“It’s really a circuitous route,” she says. “Dealer records are all over the place.”

The provenance project has taken Kianovsky to Paris, London, New York City and Washington, D.C., and she is currently planning a trip to Los Angeles.

Hot on the Trail

Scott R. Wilson ’03 aided Kianovsky in investigating many paintings last spring, examining the backs of the paintings for markings.

“We looked for custom stamps, inscriptions that indicated if a piece was from a certain gallery or country, German writing, anything that might indicate that the painting passed through Nazi hands,” he says. “The inscriptions are very difficult to see, even under UV light. They were written in pencil decades ago.”

Wilson says he was amazed by the enormity of the project.

“It’s a huge task, but loads of fun,” he says. “It’s amazing to find a tiny scribble and find out something about the painting.”

But recent government efforts have made Kianovsky’s job a bit easier.

Over a million records on stolen work kept by the Nazis were opened to the public in 1998, and are housed in the National Archives in Maryland. The American Association of Museums recently published a handbook for institutions to examine the legitimacy of their collections.

In addition to her duties at Harvard, Kianovsky also consults the staff of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project and the Commission for Art Recovery.

“It speeds things up for people looking for objects, confiscation records and claims records.” Kianovsky says. “The landscape of provenance has really changed.”

Kianovsky says she draws on years of experience as a researcher. She stresses the importance of networking and keeping close contact with colleagues, sharing records and location information.

She says former art museum director James Cuno, who left Harvard for London last December, initially pushed for the project and encouraged transparency even when Harvard had no specific claims to investigate.

“Jim really made it possible,” she says. “He gave me the freedom to do the work and pursue it in the way I needed to pursue it.”

Gaining Momentum