Project description

The modern art market is attracting more and more attention within art historical research. Whereas until a few years ago the focus of interest was primarily on collectors and dealers whose activities were examined in monographs, essays, and exhibitions, systematic basic research on the art trade and its mechanisms in art and cultural history has long since come into focus. This shortcoming is particularly regrettable for provenance research, whose work is made especially difficult by the disparate source situation. However, research on the modern art market is not only of interest from an art historical perspective, but above all for provenance research. For example, the history of many works can be traced back even further through evidence of their existence in 19th century collections.

With the topics of art theft, expropriation, confiscation, or forced sale, it moves above all to the center of the art policy of the 1930s and early 1940s. At the 1998 Washington Conference, museums made a broad international commitment to examine their collections for works of art that had been confiscated by the Nazis and not yet restituted to their rightful owners. In order to comply with these requirements, provenance researchers in individual museums examine the origin of these artworks object by object. Very often, the same literature and sources have to be researched and consulted. Auction catalogues are a central source. In them, the artworks are often described in detail and past provenances are recorded. Before the start of digitization activities and thus also before the establishment of "German Sales", there was no possibility of viewing these catalogues centrally: Worldwide, not a single institution systematically collected these important sources. In the major libraries and museums, moreover, the cataloguing of the holdings was carried out according to quite different standards of documentation. Provenance researchers, librarians and archivists, as well as scholars from various disciplines dealing with the art and cultural policies of National Socialism therefore urgently needed an authoritative, publicly accessible and conveniently searchable database that would process all auction catalogues and the information generated from them according to a consistent system.

The digital offerings brought together under "German Sales" now look back on a longer history. The starting point was a cooperation project between Heidelberg University Library, the Art Library of the National Museums in Berlin, and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, which began in 2010. Further sub-projects have followed up to the present day.

On the one hand, the period covered (originally only the years 1930-1945) has been expanded to include all catalogues published until 1949 (in some exceptions even beyond, as far as the copyright situation allows). On the other hand, the digitization of auction catalogues is no longer limited to the secondary market, but the online provision of gallery, stock, and antiquarian catalogues also makes information from the primary market available for provenance research as well as for other art, cultural, and economic history research contexts.

The focus on catalogues published in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland has been maintained so far, but enriched by German-language copies published in other countries, and by those published during the German occupation in France and the Netherlands. But even otherwise, "German Sales" is actually on the way to "European Sales", as digitized catalogues from other European countries are also repeatedly integrated into the research.