The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection has been housed at the V&A since 2008. The Gilberts began collecting in the 1960s, and Arthur continued to do so until his death in 2001. As a private collection housed in a public institution, the Gilbert Collection offers a window into the history of private collecting and the art market the Gilberts were collecting in. This insight into the art market has permitted pioneering research into histories of provenance. As part of the major redevelopment of the Gilbert Galleries, due to open in March 2026, these stories will be a part of the permanent display.
Today, provenance is generally understood to refer to the study of the ownership histories of objects and is seen as an important part of professional practice. However, during the years that the Gilberts were collecting, provenance was commonly perceived as ‘prestigious ownership’. When purchasing a historic object, collectors would be told its provenance as a way of inferring a notable lineage of previous owners. This is often considered a marker of quality and value, and the Gilberts were drawn to objects that had been owned by reputable collectors or famous figures. An object owned by royalty would have this provenance as a headline, whilst others owned by relatively unknown collectors would be a footnote in the cataloguing records. It was also not unusual to find significant gaps of time where no one knew who had owned an object at all, but the Gilberts, like their contemporary collectors, bought in good faith and did not recognise this lack of information as a concern.
Wider public interest in museum collections’ provenance has begun to grow over recent decades, with many people calling for the restitution of objects that were forcibly removed from their original owners or taken from their originating countries and communities in ways that would not be considered legally or morally acceptable today. This has caused a shift in the way the general public, as well as museum and art professionals, understand the term. Museums have now evolved their practices in reference to this with an aim to record an unbroken chain of provenance for each object and to be open about ongoing research and what is still unknown.
The V&A strives to achieve this and, in doing so, was one of the first UK museums to hire a curator solely dedicated to provenance research. The first iteration of this role took the form of a ‘Provenance and Spoliation Curator’ in 2018, funded by the Gilbert Trust for the Arts. In this position, Jacques Schuhmacher’s proactive provenance research was focused on the Gilbert Collection.
During the decades that the Gilberts were collecting, the art market was largely unregulated in reference to the substantial displacement of artworks during the Second World War after collectors from the 1930s and 40s, mainly Jewish or those with a Jewish bloodline, suffered Nazi persecution and spoliation. Though many inventories were created to document the dispossession of their victims, these were never consolidated and often did not survive the war; therefore, determining whether an object may have been targeted by the Nazis is a complex task. This is precisely why the Gilbert Collection launched a three-year research project, engaging Schuhmacher to uncover the histories of these objects that had long been hidden and forgotten.
As a result, a temporary display running between 2019 – 21 entitled ‘Concealed Histories: Uncovering the Story of Nazi Looting’ displayed eight objects in the collection connected to Jewish collectors and their families who suffered under the Nazis – for example, a clock owned by Nathan Ruben Fränkel (1848 –1909), whose descendants fled Germany and survived the war in hiding, which was last catalogued in his collection in 1913 and resurfaced in 1975, subsequently bought by the Gilberts. This pioneering display was the first of its kind in a UK museum and emphasises how many objects with links to this period in history ended up in public and private collections, often acquired without knowledge of their background or the hands they had passed through.
This crucial research also culminated in the V&A/UCL Press publication ‘Nazi-Era Provenance of Museum Collections: A research guide’, authored by Schuhmacher, where he delineates the purpose of such work as ‘not to simply add a name and date to an object’s record for the sake of archival completeness; it serves to ensure that the Nazis’ worldview and their actions do not live on unchallenged in the galleries and storerooms of our museums today’. New research on 20th-century Nazi looting of Gilbert objects continues.
While Nazi-era research was a significant part of the three-year project, it was not limited to just this, and the investigation continued across the collection. This led to discovering that, unbeknownst to Arthur Gilbert, a 4,250-year-old Anatolian gold ewer in the collection had been illegally excavated and exported in the 1970s. In light of this revelation, the Gilbert Trust donated the ewer to the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara, Turkey, in October 2021, where it remains on display today. As part of its restitution, the Gilbert Collection commissioned contemporary artist Adi Toch to respond to the historic ewer with a new piece.
This ground-breaking provenance research now has a permanent legacy in the new Gilbert Galleries in gallery 71A, where Adi Toch’s response piece will be displayed alongside a permanent version of the Concealed Histories display. Including these features in a permanent room dedicated to provenance research is part of the V&A’s wider ongoing commitment to speaking openly about where our objects come from and further prompting us to not shy away from these conversations, but in fact instigate them.
Using a variety of interpretation, our designed labels take on a different format from the other Gilbert gallery rooms by employing a dual label system. This allows us to share these complex histories by prompting the visitor to flip between the two labels – the cut-out sections directly indicating the difference between what we thought before the research was conducted and what we know now.
The centre of gallery 71A focuses on Soviet looting through the presentation of two pairs of holy gates from the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery in Ukraine. Originally, it was believed these gates were gifted by Tsarina Catherine II of Russia to the monastery churches. However, we now know this to be not true after museum professionals at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra National Preserve reached out and revealed details of the gates commission by the monastery’s authorities. From this, a collaborative partnership was born between the two institutions, and more provenance history of the gates has been uncovered and understood than ever before, even confirming the identities of the makers. Because of the important provenance discoveries made during this partnership, a larger-than-usual design of the interpretive scheme, spanning the full width of the gates, is utilised to tell the full story of these objects’ provenance in a way that is not always possible in traditional gallery labels.
This collaboration has also triggered wider research at the V&A into Ukrainian heritage and is the focus of a symposium planned for September 2026. Institutions across the UK are making a concerted effort to decolonise Ukrainian heritage, best exemplified by the International Council of Museums’ (ICOM UK) new guide to the cultural heritage of Ukraine, ‘Supporting Decolonisation in Museums: Focus on Ukraine’. This guide equips museum and heritage professionals with reliable information to ‘challenge harmful colonial narratives, negative stereotyping, misrepresentation and mislabelling of Ukraine and its cultural heritage’. It features a number of case studies that have sought to achieve this, including the Gilbert Collection’s holy gates from Kyiv.
The Gilbert Collection has supported the V&A’s in-depth provenance work to shine more light on these histories, particularly of Soviet and Nazi looting. Our combined efforts and the permanent inclusion of these in the new Gilbert Galleries is a statement of the V&A’s championing of provenance work, allowing us to reach our audience in the best way we know how. A webpage dedicated to provenance research provides a snapshot into the work that is carried out across the museum and reflects our aim to share this information openly with our audiences, including those that may shine an uncomfortable light on our past practices.
