Missing Nolde portrait located
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A portrait by German Expressionist Emil Nolde worth about $660,000 has been discovered more than 25 years after it went missing, a spokesman for Germany’s Baden-Wuerttemberg state police said Friday.
The oil painting “Nadja” was discovered by an art historian who said he stumbled across it when cleaning out his attic and realized the work did not belong to him. The man, whose name was not released, handed it over to state police, a spokesman said.
Painted in 1919, the portrait originally belonged to Walther Rathenau, the foreign minister of Germany’s Weimar Republic who was murdered in 1922. Rathenau’s brother then inherited the picture, which went missing in the late 1970s while in the hands of a transport company.
Police are now trying to determine who is the rightful owner.
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