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CONFERENCE PANEL: “Digital Provenance and the Art Market”, 01/22/2022.

On January 22nd, 2022, on a panel called ‘Art Market, Art Trade, Cultural Property Smuggling’, Lynn talked to her colleague Meike Hopp about digital art market and provenance research at the annual conference ‘Collections – Provenance – Cultural Heritage 6.0’, hosted by the Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg. This year, the focus of the conference was expanded to include aspects of digital collection. Among other things, Lynn and Meike discussed historical art market realities, such as joint businesses, the role of agents versus owners on the auction market and the challenge of recording the complexities of provenance research in a structured way. This is especially difficult, they concluded, when you want to include all the nuances and uncertainties.

CONFERENCE PAPER: “Modern Migrants – Provenance Studies at Leuphana”, 11/19/2021.

From November 17-19th, 2021, Fabio participated in the Second Culture Community Plenary of the NFDI4 Consortium for Research Data on Material and Immaterial Cultural Heritage. In his talk “Modern Migrants – Provenance Studies at Leuphana”, Fabio presented the project Modern Migrants: Paintings from Europe in US Museums at Leuphana University Lüneburg, which aims to digitally collect, structure and, ultimately, analyze data on modern paintings from Europe in US museum collections, with the view to generating knowledge about art markets, the circulation of artworks, and other networked aspects of art history. Using the provenance of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Harlequin’ (1915) as an example, Fabio’s presentation focused on the challenges of extracting knowledge from provenance texts, as well as the possibilities and limitations of natural language processing.

TALK: “Driving L’Arlésienne”, 10/27/2021.

On October 27, 2021, Lynn participated in the workshop “Infrastructures of Producing, Transporting, and Logistics in Transnational Perspective“, organised by the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. In her talk, entitled “Driving L’Arlésienne: Transporting Paintings during National Socialism”, she highlighted and analysed the complexities of transporting art during the war, with a particular focus on the fate of one painting, van Gogh’s “L’Arlésienne”, as well the odyssey of its owner, Marianne de Goldschmidt-Rothschild, who had to endure a great deal before she could find a safe refuge for herself and her artwork.

CONFERENCE PAPER: “Towards an Emancipated Provenance Research”, 04/20/2021.

On April 20th, 2021, Lynn delivered a closing remark at the annual conference of the Arbeitskreis Provenienzforschung e.V., which, this year, went by the title “Searching for clues and coming to terms with the past – the state of provenance research in Hamburg”. Lynn’s talk, “Towards an Emancipated Provenance Research”, argued that provenance research is, fundamentally, not a temporary but a long-term project, and, if given time, will be able to “unfold its scientific and memory-culture potential, especially in cultural heritage institutions and at universities”.

PUBLICATION: “Provenance Research in Museums: The Long Run”, 12/03/2020.

On December 3rd, 2020, Arthur Tompkins’ released his reference handbook ‘Provenance Research Today: Principles, Practice, Problems‘ co-published with Lund Humphries, London, and the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR). Together with Iris Schmeisser, Lynn co-authored an article in the handbook called “Provenance Research in Museums: The Long Run”.

“To illustrate the shift from ‘traditional’ art-historical to interdisciplinary Nazi-era provenance research and its challenges”, the article centres upon the complex history of a Swiss landscape painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, which, over the course of many years, and multiple re-visits to its provenance, changed both names and date. In the conclusion to their article, Lynn and Iris thus argue that provenance research in museums is not only “case by case”, but also “as much about history as it is about historicity”.

NEWS STORY: “It is Time for Catalogues Raisonnés to Join the Digital Age”, 12/01/2022.

On December 1st, 2020, ahead of the International Catalogue Raisonné Association’s (ICRA) conference, Lynn talked to The Art Newspaper‘s Georgina Adam about how, “until recently, valuable information harvested through time-consuming and resource-intensive provenance research was often recorded in forms that could be understood by human beings but not by computers”.

You can read the article here.

CONFERENCE PAPER: “The History of Art is Linked but the Data is Not: Georgia O’Keefe, Provenance and Scholarship”, 07/21/20.

On July 21st, 2020, Lynn presented a paper called “The History of Art is Linked but the Data is Not: Georgia O’Keefe, Provenance and Scholarship” at DH2020, the annual Digital Humanities Conference, organized by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. With the theme of “carrefours/intersections,” the conference invited proposals from the sub-disciplines of public digital humanities and the open data movement. The reason why, Lynn argued, that she is advocating for Linked.Art—a community working together to create a shared Model based on Linked Open Data—is “because the history of art is linked but the data of cultural institutions is not”.

INTERVIEW: Lynn Rother interviewed on NDR’s radio podcast series ‘Das Gespräch’, 06/12/2020.

On June 12th, 2020, Lynn was interviewed by Claudia Christophersen for NDR‘s cultural podcast series ‘Das Gespräch‘, which invites prominent contemporaries from society to discuss art, culture and politics. Together with the “incomplete and questionable” nature of provenance, Lynn talked about her recent appointment to the first Lichtenberg-Professorship for Provenance Studies at Leuphana University Lüneburg.

You can listen to their conversation here.

CONFERENCE PAPER: “Art Digitization and the State-of-the-Art(World)”, 03/05/2020.

On March 5th, 2020, Lynn presented her work in the field of provenance research at an all-day conference entitled “Art Digitization and the State-of-the-Art(World)”, which was organised by the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc. and hosted by SAP Hudson Yards. A recording of the event is now available on Youtube:

NEWS STORY: “Complete Clarification – Lynn Rother Teaches the New Subject of Provenance Studies in Lüneburg”, 03/01/2020.

Upon Lynn‘s appointment to the Lichtenberg-Professorship at Lüneburg, the German art magazine Art ran a two-page interview with her in their March issue of 2020. Under the title “Complete Clarification”, Lynn argued:

“In the last two decades in particular, an extraordinarily large amount of provenance data has been generated on individual objects, but it has not yet been analysed across museums and collections. When it comes to thousands of works with tens of thousands of changes in ownership, this may be an almost impossible task for a human being, but not for a computer. This is where methods from data science come in.”