Police hoping to recover an Italian artwork looted during World War II were left empty-handed after raiding the home belonging to the daughter of a high-ranking Nazi fugitive.
‘Portrait of a Woman’ by Giuseppe Ghislandi was stolen from a Dutch Jewish art dealer in 1940 and had been missing for decades when it was spotted in a property listing in Argentina‘s Parque Luro province, near Buenos Aires. The villa was put on the market by Patricia Kadgein, 59, the daughter of senior Nazi official Friedrich Kadgien, who was once described by US intelligence as “a snake of the lowest sort”.
Police raided the property in the hopes of recovering the portrait, which was pictured hanging on the living room wall above a sofa in the listing. But when they arrived, the artwork had vanished, with authorities admitting a “change in the house’s decor” had clearly occurred since it was photographed for advertisement.
“Neither the woman nor her partner made any statement regarding voluntarily handing over the painting or giving any indication of its location,” a statement in the Le Capital newspaper read.
Reports from the Dutch Algemeen Dagblad newspaper also suggested that the artwork had been “removed shortly afterwards or after the media reports about it appeared”.
“There’s now a large rug with horses and some nature scenes hanging there,” journalist Peter Schouten wrote.
‘Portrait of a Woman’ was thought to be among more than 1,100 works from the collection of art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, which were bought up by Nazis in a forced sale after his death – many of which went, for a small fraction of their actual value, to president of the Reichstag Hermann Göring.
Some of the works were recovered in Germany after the war and displayed in the Rijksmuseum, before over 200 were returned to Goudstikker’s daughter-in-law, Marei von Saher, in 2006.
Friedrich Kadgien, an SS officer and senior financial aid to Göring, died in 1979, after fleeing to Switzerland in 1945 before moving to Brazil, then Argentina, where he built a reputation as a successful businessman.
An investigation by Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad reported that Kadgien was noted as someone who “appears to possess substantial assets [and] could still be of value to us” by US officials before his death.
Art historians said the painting seen in the property listing was identical in composition and colour to the original ‘Portrait of a Woman’ by Ghislandi, who is considered one of Italy’s most prominent portraitists of the late Baroque period.
