The Provenance

A museum owns the painting. History may disagree. At fifty-one, Marisol Brandbury-Pelletier knows the Halsey Falls Museum of American Art as intimately as her own home. As Senior Curator, she has spent years caring for its galleries, catalogs, conservation records, and institutional memory. Then certified mail arrives from the Commission for Looted Art in Europe. The letter raises a question the museum can no longer avoid: whether a painting long held in its collection was sold in 1938 under circumstances that make its ownership far less certain than the accession records suggest.
The paper trail leads back to Munich, to Greta Westheim-Goldstein, to a gallerist named Theodor Fischer, and to a sale price that does not match the painting's true value. For Marisol, the problem is not only legal or curatorial. It is moral. Every memo, board record, archive note, and provenance gap must be read again. The Provenance is a quiet, intelligent art-world suspense novel about museums, memory, restitution, and the cost of discovering that an institution's certainty may have been built on someone else's loss.