in her own words, “it was the rule rather than the exception” for artwork that changed hands between 1933 and 1945. “False provenances and artwork that changed hands during the period go hand in hand. It is practically a marker,” she said.
When it comes to The Actor, Zuckerman asserts that “none of the provenance details were correct.” She explains, “from the time that my great uncle sold the painting in 1938, there was not a single provenance published that was true. They were false in some different way or another.”
According to her, one author, who was a very respected art dealer, simply removed his name from the provenance and replaced it with the name of an art dealer who had never owned the painting. Another author changed the date of sale. To piece together the actual history of the artwork and its ownership, she embarked on a journey which involved her contacting her long-lost relatives who were spread across the world.
While investigating the story of The Actor, Zuckerman understood the scale of the Nazi-looted art problem, and also grew an interest in using digital tools to uncover such art.
Laurel Zuckerman, pictured here, is the great grandniece of German-Jewish art collectors. (Image credit: Laurel Zuckerman)
“I realised that you had all these different stories being told about the same artwork, and practically it was as if people were trying out stories to see what would stick because they weren’t all the same. They were like trying different stories. And then gradually, one story was more adopted than the others,” explained Zuckerman.
She then realised that maybe the authors of these false provenances and details might have a modus operandi. If they falsified the records of a particular artwork in one way, there is a chance that they could have done the same to another story.
In order to be able to identify these patterns, Zuckerman enrolled herself in an investigative journalism course and also attended conferences on the same to educate herself about the various tools she could use to find such patterns.
She initially began by using the now defunct Google Fusion Tables to visualise the data and find patterns in it. Eventually, she began to use a whole host of advanced tools and techniques like document analysis software, statistical computing languages, and knowledge graphs for her work.
On May 11, Zuckerman is going to be speaking at the Knowledge Graph Conference about extracting insights from errors in the data of artworks. Why errors?
“It’s just like at a crime scene in detective stories where the criminal erases his fingerprints from the glass and other objects to cover up the crime. What detectives do is they follow the efforts to cover up. Since initial evidence has been erased, whatever remains is the evidence of the cover-up,” explained Zuckerman.
Zuckerman believes that the errors in the provenance data of Nazi-looted artworks hold patterns that could give clues for uncovering more such artworks that were either looted or sold under duress during the second world war.
With the advanced digital tools available today, it is much easier to sift through vast collections of data to understand the connection between these “errors” in the provenance of artworks. Once that is done, it will be easier to identify other artworks whose provenances have been tampered with.
But there is only so much you can do while sitting on a computer and working on data. Identifying the artworks that “changed hands” is one thing. But after that comes the long bureaucratic process of actually returning them to the people who are now the lawful owners.
That work requires an entire parallel ecosystem of art historians, lawyers and activists working day and night to ensure that these artworks find their way to their rightful place.
A man looks at the Picasso painting 'The Actor" at the Met Museum. (Image credit: Laurel Zuckerman) 
A picture of The Actor in the living room of the Leffmans in Cologne, Germany, published in DekorativeKunst in 1921. (Image credit: Digitale Sammlungen)
Laurel Zuckerman, pictured here, is the great grandniece of German-Jewish art collectors. (Image credit: Laurel Zuckerman)
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