Met launching provenance research squad
Standards of assessing provenance are shifting for those institutions housing pre-eminent permanent collections. As Maxwell Anderson (formerly director of the Dallas Museum of Art and the Whitney) puts it: “The attitude used to be, don’t acquire something you know to be stolen — that’s a very low standard. The attitude today is, don’t acquire something unless you know it’s not stolen. It’s a 180-degree difference”.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is taking this seriously; it intends to hire a team of four staff to scrutinise its gargantuan inventory of more than 1.5 million works. What a task – I don’t envy them.
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https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/05/10/metropolitan-museum-provenance-research-squad
