The famous painting pillaged by the Nazis spotted on the real estate website, disappears again

More than 80 years ago, the painting master of portrait of a lady of the Italian painter Giuseppe Ghislandi was stolen by Nazis with a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam. He had not been seen since he had disappeared – until this week, when he was spotted in a real estate list for a house for sale in Argentina. And although it could seem a resolved mystery, the Guardian reports that once the portrait has been spotted, it suddenly disappeared.

The painting, a portrait of Contessa Colleoni, was one of the more than 1,000 that was looted from the collection of Jacques Goudstikker during the Second World War, and was seen for the last time in 1940, according to the database on lost art. His possession was traced by the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad (AD), who found that painting landed in possession of the Supreme Air Force commander of Germany, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, as part of a forced sale. It was then thought that he landed in the hands of Kadgian Friedrich, an SS officer described by American interrogators as “a lowest snake”, who fled Germany for Switzerland in 1945, then moved to Brazil and finally landed in Argentina.

Kadgian died in Argentina in 1978, and his family who would have remained rejected the many efforts of the announcement to try to find the art with which he escaped Germany. But when one of the Kadgian girls listed the house for sale with an Argentine real estate company, the photo made its first public appearance in almost a century. The members of the Cultural Heritage Agency in the Netherlands told AD: “There is no reason to think that it could be a copy.”

So mysterious resolved, right? Well, not so fast. The good luck that led the journalists to spot the painting also overthrew the family on the situation. When the Argentine police appeared at home to search for the table, they had disappeared. Instead, when they entered the house, they found a “generously dimensioned tapestry of a landscape and horses” instead of the table, according to a report by the Argentinian newspaper La Nación.

It is not only the painting that was taken either. The list of the house is no longer available via the real estate company which managed the sale, and the daughter of Kadgien would have deleted or modified its social media accounts. No accusation was made against the family, according to Nación, but they could face charges to hide criminal goods.