Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Photo: Robles Casas & Campos.
The painting by Italian artist Giuseppe Ghislandi in a living room in Mar del Plata. The 18th-century painting ‘Portrait of a Lady’ (Contessa Colleoni) was stolen by an SS officer and rediscovered this year in Argentina.

Guilty secrets don’t stay hidden forever. It may take a long time, as in today’s story about Nazi loot, but more often than not, truth eventually surfaces.

Facundo Iglesia  and Jon Henley write at the Guardian, “There was nothing very remarkable about the middle-aged couple who lived in the low, stone-clad villa on calle Padre Cardiel, a quiet residential street in the leafy Parque Luro district of Argentina’s best-known seaside town, Mar del Plata.

“Patricia Kadgien, 59, was born in Buenos Aires, five hours to the north. Her social media described her as a yoga teacher and practitioner of biodecoding, an obscure alternative therapy that claims to cure illness by resolving past traumas.

“Her husband, Juan Carlos Cortegoso, 61, built and raced go-karts. Like many in this neighborhood, the couple were comfortably off, and discreet. …

“Then, last month, they put their house up for sale. A photographer from a local estate agent, Robles Casas y Campos, came round to shoot the spacious, elegantly furnished interiors. The pictures went up. And their quiet existence came crashing down.

“The fifth photograph on the agency’s listing showed a general view of the villa’s living room. Hanging on the wall, above a buttoned sofa in plush green velvet and next to a polished antique commode, was a highly distinctive oil painting of a woman.

“More than [6,000 miles] away, the Dutch news outlet AD had, for several years, been quietly investigating the fate of old master paintings looted by the Nazis and still listed by the Dutch culture ministry as ‘unreturned‘ after the second world war.

“Journalists had made several attempts to speak to Patricia Kadgien, the owner of the property, and to her elder sister, Alicia, the daughters of a high-ranking Nazi official Friedrich Kadgien, who was known to have settled in Argentina after the war.

“Their calls and messages had consistently gone unanswered, or been rebuffed. But then a Dutch reporter based in Buenos Aires, Peter Schouten, went knocking on the door of the villa – and spotted a ‘for sale’ sign.

“What followed, after Schouten and his colleagues in Rotterdam clicked on the link to the property and instantly recognized the work, made headlines around the world as the story unfolded of the unlikely recovery of an 18th-century portrait missing for 80 years. …

“After the media reports of the work’s likely location, and before a police search, the couple had tried to obstruct the investigation, the prosecutor argued, by taking down the online property listing and for sale sign and replacing the portrait with a tapestry.

“Despite knowing they were under investigation, it was alleged that the defendants had also attempted a civil action claiming the painting was rightfully theirs, turning it over only after they were placed under house arrest and facing further police raids.

“Through their lawyer, Kadgien and Cortegoso have denied concealment, saying they had always been willing to hand over the painting, and obstruction, arguing that their civil action was aimed at establishing ownership and not at hiding the artwork. …

” ‘Portrait of a Lady’ belonged to Jacques Goudstikker, a Jewish-Dutch art dealer who fled Amsterdam in mid-May 1940 to escape the Nazis, but died after falling through an open hatch into the hold of the SS Bodegraven, the ship carrying him to the UK.

“Goudstikker carried with him a notebook detailing his collection of more than 1,100 artworks, including pieces by Rubens, Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt and Van Gogh, all of which were snapped up for a fraction of their value by Nazi officials.

“Some were later recovered and displayed as part of the Dutch national collection in the Rijksmuseum, before 202 works were restored to the dealer’s sole heir, his daughter-in-law, Marei von Saher, in 2006. ‘Portrait of a Lady’ was not among them. …

“Born in 1907, Kadgien joined the Nazi party in 1932 and the SS in 1935. By 1938, he was a special representative working for Göring on the four-year economic plan drawn up by Adolf Hitler to rearm Germany and prepare it for self-sufficiency by 1940. …

“Kadgien ‘confiscated a large amount of property from Jewish merchants, including jewelry and diamonds in Amsterdam, and oversaw the sale of expropriated shares and securities through banks and front companies in Switzerland’ [federal prosecutor Carlos Martínez] said.

“He fled to Zurich early in 1945, then to nearby Baden, where in 1948 he set up a successful finance and trading firm, Imhauka. With pressure growing after questioning by Swiss and US investigators, Kadgien left for South America in 1949. …

“Kadgien resurfaced in Rio de Janeiro in 1951, settling in the Santa Teresa district and establishing a Brazilian branch of Imhauka. … Imhauka secured valuable contracts with Juan Perón’s government, including acting as an intermediary for major German engineering firms such as Siemens. …

“The fate of ‘Portrait of a Lady,’ which will be registered with Argentina’s supreme court, is now uncertain. Prosecutors have requested it be held, but not displayed, at the Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires while its ultimate ownership is determined. This week von Saher, Goudstikker’s heir, lodged a legal claim to the work with the FBI in New York.”

More at the Guardian, here. No firewall.