The Afterlives of Artworks

Last year, the Getty Research Institute received an unexpected email from colleagues at the Kupferstich-Kabinett, a museum for art on paper in Dresden. Researchers were searching for a drawing of a male nude by the German Symbolist artist Otto Greiner (1869–1916) that had been missing since it was moved to a nearby castle for safekeeping, along with the rest of the museum’s collection, near the end of World War II. Getty, it appeared, was in possession of the drawing. But how did it get here, and how to be sure it was the same drawing?

In recent years, interest in provenance—an artwork’s ownership history—has moved beyond the rarefied space of academic study and into the mainstream. From popular novels and documentaries to buzzy movies and scandal-steeped podcasts, fascination with the secret histories of artworks seems to be bubbling over. But while the concept of an art object’s journey through time has become familiarized, less is known about the everyday work of accurately tracing that journey and verifying a recovered work’s identity.

The new exhibition “Lost. Found. Returned.”, which runs June 23 through October 18 at the Research Institute, offers a timeline of the Greiner drawing’s journey—from its creation in Rome in 1892, to its acquisition for the Dresden collections in 1894, to its possible looting during the war, to its rediscovery in Los Angeles last year—while revealing the tools and methods researchers use to locate and verify lost artworks.

“We really want to show the public what it means to delve into the provenance of a drawing,” says Nancy Um, the Institute’s associate director for research and knowledge creation and a member of the curatorial team. “We’re spending less time talking about the aesthetic or visual qualities of the drawing and more about what we know and when we knew it; what we don’t know, or the gaps in its provenance; and the clues that allow us to tell that story.”

Provenance work, zoomed in

Provenance work can be an uneven mix of scintillating forensic discoveries, painstaking database scrolling, and near-endless rounds of note sharing with colleagues, all in an effort to get at information that institutions, auction houses, private collectors, and others in the art world often keep close to their chests.

The Greiner drawing offers a case study in how this work is carried out. The positive identification of Standing Male Nude from the Back, with a Smaller Sketch (1892) unfolded as a convergence of various kinds of clues, first uncovered by the Kupferstich-Kabinett. The Institute received these findings and built upon them, until all lines of evidence pointed to the same object.

A central challenge was that the drawing initially seemed to lack a definitive identifying mark linking it to Dresden’s collection. Identification therefore began not from the object alone but from archival descriptions. An 1894 inventory entry—which records unique information about an artwork, including acquisition details—provided the first anchor, but it was a catalogue published in 1900 that confirmed the drawing’s presence in the collection and offered a visual reference point. Because the object itself was not labeled, researchers had to match the physical sheet to historical records.

Forensics, “fingerprints,” and fading clues

The decisive step was close visual comparison across sources. Scholars matched the rediscovered drawing to the 1900 reproduction, focusing on miniscule, noncompositional features. A seemingly insignificant detail, an errant droplet of ink, became critical evidence.

“Provenance research today hinges on this very connoisseurial work of using a magnifying glass and looking at, say, a stamp on the front of a print or a description in faded pencil on the back of a drawing,” says Um. “And in this case, there was a really distinctive ink spot that helped us to confirm that this was definitely the same drawing.”

These tiny, unique, often accidental features can function like fingerprints in provenance detective work. In the case of the Greiner drawing, they allowed researchers to assert that the modern object and the historical record referred to the same sheet, not just the same composition.

Then, during preparation for the exhibition, another clue emerged.

Examining the back of the drawing, the Getty team noticed faint, partially erased pencil markings in the upper left corner. Unable to decipher them, they sent an image to colleagues in Dresden, who had previously only seen the 1900 reproduction, and therefore front, of the sheet. They immediately recognized the markings as Cyrillic letters that spelled “Греинер” (Greiner).

The inscription suggested that the drawing may have passed through Soviet hands after the war—possibly taken by the so-called trophy brigades, which Stalin formed to remove art and other cultural materials from German and Eastern European territories as reparations for wartime losses. A single word, barely visible, helped make the case for a long-suspected new chapter in the object’s history.

In 2001, when the work reappeared on the art market in Berlin, it came through a Finnish art consignment. Since Finland shares a border with Russia, this further supported the probability that the drawing had been in Russian possession since it disappeared.

A transatlantic leap

After its 2001 sale, the drawing changed hands again in 2005, bought by the Los Angeles art collector and dentist Richard A. Simms, who later partially donated it along with hundreds of other prints and drawings, primarily by artist Käthe Kollwitz, to the Institute.

“None of those works’ provenance was in question, because they came from the Kollwitz family estate,” says Um. “We are an archival collecting institution, so we normally bring in large collections that we measure by the linear foot, rather than by the object. It is our standard practice, and best practice in the field, to do research on these objects after acquisition, unlike, say, a museum considering a single painting.”

A project researcher from Dresden will come to Los Angeles this summer with the goal of using the Dr. Richard A. Simms collection as a resource to help Getty and the Kupferstich-Kabinett learn more about the journeys of other lost works.

Collaboration is key

The assorted documentation used to identify the drawing, along with its partially pieced together ownership trajectory, created a cumulative chain of evidence. And, crucially, this occurred through institutional dialogue. Dresden researchers identified the drawing through careful examination of a 1900 reproduction. Getty provided direct access to the object in its collections, enabling visual confirmation. Both institutions compared findings, aligning archival data with the physical drawing. This collaborative model reflects a broader shift in provenance research toward shared authority and transparency, rather than isolated attribution.

“Transparency is more and more recognized as a value; it’s what the public expects, and what cultural institutions want to do,” says Sandra van Ginhoven, head of the Getty Provenance Index and curatorial coleader of the upcoming exhibition. “Provenance research is the cornerstone for anything that can happen in terms of decisions about restitution or how to go forward.”

Though it wasn’t used in this particular case, the Getty Provenance Index is a key resource for global provenance work. Currently undergoing remodeling, the Index enables searches across millions of archival records drawn from dealer stock books and sales catalogs worldwide.

The Index, and other provenance research tools like it, do not replace the connoisseurship Um described but instead amplify it, allowing researchers to connect fragments of evidence that would otherwise remain isolated. This, in turn, often leads to cross-institutional investigations and conversations about the works in question.

From private object to public story

Amid a growing trend toward in-house provenance research at museums, Getty hopes its Lost. Found. Returned. exhibition will encourage more transparency and storytelling around the findings of such research.

What the story of the Greiner drawing ultimately shows is that artworks do not simply sit still in history—they move, disappear, resurface, and accumulate meaning along the way. Reconstructing those journeys requires more than expertise; it takes patience, chance discoveries, and a willingness to follow even the faintest traces.

By putting that process on view, Lost. Found. Returned. turns a single recovered drawing into something larger: a case for openness, collaboration, and treating provenance not as an afterthought but as an essential part of how we understand—and care for—art.