More than 80 years ago, the master painting of Portrait of a Lady by Italian painter Giuseppe Ghislandi was stolen by Nazis from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam. It hadn’t been seen since it went missing–until this week, when it was spotted in a real estate listing for a home for sale in Argentina. And while that may have seemed like a mystery solved, The Guardian reports that once the portrait was spotted, it suddenly went missing again.
The painting, a portrait of Contessa Colleoni, was one of more than 1,000 that were looted from the collection of Jacques Goudstikker during World War II, and was last seen in 1940, according to the Lost Art Database. Its possession was traced by Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad (AD), which found that the painting landed in the possession of Nazi Germany’s Supreme Commander of the Air Force, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, as part of a forced sale. It was then thought to land in the hands of Friedrich Kadgien, an SS officer described by US interrogators as “a snake of the lowest sort,” who fled Germany for Switzerland in 1945, then moved to Brazil and eventually landed in Argentina.
Kadgien died in Argentina in 1978, and his family that remained reportedly rebuffed the many efforts of AD to try to track down the art that he escaped Germany with. But when one of Kadgien’s daughters listed the house for sale with an Argentinian realty company, the photo made its first public appearance in nearly a century. Members of the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands told AD, “There is no reason to think this could be a copy.”
So mystery solved, right? Well, not so fast. The stroke of good luck that resulted in reporters spotting the painting has also apparently tipped off the family about the situation. When Argentinian police showed up at the house to search for the painting, it had disappeared. Instead, when they entered the home, they found a “generously dimensioned tapestry of a landscape and horses” in place of the painting, according to a report from Argentinian newspaper La Nación.
It’s not just the painting that has been pulled, either. The listing for the home is no longer available via the realty company that was handling the sale, and the daughter of Kadgien has reportedly deleted or changed her social media accounts. No charges have been brought against the family, according to La Nación, but they could face charges for concealing criminal property.
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