A house sale and a slip-up: How a painting looted by the Nazis was located in Argentina
The daughter of a former Nazi official posted an ad to sell her property and the photos revealed a painting that had been missing for eight decades
Nearly 80 years after its disappearance, a chance event led to the location of a painting stolen by the Nazis in Amsterdam. The trace of Portrait of a Lady, by the Italian painter Giuseppe Ghislandi (1655-1743), had been lost around 1946, after the Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, its owner, was forced by Adolf Hitler’s regime to part with the works he had stored in his gallery; more than 1,100 pieces of art. The painting was located in a house in Mar del Plata, a coastal city in Argentina, 250 miles from Buenos Aires. But when the local court raided the property on Tuesday, the work was no longer there. The house belongs to one of the daughters of Friedrich Kadgien, a high-ranking Nazi official. The woman intended to sell the house and published photos of its interior: there, dominating the living room, suspended between two lamps behind an armchair, was the painting.
The real estate company advertising the sale kept the notice and photograph on its website until Monday. It later removed the publication after the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad revealed the discovery of the portrait.
“It was very surreal, we didn’t expect it,” says Peter Schouten, the journalist who led the investigation. A correspondent in Buenos Aires, Schouten worked with his colleagues in the Netherlands, Cyril Rosman and John van den Oetelaar. “My colleagues have been investigating the Kadgien family for 10 years. As we are now commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, they asked me to try to contact Kadgien’s daughters,” he says.
Described in American reports from the 1940s as “a snake,” Friedrich Gustave Kadgien (1907-1978) was a German lawyer who served as a financial expert for National Socialism. In 1935 he joined the SS and from 1938 served as the right-hand man to war criminal Hermann Göring, then a powerful high command member of Hitler’s regime. As part of the so-called Four-Year Plans, in search of resources to finance the German war industry, one of his activities was extorting Jewish merchants in Amsterdam. In 1945, after Germany’s defeat, Kadgien fled, first to Switzerland, then to Brazil, and finally to Argentina, where he would retrain as a businessman. Reports from the time indicate that, during his escape, he took diamonds and works of art.
“We wanted to know what happened to Kadgien’s fortune, what happened to the paintings, but his two daughters don’t want to talk to the press,” says Schouten. For one last attempt, he decided to travel to Mar del Plata, where they live. No one answered the doorbell, only a dog barked. But there, in plain sight, was a for-sale sign for the property, placed there by the Robles Casas & Campos real estate agency.
Later, on the company’s website, Schouten found the ad: the 209-square-meter chalet, located in the traditional Mar del Plata neighborhood of Parque Luro, was for sale for $265,000. Scrolling through the listing, he found an image that almost made him scream. “Photo number five showed a painting that has been sought in Holland for 80 years, officially listed as lost or stolen,” he says.
Ghislandi’s Portrait of a Lady, featuring an Italian countess named Colleoni, is an oil painting on canvas measuring 119.5 centimeters high by 89 centimeters wide. It belonged to Jacques Goudstikker, whose valuable art collection included several paintings by Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer, among many others. Fleeing Nazi persecution, Goudstikker left the Netherlands on May 14, 1940, with his wife and son. On the ship that was supposed to save his life, he met his end: while strolling on deck, he slipped and fell through a hatch.
Meanwhile, despite the disagreement of the Goudstikker family, the German banker Alois Miedl and Göring bought all of the dealer’s assets and his works of art at a very low price.
More than 200 of those works have already been returned to Goudstikker’s heirs after a lengthy legal dispute with the Dutch state. A special committee ruled in 1997 that “the sale of works of art by Jewish individuals in the Netherlands after May 10, 1940, must by definition be considered a forced sale.” But other works remain unaccounted for. Until now, the last known information about Portrait of a Lady was a report dated 1946 that listed Goudstikker as the owner and Kadgien as the buyer.
Experts from the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE) are convinced that the painting photographed in the Mar del Plata house is Ghislandi’s original. “There is no reason why this could be a copy,” Annelies Kool and Perry Schrier told Algemeen Dagblad after viewing the images. Definitive confirmation can only be obtained with an examination of the painting.
Goudstikker’s heirs, who live in the United States, have announced a lawsuit to recover the painting. “My family’s goal is to find all the works of art that have been stolen from the Goudstikker collection and restore Jacques’ legacy,” said the art dealer’s 81-year-old daughter-in-law, Marei von Saher, according to Algemeen Dagblad.
After the discovery was made public, the federal court in Mar del Plata received a presentation from the Customs Collection and Control Agency (ARCA). The prosecutor’s office opened a case for the alleged crime of concealing contraband, and on Tuesday, police raided the house in Parque Luro, seeking to preserve the painting. “The painting is gone; only a carbine and a .32-caliber revolver were seized,” prosecutor Carlos Martínez told the local press at the end of the operation. Judicial officials expect Patricia Kadgien and her husband, the owners of the house, to appear in court soon.
Although this is currently the only ongoing legal claim, it is estimated that there may be more. Researchers from the RCE are also tracking the whereabouts of another painting: a still life by the Dutchman Abraham Mignon (1640-1679). A 1946 record of that work also exists, listing Goudstikker as the owner and Kadgien as the buyer. Like an open wound that continues to bleed from the unpunished crime from which it originated, Mignon’s missing painting appears in photos posted by Kadgien’s daughters on social media.
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