Late last month, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts made headlines when it voluntarily compensated the heirs of a Jewish art dealer for a 17th-century Dutch portrait by Eglon van der Neer that it discovered had been stolen by the Nazis. Behind the rare preemptive compensation was Victoria S. Reed, a woman with an even rarer job: curator for provenance.

Since 2003, Reed has worked in this small and unconventional field, scouring everything from museum catalogues to archives in Washington, D.C., to investigate the ownership history of undocumented or poorly documented artworks in the museum's collection that could have changed hands in under the Third Reich. Her discovery shined light on a growing group of researchers — there are others at MoMA (which has a dedicated Web site for the initiative), the National Gallery of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art — devoted to Nazi-era provenance research. Formerly a research associate at the Princeton University Art Museum, Reed never intended to spend her time investigating Nazi loot. "It wasn't anything that I really sought out," she said. "Maybe it found me."

Institutional interest in this research is relatively new. In 1998, 44 countries signed the Washington Principles, guidelines for identification and restitution of Nazi-era looted art. In April 2000, a group of museum directors including MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry and Philippe de Montebello of the Met testified in front of a presidential commission to affirm their commitment to the research. Still, some institutions, like the Leopold Museum in Austria, are said to have knowingly lent work to other museums with questionable provenance over the last two decades. Furthermore, the Washington Principles remain a nonbinding agreement, and cases of restitution are relatively rare — despite the frequent presence of certain ongoing cases in the headlines — though increasing.

ARTINFO sat down with Reed to discuss what a "curator for provenance" actually does, how she's managed to make so many rapid-fire discoveries, and why the issue of provenance is, for her, more intellectual than moral.

How many discrete works have you dealt with since youstarted?

There are a few works that I have really researched in depth, there are many others that I have done provenance research on, and then thereare, of course, handfuls of works that I have just checked. So, easily hundreds,probably thousands, but I'm not sure you should quote me on any sort of accuratefigure.

How do you decide what takes first priority?

We want to look at works of art that could have changedhands in Europe during the Nazi period. That immediately precludes about halfthe European painting collection, which came into the museum either before 1933or was in an American collection for a long time and just wasn't in Europeduring the operative period. We've been able to identify perhaps our highestpriority works of art that have unanswered questions — objects that seem to be associatedwith individuals who lost property in Europe during this time — and they'refeatured on our Web site. Right now we have seven works of art on that list.

Why do you feature them on the site?

In order to draw attention to them and hopefully bring in additionalinformation from other people if they see these works on our site. The vander Neer is one of the paintings that has been on this list since 2000, and inpart because we featured it on our Web site, Fred Westfield, WalterWestfeld's nephew, was able to locate the painting.

Are there other paintings that have been discovered thatway?

In 2004, we had a little painting, a Madonna and child thatwe had purchased in 1970. We had no knowledge of its 20th-centuryprovenance and we were contacted by a scholar in France who was writing herdissertation on reliquary triptychs and she had additional bibliography aboutour little painting showing it as the central panel of a little triptych, atwhich time it was in a Polish private collection. And so again we updated theprovenance records for this painting with the name of the owner, not knowingreally the significance of the name or anything about the collection. And Ithink in a matter of weeks, we were contacted by the Polish embassy, which wasrepresenting the granddaughter of the man who had owned this painting in 1900.She had been present during the painting's seizure and was able to attest that this work had not only been in her family'spossession, but was plundered from their apartment during the Warsaw uprising.

If you discover a work that has a suspicious provenance,where do you take that information?

To the curatorial staff and to our deputy director. The mostrecent example of that would be the tapestries. We reached a financialsettlement over some tapestries this spring and it was in the course ofresearching the collection that I came across a red-flag name in theprovenance. These were tapestries that had been in a Nazi forced sale in 1935,so as soon as I knew that they had been in this sale that was very probablyproblematic, that was when I alerted people that we would need to dofurther research on this. And of course the more research you do the more timeand resources you need to allocate to it, so you do sort of have to check inwith people to let them know you are doing this work.

What percentage of your time do you spend on that type ofretroactive research?

Maybe 50 percent of the time. It's hard to say because myjob is really part proactive research, this kind of going back researching anddocumenting the collection, and of course the other half of it is reactive.Ideally, I would like to minimize the reactive and focus on the proactive, butof course there are time-sensitive things that come up and I have to respond toinquiries or to acquisitions or if there is a claim on something in thecollection. But I do try to balance it with the proactive. Because this is ourcollection it's really our responsibility to research and to document it.

You mentioned the two other cases that have beenresolved in the past year. Can you talk a little bit about those?

It's been a busy year. Last year, we deaccessioned andreturned to Italy a little embroidery that we learned had been probably stolenfrom the Diocesan Museum in Trent in Italy during World War II. We had the little paneldepicting the burial and the delivery of the news of Saint Vigilus's death.We've had this in the collection since 1946 and we never knew the subjectmatter. We were alerted, I think in 2008, by a scholar in the field that in factour panel had gone missing from Trent during the war. It's very hard toidentify a theft of course because you're not going to find a paper trail, so Ilooked at the Trent museum catalogues and subsequent publications of thisseries of embroideries to verify that it in fact had once been there and at acertain point, namely after the war, the little panel showing the death waspublished as location unknown or missing. It seemed pretty clear that it hadbeen illicitly removed and so we contacted the museum. They were able to verifythat the series had been put into storage before the war and that when it wastaken out of storage, this little one was missing. And because we purchased itin 1946, it seemed very likely that it was a wartime theft. So the trusteesvoted to deaccession that and we returned it to Trent.

What was the second?

The second one was a financial settlement that we reached inMarch over the tapestries that I mentioned earlier. The tapestries had beenpart of the stock of Margraf Galleries, a consortium of galleries in Berlin runby a Jewish couple, Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer. They fledGermany in 1933 to avoid persecution and in their absence the management of thegalleries was turned over to Aryan administrators and very quickly it wasdecided that the galleries should be closed and their stock liquidated. It wassold of in a series of auctions in 1935 at very low prices; the tapestries werein one of these liquidation sales, which today would be considered forcedsales, not legally valid. So the tapestries ended up on the German art market,they were purchased by another Jewish collector who brought them to the UnitedStates and gave them to us in the '50s. Once we ascertained the details of thesale in 1935 we contacted the heirs of the Oppenheimers and negotiated afinancial settlement, which really effected a legal sale.

Because there are a certain number of works in thecollection, and within that a certain number that may have been looted in the Nazi period,do you ever feel like you will "finish" this job after a certain number ofyears?

Well I don't know that you're ever really done with thiswork, but we do have a handle on at least the paintings collection, which is,as you say, a discrete number of works. There are other parts of the collectionthat have been studied much less. I imagine it's going to take a bit of time, somaybe someday we'll be done but I don't think anytime in the near future.

What do you feel is restitution's place in the modernAmerican museum?

I think certainly provenance is an issue that museums needto be aware of, and I think museums are much more aware of it now more than theyused to be. And the way that museums build up their collections, the waymuseums document their collections has really changed. I think that people aremuch more diligent now. I think with the advent of the internet we have a meansof being transparent about our documentation now and how to share thisinformation with the public. So I believe attitudes are really changing and theway museums are collecting is changing. It's not going to change overnight, butI think we've sort of rounded that corner.

Do you feel a moral compulsion to do what youdo, or are you more interested in it from aprofessional research standpoint?

Your question touches on the fact that conducting provenance research involvesnot only art history research, but also the law and ethical considerations. Idon't make administrative decisions for the museum; as you know, I do theresearch and share the results of this research online. But the fact that Ihave this job at all is the result of a shift in museum ethics — museumcollection practices have changed in the wake of museum ethics changing. In myrole, I certainly have an obligation to the museum and to the public toresearch the collection and share the results of this research, to ensure thatthe MFA is upholding a high professional and ethical standard.

It's interesting that for you it's more about the researchprocess than the end result.

That's definitely true.