Unpacking Provenance | The Fritzsche Gallery

12–1:15 p.m. EDT (Washington, DC) / 6–7:15 p.m. CEST (Berlin)

In this webinar, an expert panel discusses Berlin’s recently rediscovered Ernst Fritzsche Gallery collection and its importance to the field of provenance.

The Fritzsche Gallery was one of the first art dealers specializing in East Asian art and one of the most popular galleries in Berlin’s Tiergarten district during the interwar period. When the Nazi party came into power, the gallery profited greatly from the expulsion and murder of Jewish collectors and dealers by selling their looted collections. The Allied bombing raids of Berlin in 1943 destroyed the gallery, and parts of its inventory were presumed lost. But in 2023, archaeologists discovered the gallery’s cellar along with more than 3,000 damaged objects.

The panel features experts who work with the city of Berlin to document and research the newly unearthed cellar. Together, they consider questions raised by the discovery and the necessary conservation measures to secure it.

The online series Unpacking Provenance: Retracing the Histories of Asian Art brings together cross-disciplinary specialists to discuss provenance research processes and share resources. Discussions focus on a single object or object group, exploring a variety of innovative, strategic, and collaborative approaches to inquiry.

Unpacking Provenance is part of a larger collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution and the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz that seeks to cultivate the global network of provenance researchers and promote exchange. Previous programs include Hidden Networks: The Trade of Asian Art (2020–2022) and Provenance of Asian Art: A Collaborative Workshop and Symposium (2023).

Generous support for the museum's provenance research and object histories program is provided by the David Berg Foundation and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.

Speakers include

• Marie Hartmann
• Olivier Joumarin
• Nathalie Neumann

Facilitated by

• Joanna M. Gohmann, National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, DC 
• Christine Howald, Zentralarchiv/Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

Marie Hartmann studied Conservation and Restoration of Archaeological and Historical Cultural Heritage at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences. She completed training as a biological technical assistant to familiarize herself with scientific approaches within the field and interned at the Rathgen Research Laboratory in Berlin. Hartmann’s undergraduate and graduate degrees focus on material analysis in conservation practice to help identify an object’s place of origin, thereby contributing to questions of attribution and provenance.

Olivier Joumarin (Dipl.-Ing., MSc, Bauforscher) is an archaeologist and building historian with over fifteen years of experience in scientific documentation and heritage conservation. Since 2025, he has been the director of his own consultancy, AuB – Archaeology and Building Research, specializing in architectural surveys, excavation management, and historical building assessments. He has worked with the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in research and documentation, focusing on the analysis of complex archaeological findings and international projects. He also worked with AAB René Bräunig as a building researcher and excavation director, during which he managed numerous projects in practical heritage conservation and urban archaeology in the Berlin–Brandenburg region. His technical expertise includes the production of precise measured surveys (true-to-deformation documentation), the supervision of preparatory archaeological excavations, and professional consulting for architects and property owners working with historic structures.

Nathalie Neumann (M.A.) is a German–French art historian and has worked as a provenance researcher since 2014 on a variety of media including painting, sculpture, decorative arts, and East Asian art for several public and private institutions mainly in France and Germany, such as Team Gurlitt, Kunstverwaltung des Bundes, JGU Mainz, M2RS (Paris), and DRACAURA I and II (Southeast France). She is currently employed by the city of Fulda as provenance researcher, financed by the German Lost Art Foundation.

Joanna M. Gohmann (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is the National Museum of Asian Art’s first curator of provenance and object histories. In this role, she leads provenance research across collection areas and manages the museum’s ongoing collaboration with Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz’s Museum of Asian Art and Central Archives. Gohmann integrates provenance stories into NMAA’s web presence and gallery installations. Her work appears in the exhibition Freer’s Global Network: Artists, Collectors, and Dealers, exploring the influences that shaped how the museum’s founder collected art. Before coming to the Smithsonian, she held positions at the Walters Art Museum, the Offices of Historic Alexandria, the Ackland Art Museum, and the National Gallery of Art.

Christine Howald (PhD) is an expert in Asian art provenance research. As deputy director of the Zentralarchiv (Central Archive), she co-leads the provenance research team at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Christine manages the global research and network initiative on provenance and Asian art with the National Museum of Asian Art (Smithsonian Institution). She has published widely and is coeditor of two issues of the Journal for Art Market Studies on Asian Art (2018 and 2020) as well as the publication “em//power//relations: A Booklet on Postcolonial Provenance Research” (2022). Amongst others, she currently runs the research project “Traces of the ‘Boxer War’ in German Museum Collections,” a cooperative project of seven German museums together with the Palace Museum Beijing.
Image: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum / Claudius Kamps CC BY-SA 4.0