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

by Michael Finkel

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.

Breitwieser’s sole motivation for stealing, he insists, is to surround himself with beauty, to gorge on it.

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.

Her feet are on the ground; his head’s in the clouds.

Breitwieser is an unemployed freeloader holed up in his mother’s house. This he acknowledges. The arrangement permits him to live cheaply, allowing him to keep all his illicit artwork without the need to even consider converting any loot into cash. Stealing art for money, he says, is disgraceful. Money can be made with far less risk. But liberating for love, he’s known a long time, feels ecstatic.

As an adult, he feels the same about cell phones, email, and social media. Why make it easier to be bothered by others?

coup de coeur—literally, a blow to the heart.

Crime works best, he says, not with overpowering force but when nobody knows it’s being committed.

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.

Museums are secular churches, says Von der Mühll, and to steal there is blasphemous.

One of the first arrests following the 1911 Mona Lisa theft was actually Picasso,

Runners-up for the most stolen artist include Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol, and Joan Miró, but none approach Picasso’s total of about 1,000 swiped works.

Ten Most Wanted list of missing art.

Madeleine de France, selected by a committee of French art historians as one of the nation’s most historically important paintings,

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.

We also see everything upside down, and our brains expend a lot of energy rebuilding the world right side up.

When the quest outshines the treasure, you don’t want to stop questing.

Breitwieser has now served 444 days in jail and that is enough, his attorney argues.