Jacques Goudstikker

The trajectory of the painting, traditionally known as Portrait of Contessa Colleoni, has been discussed previously by ARCA, and formed part of the collection of Jacques Goudstikker, one of Amsterdam’s most prominent Jewish dealers in Old Master paintings before the Second World War.  When Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, Goudstikker fled with his wife and young son aboard the SS Bodegraven.  He died tragically during the voyage, leaving behind his gallery and an extensive collection which has previously been estimated at some 1,400 works accumulated over the course of his career.   More than 1,000 artworks from his holdings were subsequently appropriated or transferred under duress during the Nazi occupation, with Hermann Göring acquiring many of the most important pieces.

Among the works that disappeared was this portrait of a lady, then-attributed to the Italian painter Giuseppe Vittore Ghislandi, better known as Fra’ Galgario but later identified as the work of Giacomo Ceruti.  War period records eventually connected the painting to Friedrich Gustav Kadgien, a Nazi financial official involved in the Vierjahresplan, or Four Year Plan, who worked closely with Göring and was associated with foreign currency procurement and financial transactions conducted through Switzerland.  Kadgien escaped Europe after the war, eventually establishing himself in South America, including Argentina, where he died in 1978 without having been prosecuted for his wartime activities.

For roughly eighty years, the whereabouts of the painting remained unknown.

That changed in August 2025, and in a way that no provenance researcher could reasonably have anticipated.  Journalist from the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, following leads from Dutchman Paul Post, identified the missing portrait in photographs accompanying an online real estate advertisement for a house in Mar del Plata.  

Hanging prominently above a green sofa was the long-lost painting.  The property was connected to Patricia Mónica Kadgien, one of Friedrich Kadgien’s daughters and her partner Juan Carlos Cortegoso.   ARCA’s own parallel OSINT and SOCMINT research subsequently identified additional artworks connected with members of the Kadgien family and documented photographs that had appeared on social media and property listings.

The discovery quickly became a criminal matter.  Argentine authorities opened an investigation and searched the Mar del Plata property, but by the time investigators arrived, the portrait had been removed from the wall, with a large tapestry having been quickly placed where the painting had previously hung.   Other artworks, prints, documentation, and material were seized by the Argentine authorities during searches of properties connected with the family.

Kadgien and Cortegoso were subsequently charged in connection with concealing the work and were temporarily placed under house arrest.  The missing portrait of the Contessa finally reappeared on 3 September 2025, when the lawyer representing Patricia Kadgien and her husband surrendered the painting to Argentine authorities.  The family initially sought to pursue its ownership claim through Argentina’s civil courts, a move ARCA criticised at the time as further delaying restitution of an artwork with a well-documented Nazi-era loss history.

One year later, that dispute has taken a markedly different direction.  In a hearing held on 4 September 2026 at the Federal Court in the coastal town of Mar del Plata,  with the participation of Prosecutor Carlos Martínez, the Goudstikker family's lawyers, and representatives of Patricia Kadgien and her husband, Judge Santiago Inchausti approved an agreement under which Kadgien and Cortegoso relinquished any claim to the painting and consented to its restitution to Marei von Saher.  

In exchange, the criminal proceedings against the couple were suspended and the couple accepted a suspended sentence,  irrevocably relinquishing any rights or claims to the painting avoiding a trial and only being required to make a modest series of payments, totalling 4.8 million Argentine pesos to a local hospital, the Cooperadora del Hospital Interzonal Especializado Materno Infantil, as a form of restitution.  Had Kadgien, and Cortegoso continued to trial, she and her husband risked a maximum prison sentence of six years for possessing and concealing a stolen work of art in the context of a genocide.

Marei von Saher has spent decades pursuing the restitution of artworks taken from her father-in-law’s collection. According to initial news reports, she now intends to place Portrait of a Lady on temporary loan to the Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires before it leaves Argentina, allowing the painting to serve not simply as a recovered object but as a tangible reminder of the mechanisms of Nazi dispossession and of the extraordinarily long afterlife of cultural property crime.

For ARCA, the outcome is particularly satisfying given how this case unfolded. What began with a painting glimpsed in the background of a real estate photograph developed through journalism, open-source research, international cooperation, law enforcement intervention, and ultimately some gentle judicial persuasion.  It also demonstrates why unresolved wartime provenance cannot simply be dismissed as bothersome history.  Eighty years after the theft, the people originally responsible are gone, but the consequences of their actions remain very much alive for the families whose property was taken.

The return of Portrait of a Lady cannot undo what happened to Jacques Goudstikker, or his family, or restore the collection he was forced to leave behind in 1940.  It does, however, return one small piece of that history to the family from whom it was taken.  And after eighty years hidden in plain sight, that matters.

By Lynda Albertson