Many Estes Park residents know author Michael Finkel because his book “Stranger in the Woods” was the 2024 One Book One Valley selection. Finkel came to Estes Park in January for a presentation.
If you liked “Stranger” (about a modern-day hermit living in the Maine woods for 27 years), you will love “The Art Thief,” Finkel’s latest.
It’s a good read, a fast read, and hard to put down. Finkel seems to have a talent for finding and drawing out strange characters. His first book, “True Story” (2005), was about a murderer, Christian Longo, who killed his wife and three children. Then came his 2017 book about the hermit Christopher Knight.
Now we have ““The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession,”,” (2023), the story of another weird character, Frenchman Stéphane Breitwieser, the world’s most successful and prolific art thief. Finkel wisely keeps himself out of the story even though he did meet Breitwieser and interviewed him extensively. Wise move. The writer is not the story.
Breitwieser was extraordinarily ordinary. That was his genius and that’s how he got away with so many heists. He didn’t look or act the part of a high-stakes outlaw. In one instance, he and his accomplice/girlfriend, had a snack in the museum café with a hidden piece of art they’d just snatched.
Actually, it’s hard not to have some sympathy for Breitwieser, who took pieces of art not because he wanted to sell them but because he loved them. He and his girlfriend lived in an upstairs room of his mother’s modest house. He turned the room into a sumptuous repository of rare and beautiful pieces, which he could view from his four-poster canopy bed.
“Everything, in total, has been estimated by art journalists to be worth as much as two billion dollars, all stashed in an attic lair in a nondescript house near a hardscrabble town. The young couple has conjured a reality that surpasses most fantasies. They live inside a treasure chest,” wrote Finkel.
Take, for example, the ivory sculpture that sat on Breitwieser’s bedside table. “Adam and Eve,” a gift to the painter Peter Paul Rubens, taken from the Rubens House museum in Antwerp. Breitwieser was obsessed with the astonishingly detailed 400-year-old,10-inch sculpture by Georg Petel.
The book opens with a description of Breitwieser gracefully and swiftly stealing the piece, simply by unscrewing the plexiglass case that protected it, and stuffing it in the waistband of his pants. He wears a roomy overcoat. He doesn’t run.
If he had only known when to stop. But stop? How could he? He was in the grip of an obsession as strong as any addiction you can think of. We’re talking 200 thefts over 10 years, starting when he was 25. Breitwieser lived in France and plundered many museums there, but also drove to small museums in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Denmark and The Netherlands.
“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 thin as threads that can be sewn into canvases, instead almost always opt to acquire more art. New works, not better security, draw crowds,” writes Finkel.
But of course, Breitwieser was ultimately caught. He served time in prison, more than once, but generally has been treated mildly for a person who stole 239 artworks from 172 museums throughout Europe. His girlfriend left him and never went to jail. And, sadly, some of the most valuable oil paintings he took were destroyed by his mother.
Breitwieser thought at one time that he could make a living as a museum-theft consultant, but that never materialized. When his life as a thief came to an end (assuming it has) he was bereft.
“I was the master of the universe,” he said. “Now I’m nothing.”