GERMAN SALES - a new dimension of transparency
Press release from 10/25/2019
Kunstbibliothek der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, Heidelberg University Library and Getty Research Institute put 9000 historical auction catalogues online - a benefit for provenance research and art market research
Around 9,000 catalogues published between 1901 and 1945 by more than 390 auction houses in Germany, Austria and Switzerland have been fully recorded, digitised and indexed since 2010 in two projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Sub-project 1 (funded by the DFG, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Volkswagen Foundation) covered the years 1930-1945 and sub-project 2 the catalogues from 1901-1929, making these indispensable source resources for provenance and art market research available open access for the first time. The total of around 650000 pages can be searched in full text across all catalogues. To date, the digitised auction catalogues have already been accessed 10.6 million times.
The German-speaking auction market, with its centres in Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna and Zurich, became one of the world's most expansive art markets at the beginning of the 20th century. The auctioning of numerous private collections, the activities of museum directors and curators in the art trade, the Great Depression and the art thefts and expropriations of the Nazi state characterise its eventful and complex history. German Sales" makes it possible to identify and reconstruct the object biographies, protagonists and locations of this history with unprecedented clarity. The bibliography for the second part of the project, which has now been completed, contains a list of all catalogues and linked indexes of the auctioned collections, the auction houses and the authors of the introductions, including important art historians such as Wilhelm von Bode, Max J. Friedländer, Julius Meier-Graefe and Otto von Falke, who provide new insights into the auction market and its protagonists. The bibliography is enriched by a first quantitative analysis of the collected data with regard to the German-speaking auction market from 1901 to 1929.
Exemplary transatlantic co-operation
The Kunstbibliothek der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, the Heidelberg University Library and the Getty Research Institute Los Angeles have joined forces to realise this extensive digitisation and indexing project.
The auction catalogues were initially collected from a wide variety of libraries: around 2600 come from the Berlin Art Library and around 2380 from the Heidelberg University Library. The remaining 4000 or so catalogues can be found in a further 58 libraries and museums. This time-consuming research work was carried out by researchers at the Kunstbibliothek der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, who also compiled the two bibliographies of the catalogues. At Heidelberg University Library, the catalogues were scanned and saved as searchable OCR files. Finally, the individual catalogue entries for paintings, drawings and sculptures were prepared for the Getty Provenance Index and entered there. A particularly practical feature for the user is that each data record in the Getty Provenance Index is permanently linked to the corresponding digital copy on the Heidelberg website.