Thinking Provenance, Thinking Restitution

Almost three decades since the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, a new awareness of provenance research and practices of restitution has taken hold. This volume brings together voices from academia, museums and the art trade for a critical consideration of these developments, including essays that analyze restitution cases from a legal perspective in the UK, France and Germany, explore provenance as a form of knowledge and through its materiality, and question how international museums and the art market have dealt with provenance and restitution practices in Munich, Vienna, and London. The volume contributes to current debates about the theory and methods of provenance research, today seen as an expanded and multidisciplinary field at the intersection of law, history, anthropology and the art world.

• A critical look at provenance research and restitution
• Multidisciplinary approaches and methodology

Lucy Wasensteiner, Junior Professor of Art Historical Provenance Research in the Art History Department at the University of Bonn, working within the Research Centre for Provenance Research, Art and Cultural Property Law. She is a qualified UK solicitor and holds a Doctorate in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art. From 2018 to 2020 she was Lecturer at the University of Bonn. From 2020 to 2024 she was Director of the Liebermann-Villa am Wannsee in Berlin, a museum dedicated to the German-Jewish painter Max Liebermann, where she led a 30-month research project into provenance of the museum’s collection.

Mary-Ann Middelkoop, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge. From 2021 to 2024, she was a postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC/DFG-funded project ‘The Restitution of Knowledge: Artefacts as Archives in the (Post)colonial Museum, 1850–1939’ at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, and a Junior Research Fellow in History ofArt at St Peter’s College, Oxford. She holds a PhD in Modern European History from the University of Cambridge, and previously worked as a researcher at the Com-mission for Looted Art in Europe, London.