The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

by Michael Finkel

A violent, late-night heist is an insult to Breitwieser’s notion that stealing artwork should be a daytime affair of refined stealth in which no one so much as senses fear.

He takes only works that stir him emotionally, and seldom the most valuable piece in a place. He feels no remorse when he steals because museums, in his deviant view, are really just prisons for art. They’re often crowded and noisy, with limited visiting hours and uncomfortable seats, offering no calm place to reflect or recline. Guided tour groups armed with selfie-stick shanks seem to rumble through rooms like chain gangs. Everything you want to do in the presence of a compelling piece is forbidden in a museum, says Breitwieser. What you first want to do, he advises, is relax, pillowed in a sofa or armchair. Sip a drink, if you desire. Eat a snack. Reach out and caress the work whenever you wish. Then you’ll see art in a new way.

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. Francisco Pizarro and Hernán Cortés, in the early sixteenth century, ravaged the Inca and Aztec. Queen Christina of Sweden seized a thousand paintings from Prague in 1648 and paid her generals in artwork.

If you want skylight entries and infrared sensors, download a movie. If you want to steal art, you should learn how he accomplishes the silicone slice.

For virtually any other art-crime team, stealing the portrait would be a career-crowning achievement after immense planning. For Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine, it wasn’t even their only theft of the day.

“What’s the worth of a vulgar burglar,” asks the French art inspector Darties, “compared to a Rembrandt?”

Until recently, no one could adequately explain why art even existed at all. Art seems to contradict Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which states that a species survives on a hostile planet chiefly by eliminating inefficiency and waste. Creating art consumes time, effort, and resources without providing food, clothing, or shelter. Yet art is present across every culture on earth, varied in style but communally revealing what lies beyond words. Art may in fact have a Darwinian basis, perhaps as a way to attract a mate, though many art theorists now believe that the reason for art’s ubiquity is that humanity has overcome natural selection. Art is the result of facing almost no survival pressure at all. It’s the product of leisure time. Our big brains, the most complex instruments known in the universe, have been released from the vigilance of evading predators and seeking sustenance, permitting our imagination to gambol and explore, to dream while awake, to share visions of God. Art signals our freedom. It exists because we’ve won the evolutionary war.

Beauty, to be unpoetic but precise, is in the medial orbital-frontal cortex of the beholder.