The Silent Years Project
Screening museum ownership histories for undocumented years in Nazi-era Europe.
Status: tool built, research pending. The screen has been built and run; its validation (precision on a random sample, recall against an independent list, review by provenance specialists and consultation with the museums) has not been done yet. The counts are screening results, not findings.
What this is
The Silent Years Project is a research tool. It reads the ownership histories that museums publish in their open data, and flags objects whose record names no owner between 1933 and 1945 while the object was probably in continental Europe. This is the standard first screen in Nazi-era provenance research, applied consistently to whole collections: at present, the National Gallery of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art. A flag is a reason for research, never evidence that an object was looted or that anyone did anything wrong.
Screening counts (preliminary)
136,614 objects are in scope (made by 1945, acquired after 1932), and 9,481 are flagged for research. Data built 2026-10-17, scanner v0.4.
| Tier | Meaning | NGA | Cleveland |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | Gap in continental Europe: painting, sculpture or drawing | 1,923 | 834 |
| V | Wartime record anonymous or hedged | 26 | 55 |
| B | Gap in continental Europe: prints and other works | 3,533 | 2,169 |
| D | Custody recorded through the war | 691 | 184 |
| C | Museum text discusses the era | 56 | 10 |
Data
- National Gallery of Art open data (CC0). The museum does not endorse this project.
- Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access (CC0). The museum does not endorse this project.
Who runs it
Founded by Tyler L. Jones, Independent Researcher and AI Engineer. ORCID.
Contact: research@silentyearsproject.org
Volunteers wanted
Unpaid, remote advisory roles: Provenance Research Advisor (Art History); WWII and Holocaust-Era Historian; Social Science Advisor (Sociology or Anthropology). See the roles or write to research@silentyearsproject.org.