Old master painting looted by Nazis disappears from home in Argentina | Argentina

Argentinian police have said they will continue hunting for an old master painting looted by the Nazis and spotted by chance in an estate agent’s listing after a search of the property in the seaside town of Mar del Plata failed to uncover the work.

“The painting is not in the house … but we’re going to keep searching for it,” the federal prosecutor Carlos Martínez told local media. He said items that could be useful for the investigation, including two firearms, engravings and prints, had been seized.

Citing investigators, the Argentinian newspaper La Nación reported that the missing work, Portrait of a Lady by the Italian master Giuseppe Ghislandi, was no longer hanging in the living room of the house, where it had been in the estate agency photo.

In its place was “a generously dimensioned tapestry of a landscape and horses” that, marks on the wall suggested, had recently replaced another work. “Where we found a tapestry, not long ago, there was something else,” a police officer told the paper.

Portrait of a Lady belonged to Jacques Goudstikker, a leading Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam who died in May 1940 fleeing the invading Nazis. His collection of more than 1,100 artworks, many of them classed as old masters, was acquired for a tiny fraction of its value by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.

The Dutch newspaper AD reported this week that it had uncovered documents suggesting that by the end of war the Ghislandi portrait had fallen into the hands – it is not clear how – of Friedrich Kadgien, a high-ranking Nazi official, SS member and one-time senior aide to Göring.

The painting is thought to have accompanied Kadgien when he fled the Netherlands in 1946, first to Switzerland, then Brazil and finally to Argentina. It is believed to have remained in his family’s possession after he died in Buenos Aires in 1978.

Authorities have said one of Kadgien’s two daughters, who owns the Mar del Plata house, and her partner were the subjects of a judicial investigation after complaints filed by the federal police, Interpol and Argentina’s customs agency, Arca.

The complaints were prompted by the publication of the AD articles, which the Dutch paper said followed an investigation during which it several times contacted the late Nazi’s daughters, who declined to talk about their father or the artwork.

The paper eventually sent a reporter to Argentina, who discovered that a house owned by one of the daughters was for sale and spotted the potentially incriminating photograph of the portrait on the website of the estate agency handling the property.

AD reported on Wednesday that the property had since been taken off the site by the agency, Robles Casas & Campos, which confirmed it was no longer on their books, and that Kadgien’s daughter had changed her user name on social media.

La Nación reported that it understood no charges had yet been brought, but that if the couple were found to have had the work in their possession, they could face possible prosecution for concealing criminal property, with no statute of limitations applying because the alleged offence took place in wartime.