Add The New York Post on Google 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, who assisted fellow Jews in escaping mainland Europe once the Nazis took control of the Netherlands. Roughly 800 works were snatched up by Hermann Goering, the Luftwaffe commander and one of the Third Reich’s most influential figures, according to the Telegraph.
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.
