In 2019 and 2020, the Federal Office of Culture released fresh rounds of funding grants, which have enabled us to implement two research projects on the provenance of key bodies of work in the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, the public art collection of Basel. One concerned the

Drawings in the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel’s Kupferstichkabinett: Accessions 1933–1945

The first project at the Kupferstichkabinett (Department of Prints and Drawings) was dedicated to a review of more than 2,000 drawings that entered the collection between 1933 and 1945. In a preliminary stage made possible by generous funding support from the Karl and Sophie Binding Stiftung, we digitized the holdings, entering all related data from the analog inventory books and index cards and the object itself into the database and producing a digital reproduction of each drawing. In the provenance research project proper, we examined the drawings and consulted the inventory book, documents in the Kunstmuseum’s archive, and any available online resources to categorize the works in accordance with the Swiss provenance research color-coding schema (green = unproblematic, yellow = to be reviewed, red = problematic). This work has laid the foundation for future in-depth provenance research.

Please see the final report (to be released) for more extensive information. The works studied in the course of the project were gathered in a list and are accessible in our Collection Online.