Overview
- Journalists tracing the wartime trail found the long-missing Portrait of a Lady in photos from a Mar del Plata real-estate listing in August 2025, prompting an Argentine probe.
- Federal prosecutors charged Patricia Kadgien and her husband with possessing and concealing art taken in the context of genocide, and a Mar del Plata hearing approved a settlement on 4 September that had the couple waive any claims to the work.
- The painting is now held by Argentina’s Supreme Court in Buenos Aires and the heirs plan a temporary museum loan there before taking the work back to the family.
- Argentina’s National Academy of Fine Arts reattributed the 18th-century canvas to Giacomo Ceruti and experts valued it at about €250,000, giving prosecutors a clear provenance and market basis for restitution.
- The case ties to broader restitution work on Nazi plunder, highlights how wartime operatives like Friedrich Gustav Kadgien moved looted art to South America, and could spur further criminal reviews of items seized from the Kadgien estate.