In an unprecedented move in Canada, the National Gallery this month plans to post images of the 100 artworks on its Web site so people around the world, especially European Jews and their descendants, can easily examine and possibly lay claim to the works. The gallery has agreed to return the painting to the family, which learned of the painting's obscure provenance from a gallery Web site devoted to art with questionable or missing Second World War histories. Last year, the Montreal Museum of Fine Art returned Marriage Feast at Cana, an oil painting by the 16th-century Italian master Giorgio Vasari, to the government of Hungary. And in 1996, five war-loss drawings found in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario were voluntary returned to the Berlin Museum. At the National Gallery in Ottawa, the suspect art includes many European paintings, some American ones and some sculptures, all produced before 1945.
None is considered a masterpiece.
But until now, provenance research on them, and the rest of the gallery's extensive collection, could be done only by reviewing the gallery's catalogues. But this fall, the Canadian Art Museum Directors Organization and its U.S counterpart both instituted new guidelines requiring major galleries and museums to post their collections' Holocaust-era provenance on Web sites. No deadline was set, but Mr. Theberge hopes the National Gallery's site will be operating within three weeks. The Art Gallery of Ontario, he said, is planning a similar site for early next year. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall many, many of these questions were frozen, like many other questions.