The last decade has seen increased public awareness about the return of stolen artwork in museum collections.

Hector Felician’s 1995 book The Lost Museum made wide-reaching accusations against the museum world, calling many collections and institutions into question. Feature stories in the Times and CBS’s 60 Minutes also questioned the presence of such looted objects in American museums.

In 1998, the Boston Globe ran a series of articles suggesting that major American art museums—including Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA)—held artwork illegally seized by the Nazis, and the MFA has subsequently given back several pieces from their collection.

The same year, member institutions of the Association of Art Museum Directors, including Harvard’s art museums, said they would fully examine the provenance of their collections.

Many objects seized by the Nazis were not by well-known artists, and very few have turned up in museums. Finding records of private sales is almost impossible, making the process of finding lost artwork painstakingly difficult for former owners.

Kianovsky says she tentatively expects the bulk of the Harvard’s research to wind down in ten years—but every new object the museums acquire will undergo thorough investigation.

“We’re always going to have to be more aware than people were in the past,” she says. “Nothing we can do can remedy what happened, but we can look and examine the objects in our care.”

—Staff writer Kristi L. Jobson can be reached at jobson@fas.harvard.edu.