Danielle Ames A Dutch painting allegedly stolen by a Nazi official appears to have been found recently in Mar del Plata, Argentina’s main coastal city, thanks to a photo on a real estate listing.
An investigation published on Monday by Dutch paper Algemeen Dagblad (AD) tracked down the painting “Ladies’ Portrait,” which was painted by Italian artist Guiseppe Ghislandi. The artwork was likely last seen in Switzerland in 1946 at the hands of a high-ranking Nazi official who had fled the German Reich. The painting had been taken by the Nazis from its original Amsterdam-based owner, art dealer Jacques Goudstikker.
“Ladies’ Portrait” has been registered on an international list of missing art, and is also listed as missing by the Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency (RCE, in its original acronym), an organization that focuses on artwork looted by the Nazis. While there is no information about the painting’s value, other works by Ghislandi are currently exhibited in several museums, including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
Goudstikker fled the Netherlands with his wife and son in 1940 but tragically died in an accident on the boat. His family arrived in the U.S. with a pamphlet he kept in his luggage, detailing all of the paintings in his art dealership’s possession.
The more than 1,100 artworks in Goudstikker’s collection were later purchased at extremely low prices by high-ranking Nazi officials, including infamous German Field Marshal and art collector Herman Göring. According to AD, documentation shows that in 1946, SS official Friedrich Kadgien had two of Goudstikker’s paintings in his possession.
A right-hand man of Göring, Kadgien fled to Switzerland when Germany lost the war in 1945. He then escaped to Brazil and made his way to Argentina, where he settled, founded a company and raised a family. He died in Buenos Aires, in 1978.
Dutch journalist Peter Schouten, along with AD journalists Cyril Rosman and John van den Oetelaar, tried for years to get in contact with Kadgien’s living daughters, but the family always refused to talk to them.
“I really wanted to talk with the ladies… I’m not a judge, I’m just telling the story, I wanted to give them a chance to talk with us, to tell their part,” Schouten told the Herald.
After multiple unsuccessful attempts to contact them, Schouten headed to Mar del Plata in an attempt to reach them in person.
“What I thought when we went to Mar del Plata was, ‘well, we’ll ring the bell, she’ll open and say, ‘Hi, I’m sorry I’m not interested in talking.’ And then we’ll go back to Buenos Aires’,” Schouten described.
“I never, never, never could have imagined that this came up.”
There were two addresses listed for the Kadgien family. When Schouten initially approached one of the houses, no one was home. When he returned a couple of hours later, he could tell that someone was inside, but they weren’t answering the door.
He noticed a realtor’s sign placed in the garden. Once back in his hotel room, he began to look at the listing. On the fifth photo of the listing on the realtor’s website, the painting “Ladies’ Portrait” can be seen above a sofa in the living room.
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Schouten couldn’t believe what he saw. He contacted his colleagues in the Netherlands, who reached out to RCE advisors. While they can’t confirm that it is the original painting just from the real estate listing’s photo (the only existing pictures of the painting are black-and-white), they had no reason to believe it’s a replica. The portrait, they said, is also the same size the painting is believed to be.
After spotting the painting, Schouten once again tried to reach out to Kadgien’s daughters to see if they wanted to talk. He was ignored again, but finally got a response late last week, when one of the daughters replied to his Instagram message saying, “I have no clue what kind of a response you want from me. I have no clue which painting you’re talking about.” She asked him to send her the questions in writing. After Schouten sent them, she asked for more time to respond, and later proceeded to block him on Instagram.
He then sent her a WhatsApp message, but she asked for more time to respond to the questions before she blocked him and didn’t respond to any attempts to communicate with her. On Monday, the photo of the portrait was removed from the real estate listing.
There is another missing painting that is believed to possibly be in possession of the daughters as well. A Facebook photo posted around 2012 by one of the Kadgien sisters showed what may be another missing painting, a floral still life by the 17th-century Dutch painter Abraham Mignon, also in Friedrich Kadgien’s possession in 1946 and listed as missing on the RCE website.
AD contacted the daughter-in-law of the original collector, Marei von Saher (81) who is living in New York, who said she’ll start the claim process to get the portrait back.
Photos in this article are used with permission from Algemeen Dagblad (AD)
