Modern Migrants: Paintings from Europe in US Museums

Overview

• Website: https://www.modernmigrants.art/
• PI: Prof. Dr. Lynn Rother
• Funding: Volkswagen Foundation (Lichtenberg Program) + Leuphana University; additional EUR 1.1 million from State of Lower Saxony and Volkswagen Foundation (2024)
• Timeline: November 1, 2019 – October 31, 2027
• Distinction: The first university research program producing provenance linked open data

Description

Modern Migrants examines thousands of provenance records of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Modern paintings created in Europe between 1860 and 1945, now housed in US museum collections. The project investigates when, why, and how these paintings migrated from Europe to America, with special attention to political upheaval (wars, National Socialism, persecution), dynamics of transatlantic art markets, and individual and institutional collecting strategies.

Rather than treating provenance as isolated object histories, the project reconceptualizes provenance information as empirical evidence of cultural and social phenomena — enabling questions about temporal, spatial, social, and conceptual trends and network dimensions.

The Dataset

• 6,295 artworks with provenance data gathered from 36 museums
• 149 museums across 116 US cities identified as relevant to the project scope
• ~509 artists from 47 countries who worked in Europe between 1860–1945
• 287 artists currently represented in the dataset
• Over 60% of tracked artists lack published catalogues raisonnés
• Dataset will be published under a Creative Commons license
• The team acknowledges current data bias toward large East Coast museums and actively seeks to broaden diversity

Confirmed Participating Museums

• The Art Institute of Chicago
• The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York
• The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
• Cleveland Museum of Art
• Philadelphia Museum of Art

The full list of 36 museums is not publicly published on the website.

Methodology

Data Science

• Operates at the intersection of provenance research and data science
• Uses AI and machine learning to process historical provenance texts
• Explores Natural Language Processing (NLP) for knowledge extraction
• Addresses challenges of incomplete records, contradictions, vagueness, uncertainty, and subjectivity

Linked Open Data Standards

• CIDOC-CRM (ontology for cultural heritage information)
• Linked Art (application profile of CIDOC-CRM for art museum data)
• Transforms thousands of provenance texts into Linked Open Data (LOD) format

Research Philosophy

• Provenance serves dual purpose: individual object histories AND empirical information analyzable through computational methods
• Non-profit research lab at a state-funded German university with "no agenda but to generate new and useful knowledge"

Team

• Prof. Dr. Lynn Rother — Director
• Dr. Max Koss — Research Associate (since March 2021)
• Dr. Bárbara Romero Ferrón — Research Associate (since August 2020)
• Coco Amy Rufer, M.A. — Research Assistant (since July 2025)
• Fabio Mariani — Affiliated Researcher (former core team)
• Liza Weber — Former Research Assistant

Sub-Project: whatisapainting.com

• URL: https://whatisapainting.com/
• An interactive web visualization presenting randomized museum definitions of "painting" through a dynamic, Mondrian-style generative layout
• Draws from classification data collected through Modern Migrants
• Demonstrates definitional plurality in how museums classify what constitutes a "painting"
• Includes Maurice Denis quote (1890): "a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order"

Key Milestones

Links

• Project website: https://www.modernmigrants.art/
• Fox Portal: http://fox.leuphana.de/portal/en/projects/modern-migrants-paintings-from-europe-in-us-museums(e9654830-1a8b-4032-b01c-1644d96feffc).html
• whatisapainting.com: https://whatisapainting.com/