A masterpiece stolen amid the horrors of World War II is finally headed home, after an unlikely clue on a property-listing website helped unravel an 80-year mystery.
An Argentine federal judge has approved the return of “Portrait of a Lady,” an 18th-century work by Italian Baroque artist Giacomo Ceruti, also known as Il Pitocchetto, to the heirs of Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker.
The decision concludes an extraordinary, decades-long case involving Nazis who fled Europe, a suspected South American refuge and a real estate photo that exposed a long-hidden painting.
Before German forces invaded the Netherlands in 1940, Goudstikker had assembled one of Europe’s finest private art collections, comprising more than 1,100 works.
He died while escaping the country, after which Nazi officials systematically looted his gallery.
Friedrich Kadgien, a Nazi financial operative, was among the officials involved. Like many Nazis after the war, he fled to South America and eventually settled in Mar del Plata, the Argentine resort city on the Atlantic coast.
Decades later, Kadgien’s daughter, Patricia Kadgien, was living there when a real estate agency advertised her home online. One interior image showed a green sofa in the living room and, hanging above it, a painting listed on international databases of missing art for 80 years.
A Dutch journalist investigating leads tied to the Goudstikker collection noticed the apparent match and later contacted attorney Yael Weitz of the New York law firm Freedman Normand Friedland. Weitz took the matter to Argentine authorities. Police then searched the Kadgien home, but found that both the artwork and the revealing property-listing image had already been removed.
Authorities nevertheless recovered important evidence, seizing mobile phones, unregistered firearms and a collection of documents dating to the 1940s that helped support the case.
The Ceruti painting was among hundreds of works taken from Goudstikker’s collection. Goudstikker had helped fellow Jews flee mainland Europe after the Nazis seized control of the Netherlands. According to the Telegraph, Hermann Goering, the Luftwaffe commander and one of the Third Reich’s most powerful figures, acquired roughly 800 works from the collection.
Kadgien and her husband, Juan Carlos Cortegoso, were charged with concealment, but ultimately cut a deal, surrendering all claims to the painting and agreeing to donate roughly $3,200 to a Mar del Plata children’s hospital in exchange for having the criminal case against them suspended.
Attorney Juan Ignacio Pascual, who represents the Goudstikker heirs, called the outcome a watershed moment for a country with a complicated postwar history.
“As far as we know, this is the first time that the Argentine justice system has recovered and restituted a painting looted by the Nazis during the Second World War,” Pascual told the Art Newspaper.
The painting had long been misattributed to fellow Italian artist Giuseppe Ghislandi, but a court-ordered examination by Argentina’s National Academy of Fine Arts determined Ceruti was the true creator. The painting is valued at $288,000.
For Goudstikker’s family, the recovery is one small victory in a fight that has stretched across generations. More than 200 works from his collection were returned by the Dutch government back in 2006, but hundreds of other pieces remain scattered around the globe, their locations unknown.
Marei von Saher, Goudstikker’s daughter-in-law and sole heir, said the ruling carries weight far beyond the canvas itself.
“I am thrilled with the court’s decision to restitute this important artwork,” von Saher told the New York Times.