German / American Exchange Program on Nazi-Era Art Provenance Research
Dresden March 17-22, 2019 GERMAN / AMERICAN EXCHANGE PROGRAM ON NAZI-ERA ART PROVENANCE RESEARCH 1 DEAR 2019 PREP PARTICIPANTS, WELCOME TO DRESDEN – WILLKOMMEN IN DRESDEN! We are proud and excited to welcome you to the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden for the third year of the German/American Provenance Research Exchange Program for Museum Professionals (PREP). After remarkable weeks in New York and Berlin (2017), then Los Angeles and München (2018), PREP now moves to Dresden, where we look forward to seeing how you, the 2019 Cohort, will add your expertise to our growing network. During your exchange, you will meet new colleagues from both sides of the Atlantic, identify common topics and challenges, and discuss possible solutions. This year’s host, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD), is among the fore- most museum associations of the world. Under its aegis, a total of 15 museums and collections offer an exceptionally broad thematic diversity. At the heart of the SKD’s scholarly and curatorial work on its collections is the “Daphne” project. Begun in 2008, this comprehensive, multi-year provenance research, cataloguing, and inventory project aims to register the more than 1.5 million holdings of the SKD, facilitating a systematic provenance research of all acquisitions since 1933, in what is one of the first projects of its kind for a German museum. Against the background of the turbulent history of the 20th century, various confisca- tion contexts are present within the history of the Dresden collections: in addition to art theft in the Nazi era, these include World War II losses, “Schlossbergungen” (literally “palace salvage”), as well as seizures during the years of the Soviet military occupation and the period of the GDR.
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