Nazi-looted painting surfaced in a real estate listing must be returned to its rightful heirs, judge rules
A stolen masterpiece that vanished during the darkest days of World War II has finally made its way home, and it took a house-hunting website to crack the case wide open.An Argentine federal judge signed off on the return of “Portrait of a Lady,” an 18th-century canvas by Italian baroque painter Giacomo Ceruti, known as Il Pitocchetto, to the heirs of Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker. The ruling brings a bizarre and decades-spanning saga to a close, one that involves fleeing Nazis, a shady South American hideout and, of all things, a real estate photo shoot gone wrong.Goudstikker built one of Europe’s great private art collections, more than 1,100 pieces strong, before he was forced to flee the Netherlands in 1940 as German troops rolled in. He died during the escape, and his gallery was systematically stripped by Nazi officials.Among those officials was Friedrich Kadgien, a financial fixer who later slipped away to South America — as many Nazis did — and settled in Mar del Plata, Argentina, a resort town on the Atlantic coast.That’s where his daughter, Patricia Kadgien, was living decades later when a real estate agency listed her house for sale online.
Buried among the interior photos was an image of the living room, complete with a green couch and a painting hanging above it that had been on international missing art registries for 80 years.A Dutch journalist chasing leads on the Goudstikker collection spotted the resemblance and eventually connected with attorney Yael Weitz at the New York firm Freedman Normand Friedland.Weitz brought the case to Argentine authorities, and police soon raided the Kadgien property, only to discover the painting, and the incriminating photo, had already been scrubbed from the listing.Investigators didn’t come away empty-handed.
They seized phones, unregistered guns and a stash of 1940s-era documents that helped build the case. The painting is one of hundreds seized from the collection of Goudstikker, w...