What is provenance in art? A guide for collectors

What does provenance in art include?

Provenance is a chronological list of owners, with dates, places and, wherever possible, a document behind each link. A single certificate or one piece of paper does not make it. The record is a chain, and the ideal version runs unbroken from the artist to you. It reads something like: the artist's studio, the gallery that first showed the work, a named collector who bought it in 1974, their estate, an auction in 1998, a dealer, you.

Two things often sit alongside provenance and are sometimes confused with it. Exhibition history is the list of shows a work has appeared in. Literature, or bibliography, is the list of books and catalogues that reproduce or discuss it. Both support provenance without being provenance, because a work photographed on a gallery wall in 1974 was demonstrably in existence and somewhere specific in 1974.

The most useful piece of literature is usually the catalogue raisonné, a scholarly publication that attempts to list every known work by an artist, with dimensions, materials, ownership history and an image for each. Inclusion in one is not legal proof of anything, but for most artists it is the closest thing the market has to a register of record.

Why does provenance matter in art?

Because it does three separate jobs, and a buyer is paying for all three.

The first is authenticity. A documented line back to the studio is the strongest evidence a work is what it is said to be, and the hardest thing for a forger to fabricate convincingly.

The second is legal title, meaning the right to own and sell the thing. In many jurisdictions, buying in good faith does not protect you if the work was stolen further back in the chain. This is why two dates recur in due diligence. The first comes from the 1970 UNESCO Convention on illicit trafficking: the Association of Art Museum Directors asks its members not to acquire antiquities unless the provenance shows the object was out of its country of modern discovery before 17 November 1970, or legally exported from it after that date. The second comes from the Washington Conference Principles of 1998, endorsed by 44 governments, which committed signatories to identify and resolve claims on art confiscated during the Nazi era. That is why any gap covering 1933 to 1945 in a European work attracts particular attention.

The third is simply story. A work that passed through a collection people admire carries that association with it. This is the least rigorous of the three and the most reliably priced in.

How do you prove a painting is authentic?

You rarely prove it with one document. Authentication is built from three strands, and the strongest cases have all three.

Provenance is the first. Expert opinion is the second, whether from a scholar, the artist's estate, or inclusion in the catalogue raisonné. Technical analysis is the third: pigment and canvas dating, infrared imaging to see underdrawing, examination of the stretcher and nails.

A certificate of authenticity, a signed statement that a work is genuine, is only ever as good as the person who signed it and their standing to say so. Some artists issue them directly. Some galleries issue them for artists they represent. Many of the certificates in circulation were written by people with no particular authority, and they carry no weight at all.

Fewer bodies give opinions than once did. The Andy Warhol Foundation announced in October 2011 that it would dissolve its authentication board in 2012, and its president said plainly that he did not want to keep spending millions a year on lawyers defending the board's judgements. The practical effect is that the documentation you hold matters more, because there is less chance of someone else vouching for the work later.

The cautionary case is the Knoedler Gallery in New York. Between 1994 and 2009 a dealer sold it and another Manhattan gallery more than sixty forged paintings, presented as works by Pollock, Rothko, Motherwell and others, and buyers paid more than 80 million dollars for them. The story that carried them was a provenance nobody could check: a client associated with Switzerland who had inherited the paintings and wished to remain anonymous. The paintings were wrong, but it was the unverifiable chain that let them sell.

What is a certificate of provenance?

A certificate of provenance, sometimes called a letter of provenance, is a written summary of a work's ownership history, usually issued by the seller or a gallery. There is no legal standard for what it must contain, and no body that issues or registers them. It is a statement about the chain, and it is worth exactly as much as the invoices, labels and records behind each link it lists.

That is the difference from a certificate of authenticity. One says the work is by the artist. The other says who has owned it. Neither replaces the other, and neither replaces the documents. A certificate that names "private collection, Europe" for forty years has told you nothing a buyer can check. Ask for copies of what it is based on, and keep them with the certificate.

What documents should come with an artwork?

Everything below. Most works arrive with two or three of them.

How does provenance actually get lost?

Almost never all at once. It goes one undocumented sale at a time.

A collector buys from a friend and pays by bank transfer with nothing written down. A work is given to a daughter at a birthday and never recorded as having moved. An executor clears a house in a fortnight and the box of gallery paperwork in the loft goes out with the rest. A dealer sells on behalf of a client who wants anonymity, and a real name becomes "private collection, Europe", permanently. A frame is replaced and the old backboard, with four decades of labels on it, is thrown away by a framer who was never told to keep it.

None of these feels like a loss at the time. Each removes one link. Three or four of them across fifty years, and the chain no longer reaches the studio.

How do you prove provenance without a receipt?

The work loses value, but it does not lose its market. A work with gaps still sells, usually for less, and with more friction. What you can do is rebuild what is recoverable and be honest about what is not.

1. Photograph the back of the work before you do anything else, in good light, including every label, stamp and pencil inscription.
2. Search your own records. Bank statements, old email, insurance schedules and shipping invoices are provenance even when they do not look like it.
3. Go back to the person who sold it to you and ask who they bought it from. This one question recovers more chains than any other.
4. Check the catalogue raisonné, the artist's estate or foundation, and the archive of the gallery that represented the artist. Gallery archives are often more complete than anyone expects.
5. Ask the auction house. Salerooms keep records of past lots, and a matching image and dimension will often place your work in a specific sale.
6. Run a search with the Art Loss Register, a private database of stolen and missing works. A clean search result is itself a document worth keeping.
7. Write down what you could not establish. An honest gap, dated and described, is far better than a vague sentence that a future buyer will have to disprove.

If you are the artist: where provenance starts

Every chain in this article begins in a studio, and the first link is written by the artist or by nobody. When you sell a work directly, the buyer's provenance starts with what you hand over and what you keep: an invoice with both names, the date and the price, a record of the work with its title, year, medium and dimensions, and photographs of the front and the back.

Keep your own copy. Thirty years from now, the person most likely to be asked where a work came from is whoever holds your records. A sale written down on the day costs ten minutes. Reconstructing it later costs far more, and sometimes cannot be done.

The guide to cataloguing your own artwork covers the fields, and the one on photographing your artwork covers the back of the canvas.

How should collectors keep provenance records?

Somewhere that outlives the device it was created on, and somewhere another person could open without you in the room.

The test is simple. If your executor had to sell the collection next year, could they find out where each work came from, what was paid, what condition it was in and who to call? For most collections the answer is partly, and the missing part is the expensive part.

A register kept properly is what keeps a collection legible after the person who assembled it has stopped explaining it. Whether it lives in a well-kept spreadsheet with a folder of scans behind it or in software built for the purpose matters less than that it exists, is current, and is where someone else will think to look.