The Art Institute is taking the right step to determine ownership of its entire collection

The Art Institute of Chicago made the right move with its decision to hire a director to oversee provenance research for the museum’s multitude of artworks and artifacts.

We hope the hiring will help resolve the museum’s disputed ownership claim to a drawing by Austrian impressionist Egon Schiele that the Manhattan district attorney says was stolen by the Nazis decades ago.

The Sun-Times reported Monday that the institution named Jacques Schuhmacher its first executive director of provenance research.

The task of Schuhmacher and his four-person team is to correctly determine the previous ownership of objects in the museum holdings.

And this is even more important as museums around the world are being sued or otherwise challenged for holding art that was stolen by Nazis or looted from Native American burial sites during World War II.

Earlier this year, the Fowler Museum at UCLA returned to Ghana seven royal artifacts that were stolen from the African country by the British 150 years ago.

The Denver Art Museum returned to Cambodia in 2022 four important pieces that were looted from the country and sold to the institution through an unscrupulous art dealer who later died.

Last February, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg filed a lawsuit against the Art Institute, alleging that one of the museum’s drawings, “Russian Prisoner of War” by Austrian artist Egon Schiele, was stolen by the Nazis from a Jewish cabaret star during the Holocaust.

Schiele’s work was of interest to Bragg. His office has returned eleven Schiele works stolen by the Nazis to their rightful heirs. Some were in the hands of private collectors, but others were found in museums owned by Bragg’s office, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Morgan Library – both in New York City; The Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California; the Allen Museum of Art at Oberlin College; and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

The Chicago Schiele drawing was confiscated from the Art Institute while the case is ongoing. The Art Institute said the allegations were “unfounded and false.”

James Rondeau, president of the Art Institute, said there is now a “much broader awareness of these provenance issues.”

“There is much more intense public scrutiny and of course more intense legal scrutiny,” he said. “But this work occupies not only the legal domain, but also the ethical and moral domain of property.”

Museum visitors deserve to know that the works of art and artifacts they view were legally acquired.

At the Art Institute, Schuhmacher and his group have a duty to ensure that this is the case.

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