Named Experts in Fine Art Auction Text from the Getty Provenance Index German Sales (1900–1945)

Mathew Henrickson

doi:10.5334/johd.415

Abstract

The dataset is an enhanced subset of the “Getty Provenance Index – German Sales art auction data”. It contains the extracted names of art experts and connoisseurs who authenticated works appearing for sale at auctions in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (1900–1945). This presents an opportunity to research networks of experts, the range of styles of artworks they authenticated, and to critically evaluate the role of named scholars in the conflicted context of commercial art sales and scholarly knowledge. It was processed using SQL data extraction and Large Language Model (LLM) data mining.

References

Bähr, A. (2018). Kunstexpertise im Auktionskatalog: Zuschreibung, Autorität und Markttransparenz. In B. Savoy, & C. Wedepohl (Eds.), Räume der Kunstexpertise (pp. 219–236). De Gruyter Berlin.
Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Banerjee, S., Agarwal, A., & Singla, S. (2025). LLMs will always hallucinate, and we need to live with this. In K. Arai (Ed.), Intelligent Systems and Applications (pp. 624–648). Springer Nature Switzerland. 10.1007/978-3-031-99965-9_39
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Baudrillard, J. (1972). Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe. Gallimard.
Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Davis, K. (2019). Old metadata in a new world: Standardizing the Getty Provenance Index for linked data. Art Libraries Journal, 44(4), 162–166. 10.1017/alj.2019.24
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Fletcher, P., & Helmreich, A. (2018). Networked. In A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art (pp. 83–101). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 10.1002/9781118856321.ch6
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Friedländer, M. J. (1946). Von Kunst und Kennerschaft. Cassirer & Oprecht Basel.
Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Gaskell, I. (2002). Tradesmen as Scholars: Interdependencies in the Study and Exchange of Art. Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline. https://www.academia.edu/79734160/Tradesmen_as_Scholars_Interdependencies_in_the_Study_and_Exchange_of_Art
Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Gemma Team, & Google DeepMind. (2024). 2024-06-27 Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.00118
Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Gonzalez-Agirre, A., Pàmies, M., Llop, J., Baucells, I., Da Dalt, S., Tamayo, D., Saiz, J. J., Espuña, J. P., Aula-Blaso, J., Mina, M., Pikabea, I., Rubio, A., Shevts, A., Sallés, A., Lacunza, I., Palomar, J., Falcão, J., Tormo, L., Vasquez-Reina, L., Marimon, M., … Villegas, M. (2025). Salamandra Technical Report. 10.48550/arXiv.2502.08489
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Harpring, P. (2010). Development of the Getty vocabularies: AAT, TGN, ULAN, and CONA. Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, 29(1), 67–72. 10.1086/adx.29.1.27949541
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Hwaszcz, K., Vandeghinste, V., Misersky, J., & Piasecki, M. (2025, October 2). LLMs for Social Sciences and Humanities. LLMs for SSH – CLARIN 2025, Vösendorf, Austria.
Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Jiang, A. Q., Sablayrolles, A., Mensch, A., Bamford, C., Chaplot, D. S., Casas, D. de las, Bressand, F., Lengyel, G., Lample, G., Saulnier, L., Lavaud, L. R., Lachaux, M.-A., Stock, P., Scao, T. L., Lavril, T., Wang, T., Lacroix, T., & Sayed, W. E. (2023). Mistral 7B. arXiv. 10.48550/ARXIV.2310.06825
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Karjus, A. (2025). Machine-assisted quantitizing designs: Augmenting humanities and social sciences with artificial intelligence. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12(1), 277. 10.1057/s41599-025-04503-w
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Keraghel, I., Morbieu, S., & Nadif, M. (2024). Recent advances in Named Entity Recognition: A comprehensive survey and comparative study. 10.48550/arXiv.2401.10825
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Kräussl, R. (2007). The German art market (SSRN Scholarly Paper No. 986299). Social Science Research Network. 10.2139/ssrn.986299
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Manchanda, J., Boettcher, L., Westphalen, M., & Jasser, J. (2025). The Open Source Advantage in Large Language Models (LLMs). arXiv. 10.48550/arXiv.2412.12004
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Meta Team. (2024). The Llama 3 herd of models. 10.48550/arXiv.2407.21783
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Montias, J. M. (1999). Auction sales of works of art in Amsterdam (1597–1638). Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (NKJ)/Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, 50, 144–193. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43888643
Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Mukanova, A., Milosz, M., Dauletkaliyeva, A., Nazyrova, A., Yelibayeva, G., Kuzin, D., & Kussepova, L. (2024). LLM-powered natural language text processing for ontology enrichment. Applied Sciences, 14(13), 5860. 10.3390/app14135860
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Oosterlinck, K., & Radermecker, A.-S. (2019). “The Master of …”: Creating names for art history and the art market. Journal of Cultural Economics, 43(1), 57–95. 10.1007/s10824-018-9329-1
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Paul, B., & Levis, N. (1995). “Collecting is the noblest of all passions!”: Wilhelm von Bode and the Relationship between museums, art dealing, and private collecting. International Journal of Political Economy, 25(2), 9–32. 10.1080/08911916.1995.11643899
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Petropoulos, J. (2016). Art Dealer Networks in the Third Reich and in the Postwar Period. 10.1177/0022009416637417
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Sanderson, R. (2024). “Implementing linked art in a multi-modal database for cross-collection discovery.” Open Library of Humanities 1(1). 10.16995/olh.15407
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Schich, M., Huemer, C., Adamczyk, P., Manovich, L., & Liu, Y.-Y. (2017). Network dimensions in the Getty Provenance Index. arXiv. 10.48550/arXiv.1706.02804
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Schuhmacher, J., & De Waal, E. (2024). Nazi-Era Provenance of Museum Collections: A Research Guide. London: UCL Press in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum. 10.2307/jj.9474316
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Watrelot, M. (2023). Wilhelm von Bode and the American art market: The Rudolphe Kann Collection (1st ed.). Routledge. 10.4324/9781003385394
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Yang, A., Li, A., Yang, B., Zhang, B., Hui, B., Zheng, B., Yu, B., Gao, C., Huang, C., Lv, C., Zheng, C., Liu, D., Zhou, F., Huang, F., Hu, F., Ge, H., Wei, H., Lin, H., Tang, J., … Qiu, Z. (2025). Qwen3 Technical Report. 10.48550/arXiv.2505.09388
Open DOI Search in Google Scholar Back to article

Named Experts in Fine Art Auction Text from the Getty Provenance Index German Sales (1900–1945)

Abstract

Paradigm

My account