When Breitwieser is not in bed, he dotes like a butler on the works in his rooms, monitoring temperature and humidity, light and dust. His pieces are kept in better condition, he says, than they were in museums. Lumping him in with the savages is cruel and unfair. Instead of an art thief, Breitwieser prefers to be thought of as an art collector with an unorthodox acquisition style. Or, if you will, he’d like to be called an art liberator.
With more than two hundred heists pulled off over seven countries, stealing some three hundred works of art worth upwards of two billion dollars which he then stashed in his attic rooms in his mother’s house, Stephane Brietwieser — averaging a theft every twelve days for over seven years — is considered the most prolific art thief of all time. Starting as a young man, often accompanied by his live-in girlfriend and accomplice, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, Brietwieser was such as aesthete, such a studied connoisseur, that when he would spot a work of art — whether a silver cup or smallish Renaissance oil painting — that struck him helpless with a coup de coeur, he would calmly liberate that object (whether from its frame or its locked display case), disguise it on his person, and walk out the door of the museum, church, or gallery that he had been visiting. This sounds like it could be a thrilling tale of crime and punishment — and as journalist Michael Finkel was given unprecedented access to Brietwieser in order to tell his story, I expected him to give us a colourful antihero story as he did with The Stranger in the Woods — but The Art Thief didn’t really take off for me. The thefts, investigation, and subsequent trials are recounted matter-of-factly, Finkel pads out the story with some interesting enough research, and although I had never heard of Brietwieser before, I’m left thinking there’s no particular reason I needed to learn of him. Not a bad read at all, but not a necessary one either. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)
Anne-Catherine would never consider stealing without Breitwieser present. Her eyes are usually difficult to read. She seldom touches a piece before it leaves the museum. He’ll use her purse maybe one theft in ten. She is not exactly a thief, but she’s not not a thief either. She’s more like a magician’s assistant, hovering in the background during a trick, making sure the overly curious are gently diverted. She also reins in, when necessary, her boyfriend’s exuberance, and occasionally aids him.
Anne-Catherine and Brietwieser’s mother, Mireille Stengel, have the more interesting stories to me — it’s one thing to be a sociopathic art thief; a rather different thing to love one and risk prosecution for abetting him — but as neither of the women has ever consented to an interview, Finkel needed to rely on court records and Brietwieser’s own slippery word to form a picture of the women in his life, and it doesn’t amount to much. (Stengel in particular has a fascinating role in the story’s aftermath but the details can only be guessed at.) Finkel does attempt to learn where Brietwieser’s compulsion came from (after a childhood of privilege, his parents’ divorce saw his father move away with all the beautiful family heirlooms; court psychologists diagnosed Brietwieser as narcissistic and immature), and throughout, Finkel shares his related research, as in:
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Or maybe not. In 2011, Semir Zeki, a professor of neuroscience at University College London, used MRI scanners to track neural activity in the brain, deciphering the power of attraction. He discovered the exact place, he announced, from which all aesthetic reactions flow — a pea-sized lobe located behind the eyes. Beauty, to be unpoetic but precise, is in the medial orbital-frontal cortex of the beholder.
And:
Directors of small-budget museums don’t like to talk about security, but these institutions, rather than allocating funds for the latest protection measures, such as tracking devices as thin as threads that can be sewn into canvases, instead almost always opt to acquire more art. New works, not better security, draw crowds.
Breitwieser is unique in the world of art thieves in that he stole in order to own; never did he try to ransom or fence a work of art, and as his two small attic rooms became cluttered with stacks and piles, he was still able to convince himself that he was honouring these pieces more than their former curators had. There’s a fascinating story in that, and I’m not sure Finkel totally uncovered it.
The story of art, Breitwieser says, is a story of stealing. Egyptian papyri from the early written age decry the menace of tomb raiders. The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, in 586 BC, hauled off from Jerusalem the Ark of the Covenant. The Persians plundered the Babylonians, the Greeks raided the Persians, the Romans robbed the Greeks. The Vandals binged on the riches of Rome…Each pilfered work represents another reason he steals, Breitwieser says, and everyone in the art world is a thief in some way. If he doesn’t get what he wants, he expects others will. Some grab works by wiring cash to a dealer; he acquires pieces with a Swiss Army knife. At the very least, he’s a formidable rogue in the art world’s eternal den of iniquity. And perhaps when all is said and done, this is his dream, he will be written into the story of art as a hero.
