The purpose of my project is to examine the metadata available for Nazi-era Provenance paintings within The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Provenance Research Collection and determine if there is sufficient provenance information to serialize these objects Linked Art's Provenance modeling. The parameters for this model type can be found here; in short, the model deals mainly with provenance "activities" or "events." These elements will relay information such as custody transfers, acquisition activity, and object rediscovery.

A note about Nazi-era Provenance:

During WWII, the Nazi party looted over one million artworks from various sources. Though the Nazi Regime stole artwork for multiple reasons, each justification relies on the idea of "ethnic cleansing." For example, the Nazis looted art created by those persecuted in the Holocaust, including Jewish people, disabled folks, people of color, LGBTQIA+ communities, and Romas. Such art pieces were detrimental to the Nazi sentiment because they celebrated the talents of those diaspora mentioned and/or depicted modernist art movements such as expressionism and abstract. The Nazis considered modernist art an insult to the "German feeling" as their art style of choice was classical art that depicted "Hellenistic" beauty; only in this context, Hellenistic functions as a synonym for "Aryan.  
 Entartete Kunst (The Degenerate Art Exhibition) produced by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party is another example of how taking control of cultural institutions is a forceful, deeply nefarious facet of a fascist power grab. This exhibition displayed more than 700 works of modernist art for the sole purpose of defamation. The pieces ranged the spectrum of modernist art movements, including expressionist and abstract art. While some of these pieces met the unfortunate fate of immediate destruction, some ended up in art exhibits created to mock the aforementioned groups. The exhibit organization was deliberately sloppy: pictures were hung erratically, paintings were unframed, and a price accompanied some pieces to show their low-monetary worth. Attendees of the presentation were encouraged to laugh at the display and make rude remarks. "Degeneracy" was a crucial idea in Nazi theory and functioned as a method of portraying the persecuted groups' "genetic deformities." 
 Although the disrespect and humiliation levied against these artworks were despicable, at least the "curators" preserved the works to some degree. Those artworks spared a fate of destruction, including those used in exhibits such as Entartete Kunst, constitute a body of work with "Nazi-era Provenance."  
 With all of this in mind, it is clear that such provenance is highly dependent on event documentation in an artwork's life, including those elements specified by the Linked Art's Provenance model. 

Dataset:

In order to narrow the scope of my project, my dataset only includes artworks held at the Met's Cloisters with Nazi-era Provenance. There are 1,155 objects within this narrowed scope. The decision to only examine The Cloisters' collections significantly decreased the number of objects, as many different art mediums are utilized in this collection.

Method:

Below I will break down my methods in steps; the python code utilized in each of these steps and the resulting JSON files can be found on this repository.

Step 1: Use web scraping to download Nazi-era Provenance objects from the provenance research project list. This step required a URL split stage, which was achieved by going through all 15 pages of the filtered collection, opening the developer tool, and using that specific URL to download a list of Object IDs. The JSON files for each page can be found within the "Cloister_Parse" folder. The result of this step is the"ObjectsIDs.json" file.

Step 2: Use a secret API to download each Object as a JSON file with their respective metadata. The result of this step can be found within the "Object_IDs" folder.

Step 3: Use regular expressions and glob to create a JSON file with a list of object metadata that includes data that can be used for provenance. At this time, I noticed there is virtually no "event" specific provenance data, so I pulled out information that could be used for provenance through inductive reasoning: 1. Artist Name 2. Culture (culture depicted in art or culture of the artist) 3. Accession Year 4. Object Begin/End Date 5. Artist Bio 6. City (typically coincides with culture) 7. Country (typically coincides with culture) 8. State (typically coincides with culture)

The result of this step is the file "All_Obs.json." Additional code within this step that did not contribute to the writing of the JSON file was executed in order to find out how many objects actually contained values for the above elements.

Step 4: Since no explicit provenance information was attained through the API, I used Beautiful Soup and the import requests library to get the information on the webpage itself that refers to provenance and credit ('prov' and 'creditLine'), and combined the this information with that of step 3 for a full JSON file. The result of this step can be found within "All_Obs_With_Prov.json."

Step 5: Serialize the data into JSON LD Linked Art Data; note that this data only really includes if the acquisition type and where the object came from. Unfortunately, unless the acquistion type was a gift, it was unclear how the museum acquired it. As a result, I only serialized objects that were "gifts" rather than a purchase by the museum. The result of this can be found in the file "Final_Linked_Art_Example.json"

Conclusion:

I am surprised that the provenance elements on the collection's web page by utilizing Beautiful Soup were unattainable through an API query. The Met's website contains extensive API information, including endpoints, parameters, and directions on how to execute these queries; however, the API itself was not viable in querying for provenance information. As noted in step 1, I had to utilize a "secret API" to execute the API request necessary to find the desired information. Although I was able to achieve my goal of serialization, I was only able to do so for objects that were acquired through donation; this is disappointing, as there are many different types of acquisition provenance. I believe that explicit provenance information should be attainable through a simple API query, rather than a series of workarounds, especially from an institution as distinguished as The Metropolitan Museum of Art.