Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a new ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.
Provenance research is a cornerstone of museum practices driven by a responsibility to research the objects in its collection and to share this knowledge with its audience. Tracing an object’s history can unlock the details and histories of single collectors or even provide better understanding of entire civilizations.
Until recently, however, provenance research has often been overlooked by the general public. But a wave of high profile restitution and repatriation cases at institutions around the world in recent years have garnered the field quite a bit of attention. Many institutions added additional resources and even entirely new teams to aid in their provance research, as ARTnews reported last year.
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The Art Institute of Chicago is one such museum, having established a dedicated in-house provenance research team in 2020. Last August, Jacques Schuhmacher accepted a position as the head of that team. Previously, he worked as the senior provenance research curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London, where he first investigated the Nazi-era provenance of the museum’s Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection.
ARTnews caught up with Schuhmacher to talk about the ins and outs of his new role.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.
ARTnews: What drew you to the executive director of provenance research position at AIC? How have you been adjusting to the role?
Jacques Schuhmacher: The main reason why I found the Art Institute interesting was that there was a team that was already in place of four researchers who work on provenance full time. This is one of the largest provenance research teams in the country. In my previous role at the V&A, I was on my own. Of course, a lot of colleagues helped me with my research, but I really wanted to be part of a team where I could come to the office in the morning, where everybody is working in the same exact field, and we could have conversations about our research projects.
I also knew that a lot of research has happened at the Art Institute over the course of the past few decades. When I first visited Chicago, it was terribly cold—nothing prepared me for that—but I was really drawn to the collection because it’s so broad and diverse. To have the same breadth in London, for instance, you would have to go to the V&A, the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Tate Modern, and the British Museum. And provenance plays a role in almost every facet of museum practice, from new acquisitions to incoming loans.
I was impressed that the Art Institute also has a provenance task force of senior museum leaders, including chief curators and departmental heads, to support the work of the provenance team and to challenge us. Spending weeks in an archive, we become so deeply immersed in a topic and I find it very useful to have this kind of sounding board. It became very clear to me that this role has the full support of senior leadership at the museum. For a long time, museums did not necessarily give provenance research the level of priority that it has now.
Similarly crucial is that these teams have a research budget that allows them to do this work in a way that is productive. The fact that the AIC has financial support for this research was a very big factor.
It is incredibly rare for museums to have a research team of this size with this level of support from the senior leadership and with the resources that we have to consult an archive.
Every museum is different. The first couple months were getting to know everybody, dealing with the most urgent issues, and understanding what it is that our audiences are really interested in. In the beginning, I just wanted to familiarize myself with how this work unfolds at the Art Institute, and to really understand the work that happened and how things ran before I started.
What initiatives have you started at AIC since you first began?
Our goal is to ensure that there’s provenance information for every single object in our collection. As I mentioned, the Art Institute’s collection is absolutely enormous, with around 300,000 objects. It is a big task, but if there’s provenance information for every single object, then researchers can connect with them in a better fashion.
Thirty years ago, audiences did not necessarily expect to hear about provenance stories at an art museum unless it helped them to understand the object. Nowadays visitors are interested in these full stories. Learning and engagement have become big topics for us, where we go to universities in Chicago to talk to students and welcome study groups.
These initiatives developed because people are really interested in the detective element of this kind of work. We produce reproductions of documents that we might encounter in an archive for exhibitions to more vividly demonstrate this research. For experts, being able to readily see the succession of names and dates is immediately fascinating in and of itself, but if you are completely new to the field, you might need a bit more context—and I’ve found that has been a great way of engaging with visitors.
There are circumstances, however, where we have to carry out this research, for example, because we’re putting on an exhibition or we’re considering an acquisition of an object, and we have to do targeted research that can often be really challenging because there might not be a lot of time to carry it out.
In tracing the life of this object, if you will, you’ll find that things end up in places you would never expect. It’s part of the history of the object and it can offer a whole different perspective. I know sometimes provenance researchers have to get extremely crafty to figure out some of these objects’ past histories.
I’m really glad you bring up this point because often people think that this work is always terribly exciting, revolutionary, or controversial—or that we are even able to find out the full story. But the reality is, and in many of the cases that we work on, it can be really difficult to trace the path of an object back in time. Often, we know who gave the object to the museum, but unless there’s an archive that we can use to consult about this art dealer or collector, then maybe that will be the end of the research.
I know it can take years to track down this information, too.
It’s almost like writing a small dissertation about each object. We need to come up with your research question. We need to travel to archives. There are now so many databases and while a lot has been digitized, people think that we can mostly do this research from our desks, that we don’t have to leave the museum, but the reality is that most archives still have not been digitized. So, we need to order scans from these archives, and that can be very expensive, too.
Buddha Sheltered by the Serpent King Muchalinda.
Courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago
What do you envision for the future of provenance research at AIC?
My main project has been to work towards the goal of getting the provenance for as many objects as possible published on the website. The team published thousands of objects since I started and these efforts will continue. Very few notice this information is being put online, but it ultimately allows people to recognize patterns and similarities between holdings at the Art Institute and other museums. If, for example, a collector made contributions to other museums as well. Unless that’s recorded and shared, however, people can’t make these connections.
I’m not the kind of researcher who thinks, “I wrote it down in a file and it’s now in the archive, and that’s the end.” I’m considering ways in which we can bring these stories into the galleries by doing tours and speaking with students and other groups of visitors. This is giving me a better understanding of how we could do more in this area and it is something I would like to make a priority in the in the years to come.
Every day, we get inquiries from other researchers. Some of them are museums, while others are academics, who are interested in provenance research. We may only see the results of these collaborations in a few years, when the article is published or the PhD is finished.
Sometimes we find out provenance information that might indicate that the object would be better elsewhere. My team has worked on two returns this year [Buddha Sheltered by the Serpent King Muchalinda to Nepal and a pilaster fragment of Krishna lifting Mount Govardhana to Thailand], which is something that I found incredibly rewarding.
You co-founded, with MacKenzie Mallon of the Nelson Atkins Museum, Provenance Connects as a professional organization for those in the field of provenance research. What are some key takeaways from that experience?
The networking element of it is important. A lot of museums face very similar research challenges. For example, a collector or dealer may have brought objects to 20 museums in the US and Britain. If researchers don’t talk to each other, then everybody does the research on their own. But through Provenance Connects maybe I meet somebody on screen who told me they’re in Paris right now and are researching the same dealer, and then I can ask them to share the scans with me. I can also share files with them from my research that might be related to their project.
Provenance Connects has been incredibly useful and rewarding in this way because there isn’t a central conference in the field where people could meet an annual basis. Now, there’s an internationally dedicated space for provenance researchers to talk and to explore overlap in their research. It’s also a great way to keep on top of what’s happening in the field because there might be important work happening at a smaller museum that maybe isn’t on our radar all the time.
Considering the second Trump presidency, how do you think provenance research initiatives will be impacted?
I don’t want to speculate, but museums have effectively been doing this work since they were created. It’s the core mission of a museum to research the history of the objects in its care and to share this research with its audiences. It is very serious work about historical accuracy and completeness. For the Art Institute, it is a top priority.