German Lost Art Foundation

It promotes provenance research in Germany, especially as conducted at cultural heritage institutions, among other things by providing financial grants. The aim is to clarify whether cultural property has been seized from its rightful owners, for example in connection with persecution by the state. As a funding institution, the Foundation is also involved in facilitating, supporting, networking and promoting research projects. 

The Foundation’s initial focus is on cultural property seized as a result of persecution during the National Socialist era, especially from Jewish owners (so-called Nazi-looted cultural property). The basis for its work in this field is provided by the Washington Principles adopted in 1998, which Germany has voluntarily committed to implementing based on a historical and moral self-obligation (Joint Declaration, 1999). Cultural property losses in this category are documented in the form of found-object reports in the publicly accessible database Lost Art.

The German Lost Art Foundation also runs the research database Proveana. The objective is to support provenance research through documenting historical information, thereby making it more transparent and contributing to the solution of unresolved cases. The database allows searches for people, corporations, events, collections, provenance information, objects and further documentary sources. Proveana provides assistance for those whose cultural assets were seized, for their descendants, for scholars, for everybody involved in the trade with cultural goods, for the media, and for policy-makers. Within Proveana, Jewish collectors and art dealers are in focus. The aim is to raise the visibility not just of the collections themselves, some of which are significant, but also the regional networks they formed and in which they emerged. 

Since 2023, the German Lost Art Foundation has been cooperating with the citizen science platform "Jewish Places", which is managed by the Jewish Museum Berlin. In collaboration with Jewish Places, selected biographies were compiled on the basis of Proveana's research data and anchored on the interactive map. In this way, the results of provenance research are made visible and accessible to both the academic community and civil society.