Ex-FBI Art Crime Agent Wants Artists to Own Their Records

During his time investigating art crime for the FBI, Ronnie Walker came away with a simple conclusion: good records could make all the difference when an artwork was stolen, forged or disputed. Now, through the nonprofit Art Legacy Institute, he is trying to persuade artists to build those records themselves.

ALI has launched the Legacy Catalog, a platform for artists to document and preserve their work. The numbers involved in art crime are substantial. Since 2004, the FBI’s Art Crime Team has recovered more than 20,000 items worth more than $1 billion. INTERPOL’s international database contains almost 57,000 stolen and missing works of art.

Walker retired from the FBI in 2024. He tells The Art Journal that he founded ALI after seeing how gaps in documentation complicated investigations into stolen, forged or misattributed artworks.

The consequences of incomplete records can last for decades. The Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani died in 1920 at the age of 35. His relatively short career left behind an oeuvre that has been subject to decades of attribution disputes. Ambrogio Ceroni’s catalogue raisonné remains the gold standard for the market, but the Modigliani Project, an organisation dedicated to researching the artist’s life and career, notes that Ceroni himself acknowledged that his catalogue was not exhaustive and does not include “extensive provenance or detailed exhibition history”. Researchers have since identified works omitted from the catalogue, which have undergone further documentary, scientific and technical analysis.

Robert Motherwell’s archive sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. Inherited by the Dedalus Foundation, it contains professional correspondence, manuscripts, studio materials, publications and more than 30,000 photographs. More than 24,000 relate to individual artworks, including images of works in progress and earlier states. The archive has since become an important resource for research into Motherwell’s career and the preparation of his catalogues raisonnés.

Information about an artwork can become valuable evidence decades after it was made, but reconstructing it after an artist’s death can be difficult. Records may be scattered across galleries, collectors, estates, archives and institutions. Some may simply no longer exist, or may never have been made. That is the problem ALI is trying to address, Walker says.

“In 20 years of working for the FBI Art Crime Team, one thing was consistent: artists whose work was well documented had an advantage over artists whose work was not,” he says.

Walker argues that artists should start building those records while they are alive, when they can provide information about their work firsthand.

“Catalogues raisonnés are invaluable but they are often authored by someone other than the artist and are reserved for artists that someone has deemed historically important enough to invest the time and resources,” Walker says. “They are rarely complete and occasionally there are competing versions.”

“We see the Legacy Catalog as the democratisation of the artist catalog,” he adds.

ALI initially focused on art fraud, teaming up with anti-counterfeiting technology company Alitheon, whose FeaturePrint technology creates a unique digital identifier from the physical characteristics of an artwork. The Legacy Catalog takes a different approach, asking artists to create and maintain documentation of their own work.

It is essentially a digital archive built by the artist. Each work can have a record containing its title, date, medium, dimensions and history, alongside photographs and supporting documents.

The platform uses terms from the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus, a controlled vocabulary used by museums and other cultural institutions. When artists enter details about a work, the system uses standardised terms for its medium, materials and subject matter. The aim is to standardise entries, making them easier for researchers, museums and other institutions to search and interpret.

The Legacy Catalog does not authenticate artworks: the information it contains is supplied by the artist. Its value therefore depends on how useful those records prove to those who later rely on them. But how much authority should a record created by the artist themselves carry?

Walker says the Legacy Catalog is not intended to replace authentication experts or catalogues raisonnés. Instead, he sees it as a source of information that those experts can draw on when assessing a work.

“We will leave authentication to the experts, but the experts will tell you provenance research is critical to their process,” he says. “That’s where a well-documented body of work comes in.”

ALI is not alone in trying to solve the problem. Several companies already offer provenance and art-documentation services, many using blockchain to secure their records. Artclear, for example, launched in 2020 with a scanner developed in partnership with Hewlett-Packard that captures microscopic images of paintings and turns them into digital fingerprints, which are stored on the blockchain and used to create certificates of authenticity.

Neither the Legacy Catalog nor Alitheon’s FeaturePrint relies on blockchain.

The test will be whether museums, researchers and authentication experts actually use the records. ALI is testing the platform through partnerships with artist communities and educational institutions. It is working with the American Impressionist Society to provide complimentary one-year subscriptions to Seattle-area artists, while developing an initiative with MFA students at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

The organisation is also planning to integrate Alitheon’s FeaturePrint technology into the Legacy Catalog in 2027. Walker says the technology will add another layer of information to an artwork’s record by linking the digital record to the physical object itself.

“We don’t want artists simply putting photographs and information into a database,” Walker says. “We want them creating structured records that can remain meaningful to all facets of the art world for generations to come.”