House arrest comes after police searched Patricia Kadgien's, daughter of SS man Friedrich Kadgien, home in the coastal city of Mar del Plata – when the long-missing painting was seen in a picture in a housing ad.
"Portrait of a woman", painted in the 1730s by Giuseppe Ghislandi, was one of over 1,000 works of art stolen by the Nazis' Reich Marshal Hermann Göring from the Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker. Friedrich Kadgien was an economic advisor to Göring and fled to South America after World War II and died in Argentina in 1978.
It was journalists at the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad who unexpectedly got a lead on the painting in August when they tried in vain to get an interview with Patricia Kadgien. When they were tipped off about an ad for her home on the internet, they discovered there a picture where the missing painting could be seen hanging above a green sofa in the living room.
But when Argentine police searched Kadgien's home last week, the painting was no longer hanging. They have since made a house search in two more properties linked to her family and have seized several works of art. "Portrait of a woman" is still missing.
On Tuesday, prosecutors decided to put Patricia Kadgien and her husband under house arrest for three days, suspected of disrupting the investigation.
