MINNEAPOLIS – The painting, by a lesser-known 17th-century Dutch artist, was pleasant enough: a view of a Roman market square around 1660, people going about their business.
But it was the back of “The Piazza del Popolo, Rome” that really interested Erika Holmquist-Wahl, a curatorial assistant at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. That’s where she spotted a telltale number that suggested the piece had been looted by the Nazis.
“Every painting has a story to tell,” Holmquist-Wahl said. “Sometimes, it’s just on the back.”
The arts institute’s possession of the painting wasn’t in question; the museum could trace it back to the original owners, the Rothschild family of Vienna. But Holmquist-Wahl’s subsequent legwork helped fill in the gaps of the painting’s history, including how it was hidden away in an Austrian salt mine while in the Nazis’ grasp.
Museums around the world have researchers such as Holmquist-Wahl to study the provenance – or history of ownership – of their collections. It’s a major issue in the art world, including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where ownership of at least two pieces has been called into question in recent years.
Holmquist specializes in paintings, and one of her recent major projects has been determining whether any in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts collection might have been in continental Europe during the Nazi era. It was part of an initiative by many museums nationwide to help pick up the trail of art looted by the Nazis and make the data available to everyone by way of a searchable registry on the Internet.
Holmquist-Wahl typically looks at seals, inventory numbers and other markings on the back of a canvas or frame, as well as old auction and dealer catalogs, dealer correspondence and other records, to pick up the scent.
For the painting seized from the Rothschilds, which was by 17th-century Dutch artist Johannes Lingelbach, Holmquist-Wahl traveled to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., to review confiscated Nazi paperwork.
The papers helped her establish that the painting had indeed been seized by the Nazis in 1938, and that it was one of many works from the Rothschild collection that the Nazis had stashed for safekeeping during World War II in the salt mines at Alt Aussee in Austria. They were destined for a museum the Nazis planned to build in Linz, Austria, to rival the Louvre in Paris.
But the papers also showed that the painting was part of the trove recovered there by the Allies, who returned it to Baroness Clarice de Rothschild after the war. She later sold it to a dealer, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts bought it in 1960.
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