German Sales – Primary Market: Gallery publications in German-speaking countries 1871–1949

• Applicants: Dr. Jochen Apel, since 10/2023; Dr. Thomas Köhler
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 469180107

The project aims to identify publications that galleries for modern art in German-speaking countries published between 1871 and 1949 as completely as possible. These publications are to be digitized and searchable in full text and made available online on the servers of Heidelberg University Library in a sustainable and open access manner. This means they will be available to the scientific community in an internationally established institution and can be accessed according to the best standards. With the integration into "arthistoricum.net" and there into the established portal "German Sales", a substantial improvement of the current information infrastructure on the development of modern art is intended. The project expands content previously provided via "German Sales" by opening up the supply on the early primary market of modern art for research. In particular, provenance research for the identification of Nazi looted art, which is mandatory for public collections, requires knowledge about works of art that were traded between 1933 and 1945. However, in order to understand and evaluate transactions within the scope of the "Joint Declaration," information about the supply before 1933 and after 1945 is also needed. For works of classical modern art, the accessibility of corresponding sources is a desideratum. The projected identification, recording and digital provision of gallery publications responds to this as a pilot project, which for the first time addresses the overall development of the trade in modern art since the 19th century.Data of the companies that published the publications will be included in the database-supported information system "German Sales Institutions – Auction houses, Galleries, Antiquarian Bookshops ", which is currently under construction. A semantic, ontology-based indexing not only enables the visualization of the networks of the actors, but also the provision of the contents as RDF triples in the sense of Linked Open Data, which can be connected to other projects. The planned networking with information platforms such as the database "Proveana" of the German Center for the Loss of Cultural Property should lead to a synergetic consolidation of sources and project-related research results. The connection to the field of young digital provenance research is explicitly sought.With five cooperation partners – Library of Art History Berlin, Library of the Kunsthalle Hamburg, Art and Museum Library Cologne, German Literature Archive Marbach, Central Institute for Art History in Munich – publications that have been localized in advance are to be digitized, linked to the company data of their editors and put online. Berlin companies are researched and indexed in greater depth as examples. A follow-up application should enable the digitization of further identified publications, the in-depth indexing of their editors and, if necessary, an in-depth indexing of the publications with regard to handwritten annotations.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr. Veit Probst, until 10/2023