ART PROVENANCE
Provenance is the ownership paper trail of an object. A work of art’s provenance is a crucial part of its history and is taken into consideration by museums, auction houses, and private collectors during a sale or donation. Due to the unreliable movement of art during WWII, works of art with wartime histories often have murky provenance. Provenance research for this era relies on archival documents such as receipts of sale, inventories, and even personal letters, which can reveal information about the work of art or object in question.
ART CRIME RESEARCH
The study of the illicit movement and dealing of art when paintings and objects are used as means of amassing power, used as bargaining chips, and seen as social capital. My personal research of art crime is focused on WWII and the intentional looting of artworks and objects of cultural value. My goal is to identify key pieces from this era and establish a solid provenance using archival material and other methods to reveal hidden data patterns.
Computational Approaches to Art Crime Research:
Network Analysis and the Case of Ante Topić Mimara
My Master’s thesis on provenance data visualization using Mimara’s 1949 theft as a case study. Focused on the 56 paintings he stole from the Munich Central Collecting Point, I present the use of social and object network analyses to trace the geographic, ownership, and transactional histories of each painting with the goal of revealing hidden patterns in the historical data otherwise unseen.