Archives of American Art Launches Portal of WWII Era Provenance Research Collect
In 2012 the Archives of American Art received a grant from the Kress Foundation to support a major project to preserve, process, and create Web-searchable online finding aids for eleven collections that are valuable archival resources for World War II Era art provenance research. That project was building on the success of the earlier Kress supported digitization of the Jacques Seligmann & Co. records. These newly-processed and digitized collections are now accessible via the WWII Era Art Provenance portal section of the AAA website, and are merely a sample of the types of materials, paths of research, and archival collections among the Archives’ holdings that will prove indispensable for World War II era art provenance research. While each collection is different, both in content and types of records, they are often related to one another and complement the official records found in the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and in repositories across Europe, as well as other significant holdings of gallery records, such as those found at the Getty Research Institute and the National Gallery of Art Archives.
The available collections include: the records of five prominent galleries and dealers, the personal papers of nine of the Monuments Men and nearly a dozen oral histories.