New online finding aid for provenance researchers: files of the Düsseldorf City Archives analysed

The in-depth in­dex­ing of the files, which be­gan in Novem­ber 2019, was fund­ed by the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion. At the same time, the sources were com­piled with the sup­port of the pro­gramme Wis­sensWan­del. Dig­i­tal­pro­gramm für Bib­lio­theken und Archive un­der the fund­ing line Neustart Kul­tur. The project will make these im­por­tant archival records ac­ces­si­ble world­wide, while at the same time en­sur­ing they are se­cured on a sus­tain­able ba­sis. The da­ta can be ac­cessed via the in­ter­net por­tal Archives in NRW, and in fu­ture al­so via Archiv­por­tal-D and the Ger­man Dig­i­tal Li­brary.

The project in­volved art his­to­ri­an Nad­ja Brzez­i­na and his­to­ri­an Dr. An­nett Büt­tner analysing 94 files com­pris­ing a to­tal of around 80,000 pages: these were main­ly bid­ding, pur­chase and ex­pert opin­ion files re­lat­ing to the Düs­sel­dorf art col­lec­tions and dat­ing back to the Na­tion­al So­cial­ist era. Of these files, more than 70 were in­dexed and scanned. Oth­er ma­te­ri­al that was pro­cessed and made ac­ces­si­ble for de­tailed search in­cludes cor­re­spon­dence with for­eign mu­se­ums and oth­er archival records that are im­por­tant to prove­nance re­search such as ac­qui­si­tion files from the im­me­di­ate­ly pre­ced­ing pe­ri­od in the 1920s.

In ad­di­tion to the records of the art col­lec­tions, the Düs­sel­dorf City Archive al­so pre­serves records per­tain­ing to the high­er-rank­ing cul­ture de­part­ment and the may­or. These were al­so tak­en in­to ac­count, so re­searchers now have var­i­ous sources at their dis­pos­al. As a re­sult, re­search can now be con­duct­ed in­to spe­cif­ic works of art and in­di­vid­u­als as well as the art and cul­ture sec­tor in gen­er­al. The archival records not on­ly re­late to the Düs­sel­dorf area but ex­tend be­yond the Rhineland too, show­ing links with the oc­cu­pied ter­ri­to­ries of the Nether­lands and France in the ear­ly 1940s, for ex­am­ple. As a re­sult of the digi­ti­sa­tion of the files with the help of Wis­sensWan­del, the rel­e­vant cor­re­spon­dence – of­ten hand­writ­ten orig­i­nal doc­u­ments – can now be read on­line in many cas­es. More than 67,000 scans were made for this pur­pose. This type of dig­i­tal in­dex­ing of sources is a vi­tal tool that sup­ports na­tion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al prove­nance re­search.

A list of the in­dexed files with links to Archiv­por­tal-D is avail­able on the web­site of the Prove­nance Re­search Unit of the City of Düs­sel­dorf. It is al­so pos­si­ble to con­tact Archiv­por­tal-D at https://www.archive.nrw.de/