The story of objects

Provenance is one way of looking at objects. While it doesn’t tell us everything, a provenance record can tell us a lot about an artwork, giving us glimpses into the life it leads long after its creation.

Provenance can reveal – or conceal – that a treasured textile may have been part of a transaction between travelling traders; a guardian figure was looted in tomb raids centuries ago; how objects traded hands in the process of colonisation, or that a painting was passed down through generations of one family. Its dates may tell us an item was stolen during a war, or its names may divulge how one artist gave a gift to another. All sorts of histories have been recorded in – and much left out of – the writing of provenance.

These fascinating objects below from the Gallery's collection can be understood differently through a study of their provenance. The years a Burmese Buddha spent in the collection of an unlikely Sydney icon; the way the art market values the work of a master of the Dutch Golden Age; a story of theft, trust and custodianship from Nepal; a tale of visionary art commissioning from the Gallery’s own past; the unknown history of an extraordinary ordinary object that made its way to Australia from Central Asia; and the unsettling story of Nazi confiscation: the simple ownership records of these objects have a lot to tell us about their lives.

Landscape with enraged ox by Dutch Golden Age master Adam Pynacker has what an art historian might call an almost perfect provenance. But just what does good provenance look like?

Art historians consider it pretty exciting to have records going back to 1764 for a painting dated 1665-70. This was a record of anonymous sale from a private collection, held 20 March 1764, at the rooms of Phillippus van der Schely and Hendrik de Winter in Amsterdam.

The initial purchase before that was probably directly from the artist or his dealer for a domestic collection and, as is usual in such cases, little was recorded. But other than the 100-year gap between the first private purchase and the Amsterdam sale, every sale since was recorded.

Pynacker’s landscape changed hands some 15 more times. It was sold in Leiden, then Paris in the 18th century, then after further sales in Paris was put up for auction in London in the early 19th century - all impeccably noted.

The painting was returned to France, entering the collection of first the Duc then the Duchesse de Berry, both serious – and famous – art patrons and collectors. Of interest is the fact that when the Duchesse sold some of her collection in 1822, a decade before she sold the Pynacker, it was the first time lithographic reproductions had ever been used in a list of sale.

After several sales in Germany and Switzerland, the Pynacker ended up in the hands of celebrated American artist Saul Steinberg after 1988.

Not only is the provenance of Landscape with enraged ox without significant gaps, it has been owned by some famous names in Steinberg and the Duchesse de Berry. Art historians acknowledge that having famous owners can't help but increase a work's value and significance – especially when already painted, as in this case, by a master.

In 1958, the Gallery's assistant director Tony Tuckson commissioned artists from the Tiwi community of Milikapiti (Snake Bay) on Melville Island to make the now-famous carved and painted Tutini (Pukumani poles) for the Gallery. Tuckson believed Indigenous Australian art belonged in an art gallery context, not merely an anthropological one, and this was his first major step in building an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island art collection.

A year later in 1959, with the support of Aboriginal art enthusiast and philanthropist Dr Stuart Scougall, Tuckson travelled to Yirrkala in eastern Arnhem Land to commission more work. The pair was met by the great Yolngu clan leaders, including Mawalan Marika and Mungurrawuy Yunupingu, and artists who were dedicated to documenting their cultural inheritance and sharing this with the Australian public.

Mawalan Marika was a senior leader of the Rirratjingu clan and the wider Yirrkala community who painted this bark as part of a series of five showing the journey of the Djang’kawu by canoe across the sea. These paintings are considered to be the most comprehensive visual narratives of this Rirratjingu song cycle in existence. They are equally remarkable as early commissions directly from Aboriginal artists - works that mark the redefinition of the representation of Indigenous Australia.

One of the Gallery's best-loved modern paintings, Three bathers 1913 by Ernst Ludvig Kirchner has a fascinating history, albeit an unsettling one.

First shown at Frankfurt am Main's Galerie Ludwig Schames in October 1916, the Kirchner went on to become part of the collection of Mr and Mrs Frederick Zimmermann of New York in 1955. But, in between, it was at the heart of a dark period in modern history.

Three bathers was in the Kunstsammlungen der Stadt Düsseldorf - the Düsseldorf state art collection - when, on 26 August 1937, it was confiscated by the Nazi regime, one of thousands of artworks seized from German public collections that year.

Kirchner had hundreds of works taken from state collections and was represented in the now-infamous 'Degenerate art' exhibition of 1937, though not by this piece.

Many confiscated pieces were sold for private gain, or simply destroyed. Around 1939 our Three bathers was known to have been in the Buchholz Gallery in New York, run by Curt Valentin. Valentin, who later renamed his gallery eponymously, had been granted permission by the Nazis to sell German art in America.

The Zimmermanns bought the painting from the Curt Valentin Gallery 'Closing exhibition' in June 1955. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner committed suicide in Switzerland in 1938.