The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession (2023)
By Michael Finkel
Random House, 269 pages.
★★★★
When Emily Dickinson wrote, “Fortune befriends the bold,” she didn’t have someone like Stéphane Guillaume Frédéric Breitwieser in mind. Boldness can be easily bent in untoward ways; few criminals have done so with the sheer moxie of Breitwieser. Between 1997-2001 he and his girlfriend Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus heisted 239 works of art from 172 museums in seven countries, an average of one every 15 days, though he often stole from the same museum more than once in the same day. Most items were pirated in broad daylight when the museums were open.
For the most part, his only tool was a Swiss army knife. He was arrested after trying to steal a 16th century bugle from the Richard Wagner Museum in Lucerne, Switzerland, and spent 26 months in prison. When he got out, he wrote a book about his wayward ways, but was far from being rehabilitated. In all, Breitwieser stole more than $2 billion worth of artworks. In The Art Thief journalist Michael Finkel recounts the boldness of Breitwieser’s spree and seeks to get into his mind.
As Finkel notes, the very “story of art…is a story of stealing” that stretches deep into the past. The Babylonians stole (destroyed?) the Arc of the Covenant, the Vandals–from whom we get the term vandalism–plundered Rome, the Conquistadores hauled away Incan treasures, and imperialists such as Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, and State-sponsored tomb raiders filled museums with stolen goods. Picasso hired thieves to lift a few figurines, the Mona Lisa disappeared from the Louvre for two years (1911-13), and the 13 paintings taken from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 have yet to be located. Breitwieser isn’t the king monetarily speaking, but few if any larcenists have been as persistent as he.
Breitwieser insisted that he was an art lover who “liberated” works locked away in museums that didn’t appreciate them. He and Anne-Catharine dressed meticulously in secondhand designer threads and lived in two converted attic rooms in the Mulhouse, France home of Breitwieser’s divorced mother, Mireille (Stengel) Breitwieser that she averred she never entered. Profit was never Stéphane’s motive; he stole things he found beautiful and had a fondness for 16th-17th century Northern European art. Each venue was cased to see what sort of security was in place and how many employees were present. Many were remote, lightly-visited museums that lacked cameras, sensors, or large staffs At first, he removed smaller items that wouldn’t be missed immediately–chalices, rings, pistols, clocks–but his chutzpah led him to use a large coat to spirit away items such crossbows and helmets, or rolled up canvases zipped from their frames.
Soon his Mulhouse rooms were crammed with looted goods, including paintings from Brueghel the Younger, Lucas Cranach, David Teniers, and Antoine Watteau. When he was arrested the first time, he claimed he was merely “borrowing” the works, and that his mother knew nothing of his exploits. The latter is dubious as upon hearing of his arrest, Mireille destroyed 60 works. (She claimed she threw them into the Rhine Canal, though she probably shredded the paintings in her garbage disposal!) Anne-Catharine got off with just six months in jail by pleading she fell under the Svengali spell of her older (by 9 years) boyfriend. (Mireille served 18 months.)
As for why Breitwieser got such a light sentence, the answer seems to be that be bamboozled psychologists. Only a handful of writers had the courage to denounce him as a common thief. Armed with parole, a new girlfriend, a car bought by his mother, and $1000 worth of stolen clothing, he embarked on a book tour that was also a continuation of his pre-prison pilferage. He went back to jail for three years, was arrested a third time and is now required to wear a tracking monitor.
The Art Thief is a fascinating read, though more expert psychological analysis is in order. Put simply, the question of Breitwieser’s makeup remains unsettled. Is he an evil genius, a kleptomaniac, a spoiled rich brat protected by his mother, or just a punk treated with kid gloves because he’s suave and of bourgeois background? His is a fascinating tale, but the art world would be richer had he never been born.
Rob Weir
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