Object History Sleuths: Meet a Provenance Researcher

Have you ever wondered how works of art make it into museums? How do we learn what happens to an object between the time it’s made and when it might be put on display? I spoke with Dr. Joanna M. Gohmann, object historian and provenance researcher at the National Museum of Asian Art, to find out what kind of work goes into unearthing and documenting the lives of objects. We talked about her professional background, the tools she uses to dig into the lives of historical figures, and the evolution of the field of provenance research at the Smithsonian and beyond. If this topic interests you, dive into our blog series Unseen Art History for spotlights on individual object histories from NMAA’s collections.

All interview questions are indicated in bold.

HG: For any readers who aren’t already familiar, can you briefly define provenance for us? What is it and why does it matter?

JMG: Provenance, in its most basic form, means “to come from.” When we’re referring to the provenance of an object, we’re talking about where it came from, where it’s been, who has owned it, and for how long and why. And we’re looking into basically the transmission history of an object over its lifetime. Sometimes, people describe provenance history as “the object history” or “an object’s biography” or “an object’s life.”

The most obvious reason to care about provenance is, whoever is doing the buying or selling of the object, you want to make sure that you have proper title—that means that nobody else owns it—before purchasing it. But also, provenance is very important to make sure that you know how a work of art left its place of origin and ensure that it did so legally and ethically. The process of researching the provenance of an object uncovers exciting, dynamic histories and reveals the more intimate relationships between people and works of art. So, through this research, one learns about what works of art meant for specific individuals during specific points in time and can appreciate the long history of a work of art even outside of its moment of creation.

And, you know, provenance is not just about researching the history of fine art; all objects have a provenance story. You can do your own provenance research on objects that are important to you, and probably a lot of people already have! Think of those really special heirlooms you have in your own home and the ways in which you track and understand the histories of how or why they have come to you. This is something that really does touch a lot of people’s lives. It’s not just isolated to the museum field. Maybe we use a fancy term to describe what we’re doing, but it’s not as alien as one might think it is.

 

Are there any particular objects you’ve worked on that you found were really surprising or had particularly exciting histories?

Well, there are lots. But I don’t just research things object by object. I really look into where they came from as a larger guiding post. For example, I might look at works that came to the museum through one specific dealer and research the history of that dealer’s business structure and how they received works of art.

Something that I’ve worked on quite a bit are Chinese art objects that came through J. T. Tai, a really important dealer of Chinese art in the mid-twentieth century who was based in New York City. He had supplied another dealer, C. T. Loo, who was an internationally influential dealer of Chinese art in the first half of the twentieth century, with a lot of his inventory coming directly from China. Exploring the relationship between these two dealers has uncovered a deeper history of objects in our collections. I have tapped into generations of dealers and have identified the ways in which they worked together to influence the market, or the ways museums were responding to their sales techniques. One particular object that I looked at through this perspective was an ancient Chinese incense burner that J. T. Tai supplied to C. T. Loo, who ultimately sold the piece to the museum. We’re able to chart its journey from China, knowing these two sources, on its itinerary through time.

 

When you’re first researching the provenance of something, where do you even start?

It’s different for every object, but most of the time I start with whoever gifted or sold the object to the museum. I dive into that individual or business as deep as I can—learning absolutely everything possible about that entity. For example, I explore where they traveled, where they spent a lot of their time, who they spent time with, who they bought things from, and who they received gifts from. I often turn to Ancestry.com to uncover these details, especially travel histories, as the database shares travel manifests that the US government made public after a certain number of years in restricted archives. Through these documents, I can identify where different employees from a business were traveling to and see where different collectors spent a lot of their time. Through that material, I begin tracing people’s lives and then locate the objects within the overall structure of a person’s biography.

I also look at a lot of newspapers, searching through databases for advertisements of relevant exhibitions and displays and identifying time periods and places in which specific types of objects were being sold. Nineteenth-century newspapers routinely included “society pages,” and those are a fascinating resource. There are lists of individuals who attended certain parties, gallery openings, and even auctions. Those pages also include notes about who bought what work of art and for what price. Auction catalogs, of course, are another resource. When I can’t find our specific objects, I look to other museums’ provenance records and see where comparable objects came from. I gather a lot of data, which allows me to identify patterns that suggest who were frequent vendors or donors and the types of objects acquired at different moments. Using this dataset, I then connect the dots with the collections at NMAA.

 

That is quite a wide range of sleuthing skills! How does one become a provenance researcher? What was your path to your current job?

You become a provenance researcher by being really interested in other people’s lives. You’re usually pretty good at snooping.

 

Like the gossip of the object world!

Exactly. My academic specialty is actually in eighteenth-century European French art. Something that captivated me in my graduate studies was how objects continued to be relevant beyond the time they were commissioned, and when it came time for a job, the work of provenance really came naturally to me. It tickled that part of my brain that’s interested in how people ascribe their own meaning to things over the course of their lives, and then the subsequent person who has that object might assign something entirely different.

I first got into this work while doing research into objects that were looted and displaced by the Nazis. That is actually what brought me to the National Museum of Asian Art: researching Chinese antiquities and Chinese decorative arts that circulated in Europe during World War II. Since my arrival at the museum, the provenance program at NMAA has expanded beyond that period, and it now explores many of the other activities that drive the translocation of Asian art, including colonial occupations. The Provenance Program is really approaching this research more holistically, documenting all our objects.

 

Is that shift reflective of how the field of provenance research as a whole has developed in recent years?

Well, provenance research is not new. People have always been driven by the obsession or interest to own things that famous people owned, and provenance has long been one of the things that helps authenticate a work of art and date it back to its original moment of creation. But in 1998, provenance research became a more strategic, organized, and professionalized practice. The Washington Conference on Holocaust Era Assets issued a group of eleven principles to guide the international research community working on Holocaust-era provenance issues. Forty-four governments and thirteen NGOs agreed to intensely support and focus on this research. Since 1998, provenance research has become about more than authenticating a work of art or identifying famous owners in an object’s past. It’s also become very goal-oriented in identifying and filling gaps in knowledge. The tactics and methods cultivated by researching Holocaust-era assets are now also used to document the histories of works acquired under colonial duress or through punitive expeditions.

 

Do you have anything you want to share about the role of our museum or of the Smithsonian in the development of this field?

The National Museum of Asian Art is definitely a leader in this field. In 2002, our museum had a claim for an ancient Chinese gui that a dealer sold under questionable circumstances during the rise of the Nazi regime. NMAA worked with the claimant to find a solution; the museum repurchased the work from the claimants and the ancient bronze remains in the collections. That exchange truly served as the foundation for our museum’s provenance program and propelled us into action. This claim really brought attention to the fact that art of all kinds—not just “Old Master Paintings”—was impacted by the horror of Nazi rule and World War II. NMAA helped focus researchers and offered strategies for researching Asian art during the war.

One of the first things the museum did was write a guideline publication about how to research and share research findings, which has served as a launching point and an example for many museums—in fact, before I came here, that was my go-to document for preparing provenance information! Our museum is also one of the first to hire a permanent staff person (which happens to be me!) who is entirely dedicated to conducting this research. Typically, this job is folded into the daily work of a curator, sometimes the collections manager, but this is very specialized work that takes a lot of time and a lot of focus, so it’s quite a smart move to have an individual dedicated exclusively to it.

Recently, I was the National Museum of Asian Art’s representative on the working group that advised the central Smithsonian offices on a policy for ethical returns and shared stewardship. The policy is based on the idea that all Smithsonian units can make returns for ethical reasons in addition to just legal ones, which was our prior regulation. What that’s really pinpointing is that if any exchanges, acquisitions, purchases, or sales in an object’s past were done in an unethical manner—for example, if the power relationship was completely unequal, or if the object was taken by force in a time of war or was looted, or if it is presumed stolen but not documented in a legal sense—now Smithsonian units have the ability to reconsider that object’s place in their collections. Provenance research is really at the heart of that policy because discoveries made in doing this type of work reveal the context around those transactions.

 

In what other ways is provenance information typically used or displayed in museums?

You can find provenance information on object labels throughout our galleries and in our online collections records. It really helps the museum to maintain transparency with visitors, but it also shares stories that make these objects come alive in a different way. These stories help visitors envision how people lived with works of art. The works in the galleries become more than static art objects.

 

How has doing provenance research influenced your understanding of a specific work of art or just the purpose of art in general?

Provenance research reminds me that, after an artist makes a work of art, their intention does not always matter: the viewer brings their own experience to encountering a work, and that experience is equally as valid as what the artist intended. And it reminds me that objects have way longer lives than we will ever have, and they will witness more history than we ever will. I think it’s a rather humbling job to uncover an object’s massive journey across time and space. It really reminds me of my own humanity and the fleetingness of life.

 

That is a very huge concept to try and wrap your head around. Can you give us a glimpse of what a day in the life of a provenance researcher looks like?

Every day is different. Most days, I am looking into groups of objects and delving into biographies of individuals who owned them, or collected them, or unearthed them from the ground, and digging into the context in which these happen. It’s a lot of quiet study and reading, trying to understand how objects were present in specific contexts across history. I also teach a course on provenance research at George Washington University, so I’m always meeting with students and talking with them about their own research projects. One of my favorite things about my job is that I lead collaborative initiatives with other museums, such as the Museum für Asiatische Kunst in Berlin. We’ve collaborated with them to host a series of webinars highlighting different individuals who are active in the network of trade of Asian art, and we’re working on next steps in bringing the community of provenance researchers together. This type of research cannot happen in isolation. Successful provenance research depends on an interconnected community of researchers who can ask questions and share information. So, honestly, I spend a lot of my day texting fellow researchers, sending a lot of emails, and exchanging research discoveries. It’s the perfect job for a nerdy extrovert—somebody who really likes sitting in the archives, doing a lot of deep research, AND who loves to connect with others!

What would you say are the biggest challenges of working in provenance research?

There’s a lot of nuance. I will never master all of it. I mean, provenance goes from the moment a work of art is created until today and beyond. I’m not a specialist in, you know, the Edo period of Japan—that’s not my wheelhouse—but I have to have familiarity with that history so I can appropriately understand the objects I see. But I’m also interested in documenting what Edo-period folding screens meant in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to both the people of Japan and beyond. It’s a lot of history and a lot of space and time to have proficiency in, so I’m always learning. The second I get comfortable, I know something’s wrong, that I need to start researching more and learning more about a particular circumstance.

 

How would you like to see the field of provenance research grow or evolve?

I would like there to be more training for the next generation to delve into this work. It’s entirely different from traditional art historical research, which is really grounded in explicit facts and the visual and what’s in front of you. With provenance, you do a lot of reliance on secondary sources and suppositions, “so if this is true, that must be true” conclusions, and so it’s a different mindset. If future generations have sustained training and sustained practice in doing this work, we will be much more effective and efficient in solving a lot of provenance questions. I’d also like to see provenance research become integrated into museum practices more holistically.

 

Are there any frustrating mysteries you just haven’t been able to unravel yet?

Right now I’m researching all of the South Asian works in the Henri Vever Collection. These are Indian paintings Vever collected en masse, and he annotated many of them. There are several paintings that have these cutouts from auction catalogs and newspapers glued onto the backs of mattings that I’m trying to identify. It’s quite challenging to identify the cutouts’ origins, so I find myself spending a lot of time developing a list of every auction of South Asian paintings that happened from 1900 to 1920 in Paris, where Vever lived, checking every single auction catalog, hoping to find the source of those clippings. This sometimes keeps me up at night!

 

I’m picturing you in front of a board with the red string and the pins . . .

Well, that is what my office looks like. [laughs] But I also have really messy lists where I cross off everyone I’ve checked on. It is important to both keep track of where I have and have not found helpful information and document where I have not found something. But figuring out these auctions haunts my dreams; if I’m bored and I sit down at a computer and start searching a little too late at night, I will be up all night long. It’s an addictive hunt.

 

You have to get comfortable going down the rabbit hole, I imagine.

Yeah. But there are several works where I’ve been able to match the cutout pasted onto the frame to an actual auction catalog, and it’s incredibly satisfying when that happens because then it opens another door. I can then push a date of an object further back in time and connect it to a different owner, and then another hunt opens up in trying to figure out where that person got it from. So, it’s never-ending.

 

You know, as you’re talking about this trail of connections, it reminds me of that old Carmen Sandiego computer game . . .

“Where to, gumshoe?” I love that game!

 

While we’re talking pop culture, is every provenance researcher required to have a hot take on Indiana Jones? If so, what’s yours?

I like the hat a lot, and I own one myself! [laughs] I mean, look, he looted—he took things without asking. I think he’s a very bad example of how to acquire works of art.

 

Fair enough. One of these days you’ll have to show me the hat!