Cary Grant in 1955’s To Catch a Thief.

For Art’s Sake

MAY 20, 2023

Why Stéphane Breitwieser, a penniless Frenchman who stole $2 billion worth of art, never sold a single work …IN THE ART THIEF, MICHAEL FINKEL CHRONICLES AN EPIC ART-STEALING SPREE. JENNY MCPHEE REVIEWS.

The glamorous swirl around world-class thievery is exquisitely conjured by Grace Kelly and her impeccable wardrobe, Cary Grant and his irresistible charm, and the sumptuous French Riviera setting of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film To Catch a Thief.

Instead, the backdrop of Michael Finkel’s chronicle of the greatest art-stealing spree of all time is Mulhouse, a drab industrial city in eastern France thick with suburban sprawl.

Here, from 1995 to 2001, Stéphane Breitwieser, a quiet man in his 20s, decorates the two attic rooms he occupies in his mother’s stuccoed concrete house with nearly 300 objects stolen from small museums, castles, and cathedrals across Europe, including works by Cranach, Brueghel, Boucher, Watteau, and Dürer. His collection, by one estimate, is worth $2 billion.

“Every flat surface in the bedroom is filled,” Finkel writes in his exhilarating new book, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession. “Silver platters, silver bowls, silver vases, silver cups. Gilded tea sets and pewter miniatures. A cross-bow, a saber, a poleax, a mace. Pieces in marble and crystal and mother-of-pearl. A gold pocket watch, a gold urn, a gold perfume flask, a gold brooch.” In the adjacent room: “A medieval knight’s helmet, a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, a bejeweled table clock, an illustrated prayer book from the Middle Ages.”

And so much more, including his very first theft, a portrait of a woman by Christian Wilhelm Dietrich lifted from a medieval castle in Gruyères, Switzerland; his most valuable artwork, Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Sibylle, Princess of Cleves, taken from a castle in Baden-Baden, Germany; and his favorite piece, an ivory sculpture of Adam and Eve by Georg Petel, whisked out of the Rubens House in Antwerp, this latter heist breathtakingly described in the opening of Finkel’s book.

Money, however, is not this master thief’s objective. He never tries to sell a single item he steals. He simply desires to live and breathe art at close proximity, day and night. He finds museums alienating, their displays repulsive rather than enticing. As if hailing from extreme wealth, he feels entitled to re-create for himself a wonder room, his very own cabinet of curiosities. He is, in fact, near penniless, getting by on occasional part-time work; his goal and satisfaction in life, to purloin and possess art.

Read on at Air Mail