After a day of waiting tables, Stéphane Breitwieser would return to his mother’s house in eastern France, and climb the narrow wooden staircase to the attic — where he had stashed stolen artworks worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
“You open this door and inside, at the height of its glory, were more than 300 works of late Renaissance, early Baroque art — oil paintings, gold, silver, ivory, mother of pearl,” said Michael Finkel, who tells Breitwieser’s story in a new book.
“Everything glowing, everything crammed into these little rooms with an amazing four-poster, canopied bed in the middle where Breitwieser [slept],” Finkel told The Current’s guest host Robyn Bresnahan.
Breitwieser shared that bed with his girlfriend and accomplice Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, living in a couple of rooms on the top floor of his mother’s house in the small city of Mulhouse.
The pair began stealing from museums, galleries and churches all across France and central Europe in the mid-90s, when Breitwieser was in his early 20s. By the time he was arrested in 2001, he had become “by some accounts, the most prolific art thief who has ever lived,” Finkel said.
One of the paintings Breitwieser stole: Sibylle of Cleves by Lucas Cranach the Younger, painted circa 1540. (Penguin Random House)
A silver figure of a warship, created around 1700, and stolen by Breitwieser from the Art & History Museum in Brussels, Belgium. (Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels)
Their loot varied, from paintings including Sibylle of Cleves by Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Younger, to antiques and sculptures including German carver Georg Petel’s ivory depiction of Adam and Eve.
Estimates vary on their loot’s overall value, but Finkel said some experts put the figure at $2 billion US.
By contrast, this art thief’s lair was hidden in “the most modest house in the suburbs of a really kind of rough-and-tumble French town,” Finkel said. Breitwieser worked sporadically as a waiter but was often unemployed, with Finkel describing him as a “freeloader” who “revelled in this chamber that felt like a room in the Louvre.”
Finkel tells the story in his book The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime and a Dangerous Obsession. The author started a correspondence with Breitwieser more than a decade ago, leading to extensive interviews and even visits to museums Breitwieser has stolen from.
Psychological reports, seen by Finkel, corroborated Breitwieser’s insistence that he stole not for monetary gain, but “out of love” for the art, and to surround himself with beautiful objects.
He never tried to sell any of that art he plundered in those early years, and just wanted “to live in a spot that felt like a treasure chest,” Finkel said.
The home in the suburbs of Mulhouse, France, where Stéphane Breitwieser kept his hoard in the attic rooms. The two top windows look into the attic. (Penguin Random House)
Breitwieser even objected to being called an art thief, he added.
“He’d really like to be called a collector, an art collector — maybe with a very unusual acquisition style,” Finkel told Bresnahan.
Thieves ‘stole like ghosts’
The book explains that Breitwieser had a comfortable upbringing in France’s Alsace region, surrounded by beautiful works of art and antiques inherited from his father’s side of the family.
But when his parents had a bitter break-up in Breitwieser’s teens, he lost contact with his father — and all of that art.
Years later, he would tell Finkel that stealing was a way to replace it. One of the first things he stole was an antique pistol dating back to the 1600s, which he described to Finkel as “something nicer than anything his father had owned.”
Rather than feeling guilty over the theft, Finkel said Breitwieser was pleased to possess this beautiful antique, and wanted more.
Left, Adam and Eve, a Georg Petel sculpture from 1627. Breitwieser stole the sculpture from the Rubens House in Antwerp, Belgium. Right, Breitwieser looks at the sculpture during a visit to the museum in 2018. (RH.K.015, Collection City of Antwerp, Rubens House; Penguin Random House)
A tapestry dating back to the late 1600s, stolen by Breitwieser from the Château de Gruyères in Gruyères, Switzerland. (Penguin Random House)
Breitwieser would focus on the object he wanted to steal, while his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, “would take a look at the larger picture,” Finkel said.
They wore second-hand designer clothing to look like well-off tourists, and struck in the middle of the day when staff were rotating to eat lunch. The pair avoided the main flow of foot traffic and remained largely silent, using hand signals or the occasional cough as a warning. When he reached the item he wanted, he often slipped it under the waistband of his trousers, hidden at the small of his back beneath his overcoat.
“It just was like this dance between the two of them,” Finkel said
On one occasion, Breitwieser unscrewed 30 individual screws to open a display case — leaping away whenever his accomplice warned him that someone was coming.
Breitwieser’s approach was informed by his own experience working as a security guard, right after he graduated high school. He told Finkel in that job, he learned that the art on the wall fades into the background after a while — and staff are focused on the tourists walking by.
“He just always tried to have his body motion and his facial expressions look as innocuous and innocent as possible,” Finkel said.
“He and Anne-Catherine stole like ghosts.”
Who pilfered the Picasso?
Someone stole a Picasso statue from an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1981.
‘The long and hard downfall’
As the years passed and their collection grew, Kleinklaus grew more nervous that they would be caught, Finkel said.
“She started insisting that fingerprints … and all traces of their presence should be erased,” he said.
In November 2001, Finkel said that Breitwieser returned to a museum in Lucerne, Switzerland, to remove fingerprints from his theft of an antique bugle. A security guard recognized him from the day of the theft, and he was arrested.
“It was returning to a museum rather than stealing from it, that led to the long and hard downfall that followed,” Finkel said.
“He finds himself driving by a museum. He finds himself parking the car, he finds himself walking inside, and then it’s just going to be trouble from there,” Finkel said.
“He told me, sort of half broken, that he realized he was only good at one thing in the world. And that thing was stealing art.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
