Each year, the incoming classes of area graduate programs, including the Institute of Fine Arts, Parsons/Cooper-Hewitt, Bard Graduate Center, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, attend orientations that focus on how to maximize the research potential of the Frick Art Reference Library. At these orientations, the students learn the advantages of consulting image resources, whether photographic or electronic, together with historic, quasi-primary documents such as annotated auction catalogues and exhibition checklists, and more conventional bibliographic material.

Other more focused workshops on provenance research help acquaint both new and habitual researchers at the Library with its exceptional, often unique, holdings that together can help solve mysteries of changes of ownership, looting, and even, in the case of Rose Valland’s Répertoire des biens spoliés en France durant la guerre 1930-1945, the work of a double agent at the service of the Gestapo in Paris, who secretly recorded the specifics of thousands of looted works.