Stolen art register

The Art Loss Register is a private company based in London, founded in the early 1990s and originally funded in part by insurers and auction houses. It keeps a database of stolen, missing or disputed works that auction houses, dealers and fairs query before offering a piece, and it issues a search certificate. Alongside it sit the public databases: Interpol's stolen works of art database, fed by national police forces, and in France Treima, kept by the Central Office for the Fight against Trafficking in Cultural Goods (OCBC). For the insurer, the register matters after settlement. Once it has paid a theft, it usually becomes the owner of the work or holder of its rights, and it lists it. Years later, the piece resurfaces in a sale catalog, the search flags it, the lot is withdrawn and the insurer asserts its claim. The policy then most often carries a buy-back clause: the insured may take the work back by repaying the indemnity. On the dealer's side, the search is part of the expected due diligence, along with provenance and the seller's identity, and a buyer who skipped it struggles to plead good faith against the robbed owner. The limit is well known: a database finds only what was put into it. A stolen work never reported, or described without a photograph, passes the search, and the certificate says nothing more than 'nothing found'. Not to be confused with the catalog raisonné, which records an artist's works and not their fate, nor with theft cover, which pays for the loss without saying how to find the object.