To Recover Artworks Looted by the Nazis, Researchers Are Getting Creative, With New Strategies Including an A.I. Chatbot and a Campaign of ‘Wanted’ Posters
University researchers hope their new artificial intelligence chatbot makes provenance research easier and more accessible
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Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi Party seized and forced the sale of an estimated 650,000 artworks from private and public collections across Europe. These plundered pieces comprised roughly 20 percent of all art on the continent at the time. Though many have since been recovered, thousands are still missing or have yet to be returned to their original institutions or the families of their rightful owners.
Now, as momentum builds in both the United States and Europe to account for these stolen artworks, cutting-edge technology may be a useful investigative tool.
The latest strategy, by a trio of researchers at Santa Clara University in California, comes in the form of an A.I. chatbot called the AI Provenance Assistant that aims to streamline the process of tracing the ownership and location history of works of art, making it easier to identify and repatriate Nazi-looted pieces.
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There’s no one source of information about these artworks. Records are spread across databases that use different languages, spellings and filing systems. This makes researching any one piece difficult and time-consuming.
The chatbot, described by its creators as a “data docent,” is designed to scour these many databases in response to simple queries and return useful information.
“The A.I. tool makes it so that anyone can write a question in natural, human language, and it will automatically translate it to the code,” Haibing Lu, an analytics professor and co-creator of the tool, tells Santa Clara University’s Deborah Lohse. “Our goal wasn’t to replace provenance researchers,” Lu tells Art News’ Vittoria Benzine. “It was to make decades of complex archival records much easier to explore through natural conversation.”
Did you know? Different taste
One reason the Nazis confiscated art was to hide away works they considered “degenerate,” including modern French and German art exploring Cubism, Expressionism and Impressionism.The tool explores one of the largest databases dedicated to Nazi-looted art, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg project, which covers some 40,000 artworks that Nazis once processed through the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris. Even within this single collection, records are not standardized.
“We spent quite a bit of time trying to identify an appropriate database to use,” Michael Santoro, a management professor at Santa Clara University and the chatbot’s co-creator, tells the Jewish News of Northern California’s Cayla Labgold-Carroll. “We didn’t understand that even within any database, and particularly in the kinds of pieces of art that we’re talking about, the information is going to be quite possibly incomplete or flawed, sometimes on purpose.”
University of California at Berkeley law professor and attorney Carla Shapreau, who was not involved in the creation of the chatbot, says she is optimistic about the tool but cautions users to verify its accuracy.
“I think that it would be essential that the database link to digital scans of primary resources, so researchers can go straight to the historical records to confirm the evidence,” Shapreau tells the Jewish News of Northern California.
Meanwhile, other institutions are turning to different creative methods for tracking down missing loot.
The Musée d’Orsay launched a new permanent exhibition—titled “Who Owns These Works?”—showcasing a rotating selection from its orphaned trove of 225 artworks. Officials hope that displaying the paintings publicly will generate leads about where they rightfully belong.
South of Paris, the Musée d’Orléans is applying its resources to find stolen artworks with a campaign of wild west-style “wanted” posters featuring some of the more prominent missing paintings.
“To date, 424 paintings are still missing, and with everyone’s vigilance, they will one day find their way back to the museum to which they were donated for everyone to enjoy,” a statement from the museum reads.
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