Neue Galerie's Online Provenance Prototype: Worth the Wait?

Scott Gutterman, deputy director of the Neue Galerie, New York, told me last week that the long wait for the Neue Galerie's public posting of its Nazi-era provenance research was partly due to its desire to do it right: "We will create a provenance website above and beyond other websites," he promised.

But the uncorrected draft version, seen by clicking a link made privately available to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, indicates that the provenance information to be provided on the Neue Galerie's website, now expected to be launched by Sept. 1, may be more fragmentary than revelatory. This is a particularly disappointing performance for an institution created and guided by a professed advocate of provenance research and Nazi-loot restitution, its president Ronald Lauder.

Gutterman sent me the internal web link, with the proviso that it not be posted on CultureGrrl. (The link I have given you above is for the material about the Neue Galerie posted publicly on the Claims Conference website, which does not include the provenance for individual works.)

What I saw in the draft version was a list of clickable provenance for individual works, but no dates as to when the works were possessed or sold by any of the previous owners. Due to this omission of dates, any gaps in ownership history, during or immediately after the Nazi era, are indiscernible.

Clicking the name of a previous owner brings up only a list of other works from the Neue Galerie's collection that had also been in the same private collection, gallery or auction house. Clicking an auction-house name yields no information about the date of sale. And clicking on "Browse by Artist" produces a list inanely alphabetized by artists' first names. (i.e., "Schiele" is under "E" for "Egon.")

Gutterman mentioned to me that provenance research, while not yet online, is regularly published in the institution's exhibition catalogues.

When asked if ownership history would also be posted for the works from the Serge Sabarsky Collection and from Lauder's personal collection, which together constitute approximately 90 percent of the Neue Galerie's art, Gutterman indicated that was an eventual goal. But the first priority, he said, was to post information about the approximately 160 works owned by the Neue Galerie itself.

All told, it's too little, too late.