Acquisition of art and antiquities intelligence requires knowledge in several areas such as history, art markets, conservation, art law and even finance, and there are multiple degree programs covering these areas. What is missing, however, is professional-level training, the so-called source study, or research on the history of object ownership, from creation to today. This kind of research is crucial because many objects have been illegally deleted from historical sites or, in the case of Nazi-era Europe, were forcibly taken from private collections. Many of these art and antiquities continue to be sold and placed in permanent museum collections in the United States and Europe.
If you are an art appraiser, collector, dealer, museum curator or registrar, it becomes essential to know how to track the history of an object and whether it was stolen or robbed. Lisa Duffy-Zeballos, director of artistic research at the New York International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), told Observer that “there is no professional training”, although “more and more people are responsible for this knowledge.”
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Duffy-Zeballos refers to a master’s degree program that focuses on source research and currently does not exist in the United States. IFAR, a nonprofit that hopes to fill the 55-year-old, provides information on counterfeit, forgery, fraud and identity verification, launches a seven-level online course called, simply called Source Research Introduction. The latest meeting between Duffy-Zeballos and art historian Theresa Kutasz Christensen began yesterday (May 6).
In each meeting, participants are introduced to online tools and databases for tracking stolen and plundered art and artifacts, such as those maintained by IFAR, Interpol, and FBI, and show how archives are consulted to track the creation, display and sale of archives. Duffy-Zeballos said they were also assigned to groups to investigate “source gaps.”
In institutions such as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Chicago Academy of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, full-time source researchers describe their training as largely. This course reflects hands-on approaches. “It’s a way to learn,” Ifar’s executive director Lindsey Schneider told Observer. Source researchers have no clear career path. “We designed our courses as skills-based, not theoretically based, with the focus on why the source matters.”
Today’s source researchers must be well versed in a broad range of knowledge, from identifying culturally significant objects to understanding international laws regarding cultural heritage and export embargoes. Smugglers often try to evade these laws, and the course trains participants to discover fake documents, verify physical characteristics that may cause red flags, and evaluate the legality of various records, whether invoices, transfer of ownership or export licenses. “These things may be difficult to study, but it’s possible. It all depends on the object. But, in fact, being able to identify fake documents is something we’re going through.”
Artworks stolen from the Nazi era have been a central focus of source research for the past 30 years, especially since 1998, the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum have held landmark meetings. Representatives from forty-four countries, as well as 13 NGOs, museums and auction houses, convened representatives who formulated the Washington Principles, which declared that “art confiscated by the Nazis and subsequently unrecovered should be identified” and returned wherever possible. There are differences in abiding by these principles. Nazi officials were stolen in the 1930s, and the German army tended to be the biggest headlines during World War II – partly due to the value of personal works, but Duffy-Zeballos stressed that any understanding of source research must be far beyond this era. “Increasingly, the realms of Buddhist antiquities, colonial repatriation and Native American objects,” she said.
In the first few months of 2025, American museums returned antiques to countries around the world. In February, the Metropolitan Museum of Art repatriated a 7th-century British Columbia bronze head in Griffin, Greece, and is believed to have been stolen from the archaeological museum in Olympia in the 1930s. In March, the Chicago Art Institute returned the 12th-century Buddha sculpture to Nepal. Also in February, the Cleveland Museum of Art announced plans to return to Türkiye, a 2,000-year-old bronze statue of Greco-Roman that has been robbed from the ancient city (Bubon).
It is easy to surrender or repatriate items from the museum’s permanent collection. The legal team is often involved, or, like the bronze statue of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Antiquities Trafficking Department of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has filed criminal cases against museums across the country in recent years. “Recovery is controversial: they are controversial, involve moral and legal issues, and have a strong diplomatic element,” Leila A. Amineddoleh, founder of Amineddoleh & Associates LLC, told observers last year. “Cultural projects are different from other objects, they have cultural significance. So some people feel objects in a transcendent way. Therefore, cultural heritage has political and diplomatic currency.”
Duffy-Zeballos said IFC and its courses don’t care about politics. “Our goal is to get people to know more about these issues and work to achieve transparency, which has been a problem in terms of where the art world comes from. It’s a very legitimate privacy issue.” She added that to enable people to do this work openly, ethically and collaboratively, you must be able to see if there are gaps in the origins of artworks or artifacts.
