Provenance researcher Rudi Ekkart speaks about Camille Pissarro’s Girl Lying on the Grass, which was sold under duress during the Second World War. Photo by Sina Schuldt/picture alliance via Getty Images

Acquiring artworks and antiquities intelligently requires knowledge in several areas—art history, the art market, conservation, art law and perhaps even finance, and there are a variety of degree programs covering those fields. What’s missing, however, is professional-level training in what’s known as provenance research, or the study of an object’s ownership history from its creation to the present day. This kind of research is critical because so many objects have been removed illegally from historical sites or, in the case of Nazi-era Europe, forcibly taken from private collections. An untold number of such artworks and antiquities continue to surface for sale and are housed in the permanent collections of museums in the U.S. and Europe.

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If you’re an art appraiser, collector, dealer, museum curator or registrar, knowing how to trace an object’s history—and whether it was stolen or looted—has become essential. Yet “there is no professional training for provenance research,” Lisa Duffy-Zeballos, director of art research at New York’s International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), told........

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