The Getty Provenance Index (GPI) was launched in the 1980s and by the turn of the millennium had become an indispensable resource for curators and researchers. Drawing on a vast pool of archival material, including dealer stock books dating back to the 16th century, this searchable database made a bewildering array of information legible, allowing anyone to survey the ownership history of thousands of artworks stretching back to the Renaissance. In May this year the Getty Research Institute launched a radically reconfigured version – though those who miss the GPI’s previous version can still use it on the Getty’s website – making use of the enormous amounts of metadata buried in the existing records to help users map connections between works, and between buyers and sellers, in more detail than ever before.
Ten years in the making, the new database – which is especially strong on records relating to European and American paintings – comes at a time when provenance is an increasingly vexed question for museums, dealers and auction houses. The more ownership histories are made available, the better it is for the art world as a whole. Sandra van Ginhoven and Lily Pregill, who jointly led the project, made sure that institutions wanting to share provenance information with the Getty could do so as seamlessly as possible: they adopted Linked Open Data as the new standard for information.
Getting a better sense of the nexus of relationships surrounding certain artworks can help tell art-historical stories on a grand scale – such as how the auction market emerged in Paris and London – as well as affording more intimate insights, for example, into how artworks were distributed within
households.
‘All this information can tell bigger stories about how artworks have moved over time,’ says van Ginhoven. ‘Who are the agents who have fostered this circulation and developed the structures that facilitate it? Our goal is to activate this data in new ways and at scale, allowing for patterns to emerge across the dataset – while making sure people can still find the data they need.’
Arjun Sajip, web editor of Apollo.
