Neue Galerie Finally Posts Nazi-Era Provenance (Sort Of)

After searching in vain for an online version of the press release or a description of the Neue Galerie’s upcoming van Gogh show, I perused the museum’s website and discovered that at least one artworld luminary took my suggested New Year’s resolution seriously:
The Neue Galerie has finally gotten around to posting the provenance of works in its collection.
But you decide whether the long wait—not to mention the paucity of information and number of steps you must perform to access just one artwork’s listing—was worth it:
The Provenance page (accessed from the Neue Galerie’s website after clicking “General Information” in the lefthand column and then “Provenance” in the lower right corner) includes this passage in its introduction:
The vast majority of works in the Neue Galerie collection have sufficiently complete provenance records to rule out the possibility of [Nazi-era] misappropriation; those records are posted here. Research on individual works with incomplete provenance is ongoing, with current information also posted here; updates will be posted on this website as they become available.
You must then scroll down past a list of non-clickable addresses for seven external provenance-research websites. At the bottom of this, if your patience has not yet been exhausted, you will arrive at a “click here” link for the Neue Galerie’s provenance postings. These include only those works that are owned by the museum, not the many works on loan to the museum from Ronald Lauder‘s personal collection. Clicking that link transports you to a “Collection Overview” page. At the bottom of that are clickable boxes—“Search Now” and “Browse By”—for provenance. Now we’re getting somewhere! (Maybe)
Scrolling over the “Browse By” button generates a pop-up button for “Artist.” That turns out to be your only browsing option. I clicked on “Artist,” then on “Schiele.” This brought up merely two choices: a painting and a drawing from the museum’s extensive array of works by that artist.
So I chose the painting, “Town among Greenery (The Old City III).” Here, after this extensive workout for my righthand index finger, is what I finally came up with:
Egon Schiele, Vienna
Galerie Arnot, Vienna
Johannes Graf zu Löwenstein
Würthle & Sohn, Vienna
Otto and Marguerite Manley, Vienna; Scarsdale, New York
Neue Galerie New York
In other words—no dates and no way of knowing if there are Nazi-era gaps in the work’s ownership history. What’s more, it appears that you can’t search by provenance keywords: I went back and hit the “Search” button after typing in “Würthle” and then “Würthle & Sohn.” This elicited no results, even though that Vienna dealer is listed in the Schiele’s provenance, above. Searchable ownership is important for Nazi victims and heirs trying to locate works from their families’ collections and also for finding the names of certain key dealers who were known to have collaborated with the Nazis in expropriating Jewish-owned collections.
No further comment necessary. Been there. Done that.
This is beating a dead horse.