In this post, we publish a tiny subset of names that should immediately set off alarms when they appear in the provenance of an artwork:
Art Collectors, dealers, curators, historians, and other art market professionals who were detained or died in Nazi custody, whether in concentration camps, ghettos, or jails.
This dataset is drawn from Wikidata Queries (see below), and so is necessarily limited to those very few names that have been properly documented in Wikidata, with occupation, date and place of death.
DATASET: Art Collectors who were detained or who died in Nazi Concentration Camps, Ghettos or Jails referenced in Wikidata
Version: 1
Licence: CC0
Date published: May 27, 2020
Publisher: Open Art Data
Source of information: Wikidata Query
File formats:
- CSV
DOWNLOAD CSV
- Google Sheet
VIEW GOOGLE SHEET
- RDF Turtle
(to be published)
Description:
In this first version, published on May 27, 2020, the Dataset contains only 47 names. (see below) with the following information:
It is obvious, then, that this tiny dataset makes no claim to completeness. Its purpose is rather to provide an angle of attack for linking up information about murdered Jewish collectors to other information, including provenance information in artworks.
Each name has a Wikidata identifier, which serves as a linked data hub to other identifiers, authority files and references such as Viaf, Library of Congress, DNB, Dictionary of Art Historians, Lostart, Yad Vashem, Wikipedia, DBpedia, Ulan, etc.
At present, very few Jewish collectors who perished in the Holocaust are properly referenced and linked.
But every journey begins with a first step.
The DATASET presented here is such a first step: to link Jewish art collectors and art professionals who were detained or died in Nazi camps or ghettos into the world of linked data via Wikidata, and thus, hopefully, to help anchor them in the digital Knowledge Graph.
A further observation:
In describing datasets it is common to inventory what is present. In describing datasets related to the Holocaust, however, it is also important to inventory what is absent. This is to avoid the frequent error of imagining that what we see is all there is to know, and to have an idea of the scope of the work that remains to be done.