Argentine federal police have placed the daughter and son-in-law of a Nazi war criminal under house arrest after a 17th-century painting stolen from a Dutch Jewish art dealer disappeared following its discovery in a real estate advertisement last month.
Portrait of a Lady by Italian painter Giuseppe Ghislandi appeared in photographs posted on the website of Robles Casas & Campos, an estate agent specializing in high-value Argentine properties, when Friedrich Kadgien’s daughter put her coastal home up for sale. The painting, a portrait of the Contessa Colleoni, is on the international list of lost art and the official Dutch list of artworks looted by the Nazis.
After consultation with the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE), Dutch newspaper AD confirmed the 17th-century painting hanging above her sofa was the same artwork stolen from Amsterdam art dealer Jacques Goudstikker during World War II. But the painting vanished shortly after the AD article was published, prompting an international investigation involving Interpol and Argentine federal authorities.
The couple, who insist they are the rightful owners of the artwork through inheritance, were detained for three days before being released pending court proceedings. Four property searches conducted this week failed to locate the missing painting, though investigators did seize two other artworks from another Kadgien daughter’s home that appear to date from the 1800s.
“The works will be analyzed to determine if they are linked to paintings stolen during World War II,” the prosecutor’s office said Tuesday. The couple’s lawyer, Carlos Murias, told local newspaper La Capital that his clients would cooperate with authorities, though prosecutors confirmed the artwork has not been handed over.
Born into a family of art dealers, Goudstikker built an international reputation as both a connoisseur and scholar, mixing Dutch Golden Age paintings with Renaissance works in his lavish galleries. He entertained with panache at his home on the Amstel River and at his country estate, Nyenrode Castle.
As Nazi forces approached Amsterdam on May 13, 1940, Goudstikker gathered what assets he could and fled with his wife Désirée and their year-old son Eduard on a cargo ship bound for England.
On July 13, 1940, two of Goudstikker’s employees, who had been paid 180,000 guilders each, sold his entire collection to Nazi criminal Herman Göring for two million guilders – a fraction of its value – over the explicit objections of Désirée, who controlled a majority of the gallery’s shares.
Friedrich Kadgien orchestrated much of this plunder as Göring’s financial adviser and right-hand man. A member of both the Nazi Party since 1932 and the SS since 1935, he coordinated the sale of stolen stocks and securities through Swiss shell companies and banks, funding the Nazi war machine through theft of art and diamonds from Jewish dealers across the Netherlands.
As Germany’s defeat became imminent, Kadgien fled on May 1, 1945, slipping first into Switzerland. There he convinced both Swiss and American officials that he wasn’t a real Nazi. He died in Buenos Aires in 1978 without ever facing trial for his wartime activities.
Portrait of a Lady traveled with him to Argentina, where it remained in his family’s possession. When AD journalists suspected the painting might be in one of his daughters’ homes and attempted to contact her, she initially claimed not to know what painting they meant, then said she was too busy to answer their questions.
“My search for the artworks of my father-in-law, Jacques Goudstikker, began in the late 1990s, and I have not given up to this day,” Marei von Saher, Goudstikker’s 81-year-old daughter-in-law, told AD. “It is my family’s goal to recover every artwork looted from the Goudstikker collection and to restore Jacques’ legacy.”
Von Saher and the family’s American lawyer have announced they will mount a legal challenge to reclaim the famous painting. Art market experts note that similar works by Ghislandi have sold at auction for only several thousand dollars in recent years, making forgery unlikely and authentication more probable.
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