About TraceArt
Founded in Geneva — world capital of mediation and a major hub of the international art market.
The founders
Barbara Lambert is a member of the Geneva Bar, a mediator and an art historian by training. Holding the CAS in International Cultural Property Law and Provenance Research, she brings to TraceArt expertise at the intersection of law, archaeology and provenance analysis.
Michael Netter is a qualified lawyer and a CEDR-accredited mediator. He is completing a PhD in legal theory. He holds supplementary studies in philosophy and focuses on the normative foundations of restitution law and evidentiary questions in provenance disputes.
Our approach
TraceArt was born from a shared observation: provenance research is fragmented across dozens of databases, archives and registers, each managed by a different institution, in different languages, with different access conditions. Founded in Geneva in 2025, the project is in continuous development. Even the most experienced practitioners consult only a fraction of these resources.
As lawyers specialising in art law, we wanted to build the tool we wished we had from the beginning of our practice: an exhaustive, editorially selective directory, oriented towards practical use. TraceArt does not replace any of these databases: it signals them, qualifies them and makes them accessible.
The project is deliberately simple: no proprietary database, no duplication of referenced objects. Only authoritative links are cited. Each database is manually verified, qualified against four strict criteria, and regularly updated.
For any questions or to report a missing database: contact@traceart.app